William Shakespeare

William Shakespeare was a prolific English playwright and poet, whose work appeared on either side of the cut-off date for period.

Relatively little is known about Shakespeare the man, which has fueled suspicion that his works were in fact written by somebody else and that he was merely an actor who served as a pen name. Many have put the case for his works to have been written by Francis Bacon or Christopher Marlowe (who would have had to fake his own death), but none of the collected evidence is even close to convincing.

Shakespeare is of course best known for his plays, many of which were adaptations of older stories, but he appears to have believed he was more likely to be remembered for his sonnet collection. He is also known to have changed the histories in some of his plays (e.g. Macbeth) to suit his patrons.

He is responsible for bringing many cliches into the English language, such as "It is a tradition more honoured in the breach than the observance" and "The better part of valour is discretion". He is credited with introducing some 2000 words such as "leapfrog", "majestic" and "pedant", using methods like anglicizing Latin terms.

External Links

The Wikipedia article on Shakespeare - http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Shakespeare