Heminges and Condell saved the plays in the 1623 Folio
William Shakespeare (c. 23 April 1564 – 23 April 1616) of Stratford remains English drama’s measuring stick. Married at eighteen to Anne Hathaway, father of Susanna and twins Hamnet and Judith, he worked London stages from the late 1580s; the 1623 First Folio, edited by fellows Heminges and Condell, rescued texts printed poorly—or not at all—in his lifetime.
His father John was a glover and alderman from Snitterfield; his mother Mary Arden came from a prosperous landowning family prominent among Catholic recusants. He was the third of eight children and was baptised on 26 April 1564. The traditional birthday of 23 April, Saint George's Day, goes back only to the 18th-century scholars William Oldys and George Steevens and appeals partly because he died on that date. He probably attended the King's New School, a free grammar school chartered in 1553 a few hundred metres from home, where boys drilled in Latin authors.
The marriage licence was issued on 27 November 1582, when Anne was 26, and the banns were read only once instead of three times, hinting at haste; Susanna was baptised six months later. Hamnet died at eleven in 1596. Between 1585 and 1592 he nearly vanishes, apart from a mention in a 1588 law case, and legends fill the lost years: poaching deer from Sir Thomas Lucy, holding patrons' horses outside theatres, schoolmastering, or serving a Lancashire Catholic who left money to a William Shakeshafte.
By 1592 he was famous enough to be mocked in print. Robert Greene called him an upstart crow in borrowed feathers who thought himself the only Shake-scene in the country, parodying a line from Henry VI, Part 3, apparently sneering at a player daring to rival university men such as Marlowe and Nashe.
He became a sharer in the Lord Chamberlain's Men, renamed the King's Men under James I, wrote Hamlet, Othello, King Lear and Macbeth before 1608, then romances such as The Tempest, and retired to Stratford around 1613. His surviving work runs to some 39 plays, 154 sonnets and three long poems. The Folio held 36 plays and opened with Ben Jonson's tribute calling him a writer for all time rather than for one age.
Source: William Shakespeare
