William Shakespeare
William Shakespeare (baptised 26 April 1564 at Stratford-upon-Avon; died there 23 April 1616) was an English poet, playwright, and actor. The documentary record — the Holy Trinity parish register, the 1616 will held by The National Archives as PROB 1/4, land and tax records, and the printed quartos — documents his baptism, his marriage to Anne Hathaway in November 1582, three children, and a London career that is first mentioned in print in 1592, when he is mocked as a 'Shake-scene'. He became an actor, playwright, and sharer in the Lord Chamberlain's Men, renamed the King's Men in 1603, and a co-owner of the Globe playhouse, built in 1599 from the timbers of The Theatre and rebuilt in 1614 after a cannon misfired during a performance of Henry VIII. Besides roughly 38 plays, he published two narrative poems — Venus and Adonis (1593) and The Rape of Lucrece (1594) — and a quarto of 154 sonnets (1609). No manuscripts survive; about half of the plays, including Julius Caesar, Macbeth, and The Tempest, first appeared in the First Folio of 1623, assembled by his fellow actors John Heminge and Henry Condell. The Folger Shakespeare Library holds the largest collection of First Folios in the world, and The National Archives holds more than 120 documents of his life, about 40 of them on the UNESCO Memory of the World Register. Scholarly consensus, based on that record, is that the man from Stratford wrote the works published under his name; the 'authorship question' is a debate that began in the Victorian period, not in his lifetime.