Quite simply put, a hack.

William Shakespeare was allegedly a notable playwright who lived in England from 1564 to 1616. In essence, he was the Spielberg of his time, or perhaps Spielberg is the Shakespeare of our time. His plays are even centuries later applauded and lauded for their timelessness and their ability to entertain and entrance countless generations with flowery use of words, interesting characters and plots, as well as the ability to make scholastic institutions throughout the world subject young minds to Romeo and Juliet for no fathomable reason whatsoever.

Shakespeare was a hack.

He'd see a play or book or story writ a century or so before, perhaps in Italy or France, and he would blatantly steal parts of it for his own purposes, claiming the ideas as his own. Not that there's anything wrong with the end result. His works are entertaining. He is however the perfect example of that tired old phrase "there is nothing new under the sun." He grasped that, embraced it, and made it his trademark. It's how he presented these age-old tales that made him forever synonymous with them.

Born in Stratford-on-Avon in 1564, he promptly puked on his mother's apron whenever she tried to make him eat something unpalatable, which was often. As he grew older he learned to not puke quite so much by not eating his mother's food quite so often. He also attended a local school as a lad which was well known for teaching Latin and little else. So either William Shakespeare aquired his incredible knowledge of such things as history, medicine, husbandry, botany, shipbuilding, alchemy, the military, and countless other subjects by teaching himself, or he was a hack: aquiring information for his various plays from unmentioned sources which never got appropriate credit, and thereby plagiarising half of London.

His stuff is good. Don't get me wrong.

Around 1591 he moved to London proper, which is where he soon learned to be a very good hack. He started as an actor with Lord Chamberlain's company, and later he joined the King's Men. No doubt he took everything he learned from Lord Chamberlain and told all the trade secrets to the King's Men. Shakespeare was very amoral.

He wrote almost thirty plays and over 150 sonnets, or so we are led to believe. There are some who insist that Shakespeare either never existed or was merely a figurehead for more talented artists who feared putting their own names on certain works. Back in these days some of what Shakespeare wrote would have been charged as heresy, blasphemy, and a bunch of other "ys" that we don't really care about nowadays. Some believe Shakespeare was actually a construct of Francis Bacon and Christopher Marlowe, who fancied tricking the entire country into believing someone existed who did not, and they were so good at it we're still suffering from their little prank even today.

Even assuming Shakespeare was the real McCoy, no human being could have known as much about everything as he did. No doubt he had help writing this stuff, and then neglected to give proper credit where it was due. Still, no other writer in mankind's history has had his plays produced so many times throughout the world. Thanks to him, such characters as Shylock, Hamlet, Othello, Prospero, Puck, and King Lear are permanent fixtures in the accumulative psyche of the Human Mind.

No doubt a day will come when man's genetic structure has evolved to the point where a babe will arrive into this world saying, "to be or not to be out of that smelly womb. That is the question."

He was born. He lived. He hacked for a living. Then he died. What's the big deal?