The English playwright and poet who wrote approximately 37 plays and 154 sonnets between roughly 1590 and 1613, working in the commercial theater of Elizabethan and Jacobean London — producing a body of work that has been continuously performed, translated, adapted, and argued over for four centuries, and that now functions as the closest thing the English-speaking world has to a universal literary canon.
Shakespeare wrote for the afternoon crowd at the Globe Theatre — tradesmen, merchants, apprentices, the occasional aristocrat — who paid a penny to stand in the yard and watch plays about kings, lovers, witches, and clowns. He was a practical playwright and part-owner of a commercial theater company, writing what sold. That work, produced for a paying audience in early modern London, has been performed continuously for four centuries on every continent, translated into every major language, and is now studied as foundational literature in schools worldwide. The distance between those two facts — commercial entertainment for an afternoon crowd, universal literary canon — is the central puzzle of Shakespeare's afterlife.