William Shakespeare

William Shakespeare was the son of a Stratford glovemaker, a small-town boy with a grammar-school education and no university degree, who went to London and became the greatest writer the English language has known. We know surprisingly little of his life and almost nothing of his inner one; he left behind no diaries, no manifestos — only the plays, and the plays contain everything.

In a working life of some twenty years he wrote comedies, histories, and tragedies that have never left the stage: Hamlet and Macbeth, Romeo and Juliet, King Lear, A Midsummer Night's Dream, The Tempest. He poured into them every shade of being human — ambition and tenderness, jealousy, grief, wonder, and laughter — and he invented hundreds of the words and phrases we still speak without knowing we are quoting him. His characters feel less like inventions than like people we have met.

He retired to Stratford a prosperous man and died there at fifty-two, leaving his work to be gathered by friends into the volume that saved it for the world. We honor him as the playwright who held, as he put it, a mirror up to nature — and who, four centuries on, still seems to know us better than we know ourselves.