William Shakespeare grew up in a small English town and probably left school as a teenager. By his late 20s he was a working actor and playwright in London - a noisy, smelly, crowded city where thousands of people packed into wooden theaters to watch plays.
Shakespeare wrote at least 39 plays, including Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and Macbeth. He wrote about kings, ghosts, witches, fairies, and ordinary teenagers in love. He could make audiences laugh and cry inside the same scene.
Because English was a much smaller language back then, Shakespeare often had to make up new words to say what he wanted. Scholars credit him with first writing things like “bedroom,” “eyeball,” “fashionable,” “lonely,” and even “swagger.” Today, more than 400 years after his death, his plays are still being performed somewhere on Earth almost every single day.
