WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE (1564-1616), who remains

the most widely known and admired writer in English literature, was born at Stratford-upon-Avon. Warwickshire, in 1564, a son of John Shakespeare and his wife the former Mary Arden, and was educated there. He married Anne Hathaway in Stratford in 1582 and by her had three children. He wrote his first plays, A Comedy of Errors and Titus Andronicus, in 1589 and by 1592 was established in London as a playwright and actor, writing his famed Histories and major Comedies during the 1590's and his great Tragedies which were performed at the Globe Theatre - in the decade that followed. Shakespeare died at Stratford on 23 April 1616. His Sonnets were published in 1609 and the first collect edition - The First Folio - of his thirty-six plays (to which Pericles was subsequently added) in 1623.