William Shakespeare

The soliloquies are what most people meet first — a man asking whether to act at all, another watching ambition turn into a nightmare he cannot stop. Hamlet, Macbeth, Othello and King Lear are quoted in situations their author never saw coming, and a good deal of ordinary English idiom traces back to them. That is the odd afterlife of a working dramatist from Stratford-upon-Avon, born in 1564: his phrases became the common stock of everyday speech.

He learned the trade from inside it. In London's crowded theatrical scene he acted as well as wrote, attached to companies that were putting up permanent playhouses, and he helped make the Globe into a place where an audience would imagine a battlefield or a heath on a bare stage. Early on he worked in histories and comedies built around wit, disguise and civic quarrel. He took his plots from chronicles, classical stories and folklore, then rewrote them into something else. He wrote for particular actors and particular playing conditions, revised, and collaborated — the scripts were shaped by what the company could actually do.

The tragedies pushed further into desire, guilt and death, and the Sonnets worked the same material in tighter form: time, beauty, betrayal. Courtly speech sat next to tavern talk in the same play, high and low registers answering each other. The late romances turned towards storms, lost children and reconciliation, sorrow folded into wonder rather than cancelled.

He retired to Stratford on money made from the theatre and from property, and died in 1616. The folios published after his death kept the plays in circulation, and since then actors, editors, directors and translators have kept remaking them for audiences he could not have anticipated. Schools and festivals still set the plays against present-day questions, largely because the puzzles in them — what to do, what one owes, how to bear loss — have not been settled.