Notes

WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
Shakespeare was born 26 April 1564, Stratford. (only later changed to Stratford Upon Avon)
Shakespeare is widely considered the world’s greatest dramatist.
He wrote 38 plays and 154 sonnets.
Shakespeare is most likely to have received a classical Latin education at King’s New School in Stratford.
He married Anne Hathaway when he was only 18;
Anne (26) was 3 months pregnant when they married.
Their first child, Susanna was born six months after their marriage.
They later had two twins, Hamnet and Judith.
Shakespeare had seven brothers and sisters
Shakespeare worked as an actor, writer and co-owner of a drama company called the ‘Lord Chamberlain’s Men’- Later known as the King’s Men
People still talk about Shakespeare and study his plays because

he wrote plays that are enormously rewarding to act and direct
his characters are endlessly interesting and impossible to reduce to a simple formula
his language, though now difficult, is subtle, richly varied, and eloquent (this includes the Sonnets, of course)
the plots of his plays still speak to the experiences of a modern world (think of the recent teen movies Ten Things I Hate About You from The Taming of the Shrew and Get Over It from A Midsummer Night's Dream)
his plays survive translation, and are performed around the world
he's just an amazingly good writer.
There are also some less attractive reasons. Some people still talk about Shakespeare because:

he's famous, so you should take him seriously
he's famous, so you would look bad if you didn't say you liked him
he's always been studied, so we should go on studying him.
Why do some people claim he didn't write the plays?
Some people find it hard to believe that the son of a middle-class glover, with just a regular school education, could have written such passionate and intellectual plays. This is really pretty silly. Alfred Hitchcock, director and creator of some of the classic films of the twentieth century, left school at the end of grade seven. Most of the major writers before and after Shakespeare had regular schooling without going to a university -- but, like Shakespeare, they went on reading and learning all their lives. It's always entertaining to believe in conspiracies, and there has been a great deal written about the people who are supposed to have written the plays rather than Shakespeare: Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford is a popular candidate these days, but Francis Bacon and Christopher Marlowe have also been suggested (too bad that two of them died before many of the plays were written). There's a section on this whole discussion on the site.

Shakespeare's sex life and his remarkable imagination
We don't know what Shakespeare's sex life was like (there was no National Enquirer in those days), so it's fun to speculate. Your can go to a discussion of the Sonnets and the fact that he wrote most of them to a young man rather than a woman.

One odd suggestion is that you can't have an imagination unless you smoke something -- some years ago two scientists in South Africa speculated that Shakespeare may have had some help from artificial sources to enhance his creativity. They have analyzed the residue in some pipes that were found in one of the houses Shakespeare lived in, and found what might have been cocaine and some other herbs. That's pretty silly too: children have amazing imaginations when they are small, and they don't have to smoke anything. Tobacco had been introduced into England in Shakespeare's lifetime, but there is no evidence that there was a deliberate use of any herbs for hallucinogenic purposes in the period. There was plenty of good (and not so good) wine and beer, however.