A Beginner's Guide to Shakespeare
William Shakespeare is probably the best known English writer in the world. But how much do you know about him?
Shakespeare was born in 1564 in the town of Stratford-upon-Avon. The writer's exact birthday is not known, but it is usually celebrated on April 23. He also died on April 23 in 1616, when he was 52. The house that Shakespeare was born in is now a museum.
Shakespeare wrote at least 37 plays and over 150 poems. Some of his best known plays were first seen at the Globe Theatre in London. A new Globe was built in 1997, where people can enjoy Shakespeare's plays as they would have when he was alive — with a large part of the audience standing in front of the stage with no roof over them!
A 2016 survey found that 51% of British people had read or seen Romeo and Juliet, making it his most popular play.
Shakespeare also wrote 10 plays named after English kings. Even though they were fiction, they have affected how people today think of the real people in them. For example, many people think King Richard III was an evil man because of what Shakespeare wrote about him — but experts now say he might not have been so bad!
But Shakespeare's biggest impact was on language. His works provide the first recorded usage of around 1,700 words — almost 10% of all the words he used in his plays and poems. Shakespeare came up with some of them himself, while others are nouns that he changed into verbs, or words to which he added a prefix, for example.
