William Shakespeare was an English playwright, poet and actor born in 1564 in Stratford-upon-Avon. He wrote around 38 plays and 154 sonnets over the course of his career. Some of his most famous plays include Macbeth, Hamlet, and Romeo and Juliet. Though highly acclaimed as the greatest writer in English, some scholars question whether Shakespeare truly authored all works attributed to him and have proposed other candidates.

1. Macbeth (1606/07)
William Shakespeare
(1564-1616)
About the Author

2. William Shakespeare
• William Shakespeare (bapt. 26 April 1564 – 23 April 1616)[a] was an
English playwright, poet, and actor, widely regarded as the greatest
writer in the English language and the world's greatest dramatist
• 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
• Shakespeare’s imaginary sister – Judith (Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own)

3. The Problem of Shakespeare’s Sister: Virginia
Woolf on Gender in Creative Culture
• If Shakespeare had a sister –(From A Room…
1929)
https://www.d.umn.edu/~tbacig/cst1010/chs/wo
olfe.html
• Let me imagine, since facts are so hard
to come by, what would have happened
had Shakespeare had a wonderfully
gifted sister, called Judith, let us say. . .

4. Shakespeare
BY MATTHEW ARNOLD
•Others abide our question. Thou art free.
We ask and ask—Thou smilest and art still,
Out-topping knowledge. For the loftiest hill,
Who to the stars uncrowns his majesty,
•Planting his steadfast footsteps in the sea,
Making the heaven of heavens his dwelling-
place,
Spares but the cloudy border of his base
To the foil'd searching of mortality;
•And thou, who didst the stars and sunbeams
know,
Self-school'd, self-scann'd, self-honour'd,
self-secure,
Didst tread on earth unguess'd at.—Better so!
•All pains the immortal spirit must endure,
All weakness which impairs, all griefs
which bow,
Find their sole speech in that victorious
brow.

5. I admire him, but I love Shakespeare : John Dryden (An Essay of Dramatik Poesy)
• “To begin then with Shakespeare; he was the man who of all Moderns, and perhaps
Ancient Poets, had the largest and most comprehensive soul.
• All the Images of Nature were still present to him, and he drew them not laboriously,
but luckily: when he describes anything, you more than see it, you feel it too.
• Those who accuse him to have wanted learning, give him the greater commendation:
he was naturally learn'd; he needed not the spectacles of Books to read Nature;
he look'd inwards, and found her there.
• I cannot say he is every where alike; were he so, I should do him injury to compare
him with the greatest of Mankind. He is many times flat, insipid; his Comick wit
degenerating into clenches; his serious swelling into Bombast. But he is alwayes great,
when some great occasion is presented to him : no man can say he ever had a fit
subject for his wit, and did not then raise himself as high above the rest of the
Poets.”
• If I would compare him with Shakespeare, I must acknowledge him the more correct
Poet, but Shakespeare the greater wit. Shakespeare was the Homer, or Father of our
Dramatick Poets; Jonson was the Virgil, the pattern of elaborate writing ; I admire
him, but I love Shakespeare -

6. Shakespeare’s Plays
• Shakespeare's plays are a canon of approximately 39
dramatic works written by English poet, playwright, and
actor William Shakespeare. The exact number of plays—as well
as their classifications as tragedy, history, or comedy—is a
matter of scholarly debate.
• Shakespeare's plays are widely regarded as being among the
greatest in the English language and are continually performed
around the world. The plays have been translated into every
major living language.

8. Shakespeare's sonnets
• are poems written by William
Shakespeare on a variety of themes.
• When discussing or referring to
Shakespeare's sonnets, it is almost
always a reference to the 154 sonnets
that were first published all together in
a quarto in 1609.
• Characters of the sonnets
• Fair Youth
• The Dark Lady
• The Rival Poet

9. Shakespeare authorship question
•Oxford, Bacon,
Derby, and
Marlowe
(clockwise from
top left,
Shakespeare
center) have each
been proposed as
the true author.