William Shakespeare

An English playwright and poet, generally regarded as the most influential writer in the English language, active as a dramatist for the Lord Chamberlain's Men, later the King's Men, in London from the early 1590s. His surviving output of roughly 39 plays spans tragedy, comedy and history in close to equal measure, and his coinages and phrasing entered ordinary English usage more extensively than any other single writer's. Comparatively little is documented about his life relative to his fame, which has generated a long-running fringe authorship controversy; the scholarly consensus, resting on abundant contemporary documentary evidence, is that the Stratford-born actor and the plays' author are the same person.