Who Was William Shakespeare?

1. What the records actually show — and what they do not

The first fact about Shakespeare is a negative one: for the most famous writer in English, we know remarkably little about his life. He was baptised on 26 April 1564 at Holy Trinity Church in Stratford-upon-Avon, the son of John Shakespeare, a glover and local official, and Mary Arden, the daughter of a prosperous farming family. His birth date is not recorded; 23 April is the traditional date, chosen because it is three days before the baptism and because it is also the feast day of St George, the patron saint of England — a neat coincidence that may be exactly that. He probably attended the King's New School in Stratford, where he would have studied Latin grammar and rhetoric, but no school record survives, and nothing is reliably documented about his formal education beyond what can be inferred from the classical learning displayed in his plays.

He married Anne Hathaway in November 1582, when he was eighteen and she was twenty-six and already pregnant. Their first child, Susanna, was born six months later, in May 1583, and twins, Hamnet and Judith, followed in 1585. Hamnet died in 1596, at the age of eleven, and the loss is often connected by biographers to the writing of Hamlet, first performed a few years later — a connection that is plausible but not provable, and one that should be treated as interpretation rather than fact. Between 1585 and 1592 there is no record of Shakespeare at all, a gap biographers call the lost years, and during which he may have worked as a schoolteacher, travelled with a company of players, or done something else entirely. What is reliably documented is that by 1592 he was in London, working as an actor and playwright, because in that year the playwright Robert Greene attacked him in print as an upstart crow, a newcomer who dared to write plays.

This honesty about the gaps matters, because Shakespeare's life has attracted more speculation than any other writer's. The temptation is to fill the silence with stories — that he fled Stratford after poaching deer, that he held horses outside the theatre, that he was secretly a Catholic or a spy — and some of these stories have been repeated so often that they feel like facts. They are not. They are traditions, some first recorded a century after his death, and they should be treated as such. The scholarly biographies are careful to distinguish between what the records prove, what they suggest, and what is simply unknown, and this article follows that discipline. Where a date or a detail is uncertain, it is marked as such, and where nothing is reliably known, the article says so rather than inventing a story to fill the space.

2. London, the theatre and the Lord Chamberlain's Men

When Shakespeare arrived in London, the English theatre was in the middle of a revolution. Permanent playhouses had only recently been built, acting companies were becoming professional, and there was a growing audience of Londoners willing to pay to see plays. Shakespeare joined the Lord Chamberlain's Men, one of the leading companies, as an actor and a sharer — a part-owner who shared in the profits — and in 1599 the company built its own playhouse, the Globe, on the south bank of the Thames, with Shakespeare as a shareholder. When James I came to the throne in 1603 the company became the King's Men, performing regularly at court as well as at the Globe, and Shakespeare's position as a shareholder in a successful company made him a prosperous man, able to buy property in Stratford, including New Place, the largest house in the town, in 1597.

His working life as a playwright followed the rhythms of the theatre. He wrote, on average, about two plays a year for two decades, working to the demands of his company and his audience: histories that flattered the Tudor view of the past, comedies for the public stage, tragedies that tested how far an audience could be taken, and late romances that mixed all three. He also wrote for particular occasions — court performances, public celebrations — and he collaborated with other playwrights, as was normal in the period. The idea of the solitary genius, writing alone in a garret, is a later invention; Shakespeare was a working professional in a commercial theatre, and his plays were written to be performed, not read, which is why they are full of stage directions, doubled roles and practical jokes that only make sense in performance.

His early success came not from the plays but from poetry. In 1593, when the plague closed the theatres, he published Venus and Adonis, a long narrative poem, and dedicated it to the Earl of Southampton, a young nobleman who may have been his patron. It was the most popular of his printed works in his lifetime, reprinted many times, and it was followed in 1594 by The Rape of Lucrece. The poems are polished, classical and deliberately literary, and they show a writer who wanted to be known as a poet as well as a playwright. The sonnets, 154 of them, were published in 1609, though they had circulated in manuscript for years before that, and they remain among the most studied poems in English, addressed to a young man and to a dark lady whose identities have never been reliably established.

