William Shakespeare

William Shakespeare (bapt. 26 April 1564 23 April 1616) was an English playwright, poet and actor, widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language and the world’s greatest dramatist. He is often called England’s national poet and the “Bard of Avon” (or simply “the Bard”). His extant works, including collaborations, consist of some 39 plays, 154 sonnets, three long narrative poems, and a few other verses, some of uncertain authorship. His plays have been translated into every major living language and are performed more often than those of any other playwright. They also continue to be studied and reinterpreted.
Shakespeare was born and raised in Stratford-upon-Avon, Warwickshire. At the age of 18, he married Anne Hathaway, with whom he had three children: Susanna and twins Hamnet and Judith. Sometime between 1585 and 1592, he began a successful career in London as an actor, writer, and part-owner of a playing company called the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, later known as the King’s Men. At age 49 (around 1613), he appears to have retired to Stratford, where he died three years later. Few records of Shakespeare’s private life survive; this has stimulated considerable speculation about such matters as his physical appearance, his sexuality, his religious beliefs and whether the works attributed to him were written by others.Shakespeare produced most of his known works between 1589 and 1613. His early plays were primarily comedies and histories and are regarded as some of the best work produced in these genres. He then wrote mainly tragedies until 1608, among them Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet, Othello, King Lear, and Macbeth, all considered to be among the finest works in the English language. In the last phase of his life, he wrote tragicomedies (also known as romances) and collaborated with other playwrights.
Many of Shakespeare’s plays were published in editions of varying quality and accuracy in his lifetime. However, in 1623, two fellow actors and friends of Shakespeare’s, John Heminges and Henry Condell, published a more definitive text known as the First Folio, a posthumous collected edition of Shakespeare’s dramatic works that included all but two of his plays. Its Preface was a prescient poem by Ben Jonson that hailed Shakespeare with the now famous epithet: “not of an age, but for all time”.


Source:
Wikipedia

eBooks: A Fairy Tale in Two Acts, Taken from Shakespeare, 1763 | A Lover’s Complaint | A Midsummer Night’s Dream | A Yorkshire Tragedy | All’s Well That Ends Well | Antony and Cleopatra | As You Like It | Coriolanus | Cymbeline | Dramas de Guillermo Shakspeare | Flowers from Shakespeare’s Garden | Hamlet | Henry IV Part 1 | Henry IV Part 2 | Henry V | Henry VI Part 1 | Henry VI Part 2 | Henry VI Part 3 | Henry VIII | Julius Caesar | King Edward the Third The Comedy of ErrorsKing Richard III | King Henry IV, Part 1 | King Henry IV, Part 2 | King Henry V | King Henry VI, Part 1 | King Henry VI, Part 2 | King Henry VI, Part 3 | King Henry VIII | King Henry the Fifth | King John | King Lear | King Richard II | King Richard III | Love’s Labour’s Lost | Loves Labour Lost | Macbeth | Measure for Measure | Much Ado About Nothing | Not Used Henry the Sixth, Part One | Othello | Othello, the Moor of Venice | Pericles | Richard II | Richard III | Romeo and Juliet | Shakespeare’s Comedy of The Tempest | Shakespeare’s Sonnets | Shakespeare’s Tragedy of Romeo and Juliet | Sir Thomas More | Sonnets To Sundry Notes of Music | The Comedy of Errors | The Complete Shakespeare’s First Folio | The Life and Death of the Lord Cromwell | The London Prodigal | The Merchant of Venice | The Merry Devil | The Merry Wives of Windsor | The New Hudson Shakespeare: Julius Caesar | The Passionate Pilgrim | The Phoenix and the Turtle | The Puritain Widow | The Rape of Lucrece | The Shakespeare Story-Book | The Taming of the Shrew | The Tempest | The Tragedie of Anthony and Cleopatra | The Tragedy of Titus Andronicus | The Tragicall Historie of Hamlet, Prince of Denmarke, 1603 Edition | The Two Gentlemen of Verona | The Two Noble Kinsmen | The Winter’s Tale | Timon of Athens | Titus Andronicus | Troilus and Cressida | Twelfe-Night | Twelfth Night | Two Gentlemen of Verona | Venus and Adonis

Works by William Shakespeare: