Digital ShakespeareEverything you need to know about Shakespeare.
Wenceslaus Hollar's 1647 panoramic view of London from Bankside, with the second Globe theatre on the skyline
Wenceslaus Hollar, Long View of London from Bankside (1647). The second Globe stands on the skyline — Shakespeare's playhouse, rebuilt after the 1613 fire.

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The 10-minute primer on Shakespeare — who he was, what he wrote, and why he still runs the language.

Shakespeare in 10 minutes

Who: William Shakespeare (1564–1616), playwright, poet, and actor from Stratford-upon-Avon, England. Baptized 26 April 1564 (his exact birth date is not recorded; 23 April is traditional), died 23 April 1616.

What: At least 37 plays — 36 collected in the First Folio of 1623, plus Pericles and the collaboration The Two Noble Kinsmen — 154 sonnets, and four narrative poems. About 18 of the plays were never printed in his lifetime and survive only because two actors saved them.

Where: London’s commercial theatres — the Theatre, the Curtain, the Globe (built 1599), and the indoor Blackfriars — playing to crowds of up to 3,000, from groundlings paying a penny to stand to gallants paying sixpence for a stool on stage.

Why he matters: No writer in English has been quoted more, performed more, or shaped the language more. An estimated 1,700+ words are first recorded in his works (“eyeball”, “fashionable”, “lonely” among the famous claims — linguists debate the exact count, but the footprint is enormous). His plays invented the modern sense of interior character: people who think aloud, change their minds, and surprise themselves.

The five things to know first

  1. We know the outlines, not the man. The documentary record is thin: baptism, marriage, property deals, lawsuits, a will. No letters, no diaries, no manuscripts in his hand survive (except possibly signatures). Everything personal is inference — this site labels it as such.
  2. The plays were a business. Shakespeare was a sharer (part-owner) in his acting company, the Lord Chamberlain’s Men (from 1603, the King’s Men). He wrote for specific actors, specific theatres, and paying crowds — not for posterity.
  3. The texts are messy. Plays reached print through quartos (small cheap editions), some “bad” (memorial reconstructions), some authorial. The First Folio (1623), assembled by actors Heminges and Condell seven years after his death, is our only source for 18 plays — including Macbeth, Julius Caesar, and The Tempest.
  4. He was famous, then forgotten, then canonized. Celebrated in his lifetime (Francis Meres called him “most excellent” in 1598), his reputation dipped after the theatres closed (1642–1660), then rose from the Restoration onward to the global icon he is now. See reception.
  5. The authorship question is real but lopsided. A minority argues someone else wrote the plays; the overwhelming majority of scholars accept the Stratford man. Both positions are presented with their evidence on the reception page.

Where to go next

Source notes