3. The plays: histories, comedies and tragedies

Shakespeare's plays are usually grouped into histories, comedies and tragedies, a division that comes from the First Folio of 1623, and each group shows a different side of his art. The histories — the two tetralogies on the Wars of the Roses, and the plays on King John and Henry VIII — dramatise English history as a sequence of rebellions, usurpations and civil wars, and they are the plays in which his political intelligence is most visible. Richard II, Henry IV and Henry V, written in the 1590s, ask how power is won and lost, what makes a legitimate king, and whether a ruler can be both effective and moral. The character of Falstaff, the fat knight who dominates the Henry IV plays, is one of his greatest comic creations, and the question of whether he should be dismissed by the newly crowned Henry V is one of the most argued-over moments in the plays.

The comedies — A Midsummer Night's Dream, Much Ado About Nothing, As You Like It, Twelfth Night and others — are built on disguise, mistaken identity and the confusions of love, and they are the plays in which his delight in language is most apparent. They end, conventionally, in marriage, but the endings are rarely simple: the heroines are often more intelligent and more articulate than the heroes, the clowns see more clearly than the lovers, and the marriages that conclude the plays are sometimes presented as compromises rather than triumphs. The tragedies — Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth and Antony and Cleopatra — are the plays on which his reputation most securely rests. Each takes a central figure of exceptional ability and shows how a flaw, a decision or a circumstance brings that figure to ruin, and each does so in language that has become part of the English language itself: to be, or not to be, the green-eyed monster, the milk of human kindness, and hundreds of other phrases that began as lines in these plays.

The late plays — The Winter's Tale, Cymbeline and The Tempest, written in the final years of his career — are harder to classify, mixing tragedy and comedy, and they are often called romances. The Tempest, probably his last play written alone, is a story of a magician, Prospero, who gives up his art at the end of the play, and it has often been read, though not without dispute, as Shakespeare's farewell to the theatre. He retired to Stratford in the early 1610s, and died there on 23 April 1616, according to tradition — the same date as his supposed birthday — and was buried in Holy Trinity Church, where his gravestone carries a curse against anyone who moves his bones. He left a will that has been much discussed, including the bequest to his wife of his second best bed, a detail that has been read as either an insult or a conventional provision, and which illustrates, again, how little the documents tell us about his private feelings.

4. The First Folio and how the plays survived

Shakespeare did not publish his plays in collected form during his lifetime, and more than half of them might have been lost if his fellow actors John Heminges and Henry Condell had not collected them in the First Folio of 1623, seven years after his death. The Folio contains thirty-six plays, eighteen of which had never been printed before, and without it we would have no Macbeth, no Twelfth Night, no Julius Caesar, no Antony and Cleopatra, no The Tempest and no The Winter's Tale. The plays that had been printed during his lifetime appeared in small, cheap quarto editions, often printed from actors' memories or from shorthand notes taken in the theatre, and some of those quartos differ so much from the Folio versions that scholars still argue about which represents the play as Shakespeare wrote it. Hamlet, for example, exists in three substantially different early texts, and modern editions are built by comparing them.

The Folio is also the source of the most famous image of Shakespeare, the engraving by Martin Droeshout that appears on its title page, and of the first biographical account of him, the brief remarks by Ben Jonson, a fellow playwright who praised him as not of an age, but for all time. Jonson had known Shakespeare personally, and his praise — qualified, because Jonson also criticised his carelessness and his lack of classical learning — is among the best evidence we have of how Shakespeare was regarded by his contemporaries. He was admired, successful and well paid, but he was not treated as a unique genius in his own lifetime; that reputation was built in the eighteenth century, when editors, actors and critics began to present him as the national poet, and it has grown ever since.

The survival of the plays is itself a remarkable fact. Of the roughly three thousand plays written for the London stage between 1560 and 1642, only a few hundred survive, and most of those survive in a single copy. That Shakespeare's plays survived so completely is due to the Folio, to the continued performance of his plays after his death, and to the accidents of printing and preservation. It is a reminder that literary reputation is not only a matter of quality but of luck, and that the canon we inherit is shaped by the books that happened to be printed, the companies that happened to preserve their scripts, and the readers who happened to care.

5. Language, influence and the words he left behind

Shakespeare's influence on the English language is unmatched by any other writer. He is credited with introducing, or at least first recording in print, a large number of words — estimates vary, but the figure of around seventeen hundred words is often cited — including eyeball, fashionable, lonely, majestic and countless others, though scholars now note that many of these words may have been in use before he wrote them down, and that his role was often to popularise rather than to invent. What is not in doubt is the number of phrases from his plays that have entered everyday English: to be or not to be, a rose by any other name, the better part of valour is discretion, all the world's a stage, and hundreds more. These phrases are used by people who have never read a play, and they are part of the reason his reputation has survived translation into every major living language.

His influence on literature is equally large. Writers in every generation since his death have measured themselves against him, borrowed from him, rewritten him or rebelled against him. The novel, the modern theatre and film all owe him debts: the soliloquy as a way of showing a character thinking, the mixing of comedy and tragedy in a single play, the use of prose and verse side by side, and the creation of characters — Hamlet, Falstaff, Lear, Lady Macbeth — who feel more real than the people around us. His plays have been adapted into operas, ballets, films and novels, and they are performed somewhere in the world every day of the year. The Globe Theatre, rebuilt on the south bank of the Thames and opened in 1997, stands as a monument to that continuing life in performance, and the Royal Shakespeare Company and other companies keep the plays in the repertory year after year.

The question of why his work has lasted is one that critics have debated for four centuries, and there is no single answer. Part of it is the language, which combines ordinary speech with poetry in a way no other writer has matched. Part of it is the characters, who are contradictory, self-deceived and recognisably human in a way that earlier drama rarely achieved. And part of it is the plays' openness to interpretation: a director can stage Hamlet as a political thriller, a family drama or a philosophical meditation, and each version will find support in the text. The plays do not tell the audience what to think; they show people thinking, deciding and failing, and they leave the judgement to us. That openness is why the plays survive each new generation's reading of them, and why they are likely to survive the next.

6. The authorship question: what scholars say

No account of Shakespeare would be complete without the authorship question, the claim, first made in the nineteenth century, that the plays were not written by the man from Stratford but by someone else — most commonly Francis Bacon, Christopher Marlowe or Edward de Vere, the Earl of Oxford. The argument rests on the thinness of the documentary record: that a provincial actor without a university education could not have written plays displaying such learning, such knowledge of law, Italy and court life, and such command of language. It is an argument that has attracted passionate supporters, including some famous writers, and it has generated a large literature of its own. It deserves to be stated fairly, and then answered.

The scholarly consensus is clear, and it should be stated plainly: the plays were written by William Shakespeare of Stratford-upon-Avon. The evidence for this is the contemporary record: his name appears on the title pages of the plays published in his lifetime, his fellow actors collected his plays after his death and identified him as their author, his contemporaries, including Ben Jonson, wrote about him as a playwright, and there is no contemporary evidence pointing to any other author. The alternative candidates each face fatal difficulties: Bacon's known writings are in a different style, Marlowe died in 1593, before most of the plays were written, and Oxford died in 1604, before the late plays. The learning displayed in the plays, moreover, is the learning of a grammar-school education and of a working playwright who read widely and borrowed freely, not the learning of a university scholar, and the plays contain errors — of geography, of history, of classical detail — that are exactly what one would expect from a writer of Shakespeare's background.

That said, the authorship debate has done one useful thing: it has forced scholars to be honest about how little is known about Shakespeare's life, and to distinguish between what the records prove and what is merely tradition. The debate is also a reminder that the plays themselves, rather than the biography of their author, are the reason Shakespeare matters. Whether he attended university or not, whether he visited Italy or not, the plays are what they are, and they are the evidence on which his reputation rests. Readers who want to go further should read the plays themselves, and the Folger Shakespeare Library and the Encyclopaedia Britannica are the best starting points for following the scholarship as it stands.

