William Shakespeare
William Shakespeare
William Shakespeare (1564–1616) was an English playwright, poet and actor, and one of the most influential writers in the English language. Born in Stratford-upon-Avon, he left his hometown for London, where by the early 1590s he was working as an actor and playwright and soon became a shareholder in the Lord Chamberlain's Men, the company that built the Globe Theatre in 1599 and later served King James I as the King's Men. Over about twenty-five years he wrote some 39 plays, ranging from histories and comedies to tragedies such as Hamlet, King Lear and Macbeth, as well as 154 sonnets. His dramas weigh conscience, loyalty, mercy and justice with deep insight into human character. In 1623 two fellow actors gathered 36 of his plays into the First Folio, preserving works that remain central to theater and education worldwide and that gave English many of its familiar phrases.
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The Tudor Age
Thomas More served Henry VIII as Lord Chancellor but refused, for reasons of conscience, to accept the king as head of the English church. Henry's daughter Elizabeth I presided over a flourishing of English culture and seafaring: Sir Francis Drake sailed around the world, Edmund Spenser dedicated The Faerie Queene to her, and William Shakespeare's first plays reached the London stage.
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