Shakespeare is widely considered to be the greatest writer ever, and despite this reputation actually turns out to be quite good. He was a playwright who lived in England from 1564 to 1616.

His reputation is bolstered because we actually know very little about him, so there's very little to get in the way of all sorts of interesting theories about his plays. The documentation shows he was born in Stratford, moved to London , wrote 37 plays, a handful of verse poems, a bunch of sonnets , returned to Stratford and died. And that's just about everything that is known for definite.