William Shakespeare

What can be documented about Shakespeare is thin and mostly commercial. He was baptised in Stratford in 1564, the son of a glover; married Anne Hathaway at eighteen and had three children; appears in London by 1592, insulted in print by a rival as an upstart crow; became a sharer in the Lord Chamberlain's Men and a part-owner of the Globe in 1599; bought property; retired to Stratford; and left a will in which his wife receives the second-best bed.

Of his inner life there is nothing at all. No letters, no manuscripts, no diary. Roughly thirty-eight plays and a hundred and fifty-four sonnets, and no line in his own hand that we can be sure of.

The plays survive by accident and friendship. Half of them, including Macbeth, The Tempest and Twelfth Night, had never been printed when he died. In 1623 two actors from his company, John Heminges and Henry Condell, collected the texts and published the First Folio. Without that book those plays would be gone.

The theories that someone else wrote them appeared two centuries later and rest on no documentary evidence whatever.