William Shakespeare – Renaissance English playwright, author of Hamlet and Romeo and Juliet, the most quoted writer in history. His plays explored passion, power, and illusion, shaping modern theatre forever.
🎭 His works contain nearly 20,000 distinct words – he practically “invented” English. 📜 Many of his coinages remain in use today: lonely, gossip, majestic. 🍷 In Stratford, tavern keepers joked he “drank more than he wrote”. 🎬 The Globe was not just a theatre but a carnival of city life. 👑 Legend says Queen Elizabeth once demanded a play overnight – and A Midsummer Night’s Dream was born. 🖋 Contemporaries wondered how a man without a university degree could write such profound poetry. 🌍 Astronauts even carried lines from Hamlet into space. 💔 The death of his son Hamnet is often seen as echoing in Hamlet. 😂 Curiosity: his surviving signatures are all different – none spells “Shakespeare” clearly. 😄 Amusing fact: his father-in-law teased him as “a chatterbox poet wasting time on rhymes”.