7. Why Shakespeare still matters

Shakespeare matters, in the end, because his plays continue to do what they were written to do: to hold an audience, to make people laugh and weep, and to show human beings in all their complexity. He wrote for a popular audience in a commercial theatre, and his plays were not intended as literature for the study; they were intended to be performed, to fill a playhouse, and to make money. That they have survived as literature is a tribute to the quality of the writing, but it is also a reminder that the distinction between popular entertainment and great art is not as sharp as it is sometimes made to seem. Shakespeare was both, and he remains both.

He also matters because he is the writer through whom English-speaking people have learned to think about themselves. The phrases from his plays are the phrases in which we describe our own lives — the green-eyed monster of jealousy, the winter of our discontent, the quality of mercy — and the characters he created are the figures against whom we measure our own experience. To read Shakespeare is, in a real sense, to learn the language in which we think about love, ambition, jealousy, ageing and death. That is a claim that can be made about no other writer in English, and it is the reason his plays are taught in schools around the world, performed in every country, and translated into every major living language.

For readers who want to go further, the best next step is to see a play performed, or to read one aloud, because Shakespeare's writing was made for the voice and for the stage. The biography on this site gives the verified facts of his life, sparse as they are; the plays themselves are the real biography, and they are available in full, in modern editions, in libraries and online. Four centuries after his death, the man remains partly a mystery, and the work remains entirely alive. That, perhaps, is the most fitting epitaph for a writer who said, in one of his sonnets, that his verse would outlive marble and gilded monuments. It has.

Frequently asked questions

Sources and further reading

• Encyclopaedia Britannica — William Shakespeare
• Wikipedia — William Shakespeare
• Folger Shakespeare Library — Shakespeare's Life

