William Shakespeare

Many people regard William Shakespeare as the greatest writer of all time. Every year millions of people all over the world attend performances of his plays. Some of these plays have been made into movies, which attract even more people. His sonnets have wooed lovers for centuries.

Nothing in Shakespeare’s early life hinted at how famous he would later become or how he developed his writing talent. He grew up in a small town, dropped out of school early, and went to work. He had to get married when he was just eighteen. He had three children by the time he was twenty-one.

Yet within a decade he was one of England’s most successful playwrights. He wrote hit after hit after hit. Some were tragic and ended with corpses littering the stage. Others were comedies that wound up with happy couples getting married. They all expressed a wide variety of human feelings that are just as pertinent today as they were when Shakespeare wrote them. The universal emotions evoked by his work guaranteed he would be “not of an age, but for all time.”