The Bard, by the Numbers
William Shakespeare (c. 23 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 pre-eminent dramatist. He is often called England's national poet and the "Bard of Avon", or simply the Bard.
The surviving body of work, including collaborations, consists of some 39 plays, 154 sonnets, 3 long narrative poems and a few other verses, some of uncertain authorship.
What that output became is harder to quantify. His plays have been translated into every major living language and are performed more often than those of any other playwright. He remains arguably the most influential writer in English, and his works continue to be studied and reinterpreted — four centuries after the last of them was written.
Almost Nothing Is Known About Him
Shakespeare was born and raised in Stratford-upon-Avon, Warwickshire. At 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 actor, writer and part-owner — a "sharer" — of a playing company called the Lord Chamberlain's Men, later renamed the King's Men after James VI of Scotland took the English throne. At around 49 (c. 1613) he appears to have retired to Stratford, dying three years later.
And that is close to the extent of it. Few records of Shakespeare's private life survive — a gap that has stimulated considerable speculation about his physical appearance, his sexuality, his religious beliefs, and even fringe theories about whether the works attributed to him were written by someone else. The most documented writer in the language is also one of the least known.
Comedies, Then Tragedies, Then Romances
Shakespeare produced most of his known works between 1589 and 1613, and the career divides cleanly into three phases.
His early plays were primarily comedies and histories, and are regarded as among the greatest works produced in those genres.
He then wrote mainly tragedies until 1608 — among them Hamlet, Othello, King Lear and Macbeth, considered to be among the finest works in English. In the last phase he turned to tragicomedies, also called romances, such as The Winter's Tale and The Tempest, and collaborated with other playwrights. A writer who began by making audiences laugh spent his middle years writing the four bleakest plays in the language, then ended with reconciliation and forgiveness.
The Book That Saved Half of Him
Many of Shakespeare's plays were published during his lifetime in editions of varying quality and accuracy — pirated, garbled, reconstructed from memory.
Then in 1623, seven years after his death, two fellow actors and friends, John Heminges and Henry Condell, published a more definitive text: the First Folio, a posthumous collected edition containing 36 of his plays.
It is difficult to overstate what that book did. Roughly half of those plays exist only because it was printed — no earlier reliable text survives for them. *Macbeth*, *The Tempest*, *Twelfth Night* and others reached us through the decision of two friends to gather up a colleague's work. The preface includes a prescient poem by Ben Jonson, a former rival, who hailed Shakespeare with the epithet that has followed him ever since: "not of an age, but for all time".