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• Who Is Virat Kohli? — Virat Kohli is India's modern batting great, the record holder for ODI centuries and a World Cup winner, still active in one-day cricket in 2026.
• Who Is Vladimir Putin? — Vladimir Putin has led Russia since 2000 — as president and, for four years, as prime minister. This explains his rise, his rule and his role in the world.
• Who Is Warren Buffett? — Warren Buffett built Berkshire Hathaway from a struggling textile mill into a vast conglomerate, and his letters taught generations value investing.
• Who Is Wasim Akram? — Wasim Akram is Pakistan's greatest fast bowler, the first to 500 ODI wickets and hero of the 1992 World Cup final, famed as the master of swing.
• Who Is Xi Jinping? — Xi Jinping has led China since 2012 as general secretary of the Communist Party and since 2013 as president, shaping its policies and vision.
• Who Is Zinedine Zidane? — Zinedine Zidane won the World Cup as a player and three Champions Leagues as a manager, and in July 2026 was appointed head coach of France.
• Who Was A. P. J. Abdul Kalam? — A. P. J. Abdul Kalam rose from a poor boyhood in Rameswaram to lead India's space and missile programmes, then served as the country's 11th president.
• Who Was Abdul Sattar Edhi? — Abdul Sattar Edhi built Pakistan's largest welfare network from a single free dispensary. This explains his life, his foundation and his legacy.
• Who Was Abdus Salam? — Abdus Salam won the 1979 Nobel Prize in Physics for unifying two forces of nature. This explains his science, his institutions and his contested legacy.
• Who Was Abraham Lincoln? — Abraham Lincoln preserved the Union through the Civil War and ended slavery. This explains his rise, his presidency and his contested legacy.
• Who Was Ada Lovelace? — Ada Lovelace published the first program for a programmable machine in 1843. This explains her notes, her vision of computing and the debate over her role.
• Who Was Adolf Hitler? — Adolf Hitler led the Nazi Party and ruled Germany as dictator from 1933 to 1945, started the Second World War in Europe and was central to the Holocaust.
• Who Was Alan Turing? — Alan Turing defined modern computing, broke German naval Enigma and proposed the Turing test. This explains his science, his war work and his tragic end.
• Who Was Albert Einstein? — Albert Einstein rewrote physics with relativity and won the Nobel Prize for the photoelectric effect. This explains his ideas, his life and his legacy.
• Who Was Alexander Graham Bell? — Alexander Graham Bell patented the first practical telephone in 1876. This explains his work with the deaf, the patent fight and his wider inventions.
• Who Was Alexander the Great? — Alexander the Great built one of history's largest empires before dying at 32. This explains his conquests, his cities and the debate over his legacy.
• Who Was Alfred Nobel? — Alfred Nobel invented dynamite, held 355 patents and founded the Nobel Prizes. This explains his explosives empire, his will and the prizes' legacy.
• Who Was Allama Iqbal? — Allama Iqbal was Pakistan's national poet, whose ideas shaped the case for Pakistan. This explains his poetry, his philosophy and his legacy.
• Who Was Benazir Bhutto? — Benazir Bhutto was the first woman to lead a Muslim-majority country, serving as prime minister of Pakistan in 1988-90 and 1993-96.
• Who Was Bob Marley? — Bob Marley took reggae from Jamaica to the world and became a symbol of peace, resistance and unity. This explains his life, his music and his legacy.
• Who Was Bruce Lee? — Bruce Lee was the martial artist and actor who carried Hong Kong action cinema to the world and founded Jeet Kune Do, leaving a lasting influence.
• Who Was Charles Darwin? — Charles Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection, published in On the Origin of Species in 1859, became the foundation of modern biology.
• Who Was Charles Dickens? — Charles Dickens was the greatest novelist of the Victorian era, whose serialised novels mixed comedy, social criticism and unforgettable characters.
• Who Was Charlie Chaplin? — Charlie Chaplin created the Little Tramp, the most famous screen character of the silent era, and directed classics City Lights and The Great Dictator.
• Who Was Cleopatra? — Cleopatra VII was the last ruler of Ptolemaic Egypt, a multilingual stateswoman who kept her kingdom independent for 21 years before Rome annexed it.
• Who Was Diego Maradona? — Diego Maradona was an Argentine footballer who captained Argentina to the 1986 World Cup and is widely regarded as one of the greatest players in history.
• Who Was Don Bradman? — Don Bradman was an Australian cricketer who averaged 99.94 in Test cricket, a record so far ahead of any other batsman that it remains famous in sport.
• Who Was Elvis Presley? — Elvis Presley took gospel, country and rhythm and blues and turned them into rock and roll, becoming the most famous singer of his century.
