William Shakespeare
Airy nothing given a name
“And as imagination bodies forth / The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen / Turns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothing / A local habitation and a name.”
A Midsummer Night’s Dream, V.i
William Shakespeare was an English playwright, poet and actor, widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language.
Born in Stratford-upon-Avon in 1564, he was working in the London theatre by the early 1590s, and became a sharer in the company that built the Globe in 1599. Over some twenty-five years he wrote around thirty-nine plays, among them Hamlet, King Lear, Macbeth and The Tempest, together with the sonnets and narrative poems. He died in Stratford in 1616.
No writer has given the stage a larger company of living people. His characters have passed out of the plays into the common imagination of the world, and his language into everyday speech.
Seven years after his death, two fellow actors, John Heminges and Henry Condell, gathered his plays into the collection now called the First Folio. Around eighteen of them had never been printed and might otherwise have been lost. The Order honours Shakespeare, and remembers the friends who preserved his work.