William Shakespeare

William Shakespeare (1564 to 1616) was an English playwright, poet and actor from Stratford-upon-Avon, the author of about 39 plays, 154 sonnets and three long narrative poems.

Baptised in Stratford on 26 April 1564, he was working in London by the early 1590s as an actor, writer and shareholder in the Lord Chamberlain's Men, which became the King's Men after James I came to the throne in 1603. Members of the company built the Globe Theatre on the south bank of the Thames in 1599 and took over the indoor Blackfriars theatre in 1608. His narrative poems Venus and Adonis (1593) and The Rape of Lucrece (1594) were printed in those years, and individual plays began to appear in quarto editions from 1594, with his name on title pages by 1598. Shakespeare's Sonnets appeared in 1609. He retired to Stratford around 1613 and died there on 23 April 1616.

For collectors

Seven years after his death, his fellow actors John Heminges and Henry Condell assembled the First Folio (1623), published by Edward Blount with William and Isaac Jaggard. It contains 36 plays, 18 of which, including Macbeth, The Tempest, Julius Caesar and Twelfth Night, had never been printed before. About 750 copies are thought to have been printed and 235 are known to survive; a copy from Mills College sold at Christie's in 2020 for $10 million. The earlier quartos are rarer still. Some, such as the 1603 first quarto of Hamlet, are regarded as unauthorised "bad quartos" whose texts differ markedly from later versions.