• Who Was Emily Dickinson? — Emily Dickinson was an American poet who wrote nearly 1,800 poems in private in Amherst, Massachusetts, and was barely published in her lifetime.
• Who Was Faiz Ahmed Faiz? — Faiz Ahmed Faiz was Pakistan's most celebrated modern Urdu poet, whose verse joined romantic lyricism with resistance to injustice.
• Who Was Franz Beckenbauer? — Franz Beckenbauer was a German footballer known as Der Kaiser, who won the World Cup as captain in 1974 and as manager in 1990.
• Who Was Freddie Mercury? — Freddie Mercury was the lead singer of Queen, a four-octave voice and fearless showman who wrote Bohemian Rhapsody and We Are the Champions.
• Who Was Frida Kahlo? — Frida Kahlo was a Mexican painter known for uncompromising, brilliantly coloured self-portraits exploring identity, the body and death.
• Who Was Galileo Galilei? — Galileo Galilei reshaped astronomy with his telescopic discoveries of 1610, defended a Sun-centred universe, and was tried by the Inquisition in 1633.
• Who Was Genghis Khan? — Genghis Khan united the Mongol tribes and built the largest contiguous land empire in history, a conqueror and lawgiver whose legacy is still argued over.
• Who Was George Washington? — George Washington won American independence, presided over the Constitutional Convention, and as first president defined the office — then walked away.
• Who Was Guglielmo Marconi? — Guglielmo Marconi was an Italian inventor who built the first practical wireless telegraph and sent the first transatlantic radio signal in 1901.
• Who Was Henry Ford? — Henry Ford was an American industrialist who founded the Ford Motor Company, built the Model T and perfected the moving assembly line.
• Who Was Isaac Newton? — Isaac Newton wrote the laws of motion and universal gravitation, invented calculus and transformed optics, leaving a lasting legacy in science.
• Who Was James Watt? — James Watt did not invent the steam engine, but his separate condenser of 1765 made it efficient enough to power the Industrial Revolution.
• Who Was Jane Austen? — Jane Austen published six novels in her lifetime, anonymously, and died at 41. This explains her life, her novels, her irony and her growing reputation.
• Who Was Jesus Christ? — Jesus of Nazareth is the central figure of Christianity, the world's largest religion. This explains his life in the Gospels, his teachings and his legacy.
• Who Was Johan Cruyff? — Johan Cruyff was the star of Total Football, won three Ballon d'Or awards, and as a manager built the Barcelona team that shaped modern football.
• Who Was Johannes Gutenberg? — Johannes Gutenberg built the first mechanised printing press in Europe and printed the Gutenberg Bible around 1455, changing how the world shared ideas.
• Who Was John Keats? — John Keats died of tuberculosis in Rome at 25, having written his six great odes in a single year. This explains his short life, his poetry and his fame.
• Who Was Joseph Stalin? — Joseph Stalin led the Soviet Union from the 1920s until 1953, industrialised the country and led it through the Second World War, ruling through terror.
• Who Was Julius Caesar? — Julius Caesar conquered Gaul, crossed the Rubicon and remade Rome's calendar and government, and was murdered by senators who feared he would be king.
• Who Was Kobe Bryant? — Kobe Bryant won five NBA championships with the Los Angeles Lakers and became known for the Mamba Mentality, on and off the court.
• Who Was Leo Tolstoy? — Leo Tolstoy wrote War and Peace and Anna Karenina, then abandoned literary fame for a radical moral philosophy that influenced Gandhi and the world.
• Who Was Leonardo da Vinci? — Leonardo da Vinci painted the Mona Lisa and The Last Supper and filled notebooks with anatomy and engineering, becoming the symbol of the Renaissance.
• Who Was Ludwig van Beethoven? — Ludwig van Beethoven wrote nine symphonies, 32 piano sonatas and the Missa Solemnis, much of it while deaf. This explains his life and legacy.
• Who Was Mahatma Gandhi? — Mahatma Gandhi led India to independence through nonviolent resistance, and his ideas shaped civil-rights movements worldwide.
• Who Was Mao Zedong? — Mao Zedong founded the People's Republic of China in 1949 and led it until 1976, bringing unification and the Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution.
• Who Was Margaret Thatcher? — Margaret Thatcher was the first woman to serve as British prime minister, leading the UK from 1979 to 1990 through reform, the Falklands War and division.
• Who Was Marie Curie? — Marie Curie discovered polonium and radium and remains the only person to win Nobel Prizes in two different sciences, a pioneer of radioactivity research.
• Who Was Marilyn Monroe? — Marilyn Monroe was the biggest star of the 1950s, the blonde bombshell of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and Some Like It Hot, who fought the studio system.
• Who Was Mark Twain? — Mark Twain, born Samuel Langhorne Clemens, wrote Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn and became America's most famous humorist.
• Who Was Maya Angelou? — Maya Angelou was a poet, memoirist and civil rights activist whose autobiography I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings made her widely read.
• Who Was Michael Jackson? — Michael Jackson, the King of Pop, made Thriller, the best-selling album in history, and changed music video, dance and pop stardom.
• Who Was Mirza Ghalib? — Mirza Ghalib (1797-1869) is the pre-eminent Urdu and Persian poet of the last Mughal era, whose ghazals on love, loss and doubt are still recited.
• Who Was Muhammad Ali Jinnah? — Muhammad Ali Jinnah was the barrister and statesman who led the All-India Muslim League and became Pakistan's first Governor-General in 1947.
• Who Was Muhammad Ali? — Muhammad Ali was the three-time heavyweight champion who called himself The Greatest, and the most famous athlete of the twentieth century.
• Who Was Napoleon Bonaparte? — Napoleon Bonaparte rose from Corsica to Emperor of the French, redrew the map of Europe, and left a legal code that still shapes law across the world.
• Who Was Nelson Mandela? — Nelson Mandela spent 27 years in prison under apartheid, then became South Africa's first democratically elected president and a Nobel Peace laureate.
• Who Was Nikola Tesla? — Nikola Tesla developed the alternating-current power system, the induction motor and the Tesla coil, making long-distance electric power practical.
• Who Was Osama bin Laden? — Osama bin Laden founded al-Qaeda in 1988 and organised the September 11, 2001 attacks, in which nearly 3,000 people were killed.
• Who Was Pablo Neruda? — Pablo Neruda was Chile's great poet, a Nobel laureate, a communist senator and a diplomat. This explains his poetry, his politics and his death.
• Who Was Pablo Picasso? — Pablo Picasso co-founded Cubism, painted Guernica, and spent 75 years breaking the rules of art — the most influential artist of the twentieth century.
• Who Was Pelé? — Pele is the only footballer to win three World Cups, the youngest winner, and the game's first global icon. This is his life, his goals and his legacy.
• Who Was Pope Francis? The People's Pope — Pope Francis, the first pope from the Americas and the first Jesuit pope, led the Catholic Church from 2013 to 2025 with an emphasis on mercy and the poor.
• Who Was Prophet Muhammad? — The Prophet Muhammad is the founder of Islam, the world's second-largest religion. This explains his life, his teachings and his legacy.
• Who Was Queen Elizabeth II? — Queen Elizabeth II reigned for 70 years, from 1952 to 2022 — the longest reign in British history. This explains her life, her reign and her legacy.
• Who Was Rabindranath Tagore? — Rabindranath Tagore was the first non-European to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, and the author of the national anthems of India and Bangladesh.
• Who Was Rosa Parks? — Rosa Parks was not a tired seamstress who acted on impulse. She was a trained activist and NAACP secretary whose bus refusal was a deliberate act.
• Who Was Rosalind Franklin? — Rosalind Franklin's X-ray image, Photograph 51, gave Watson and Crick the key evidence for the double helix. This is her life and the credit debate.
• Who Was Rumi? — Rumi, the thirteenth-century Persian poet of Konya, wrote the Masnavi and the Divan-e Shams, and became the most widely read poet in the world.
• Who Was Shane Warne? — Shane Warne took 708 Test wickets, bowled the Ball of the Century in 1993 and won the 1999 World Cup with Australia. This explains his career.
• Who Was Stephen Hawking? — Stephen Hawking was a theoretical physicist who showed that black holes emit radiation and wrote A Brief History of Time. He died in 2018, aged 76.
• Who Was Steve Jobs? — Steve Jobs co-founded Apple in 1976, was forced out in 1985, built Pixar, and returned to launch the iMac, iPod, iPhone and iPad. He died in 2011, aged 56.
• Who Was Thomas Edison? — Thomas Edison held 1,093 US patents, invented the phonograph and the practical incandescent lamp, and built the first commercial electric power system.
• Who Was Vincent van Gogh? — Vincent van Gogh produced about 2,100 artworks in a single decade, including The Starry Night and Sunflowers, and became famous only after his death at 37.
• Who Was William Wordsworth? — William Wordsworth launched English Romanticism with Lyrical Ballads and wrote The Prelude, the great autobiographical poem. This explains his life.
• Who Was Winston Churchill? — Winston Churchill led Britain through the Second World War and won the Nobel Prize in Literature, and his record on empire is still debated.
• Who Was Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart? — Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was a child prodigy who composed more than 600 works before his death at 35, defining the Classical era.
• Why Van Gogh Became Famous After Death — Vincent van Gogh died in 1890 almost unknown, and within a few decades his paintings were among the most loved in the world.