An introduction to women who contributed to English literature in the 16th and 17th centuries

title page of the 1616 edition of Christopher Marlowe's The Tragical History of Dr. Faustus

Faust, detail from the title page of the 1616 edition of The Tragical History of Dr. Faustus by Christopher Marlowe.

Courtesy of the trustees of the British Library; photograph, R.B. Fleming

Shakespeare’s works

Learn about William Shakespeare's early boyhood and path to London to become a playwright and actor

This film recounts the life of Shakespeare from his early boyhood through his productive years as a playwright and actor in London. It is a 1955 production of Encyclopædia Britannica Educational Corporation.

Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.See all videos for this article

Above all other dramatists stands William Shakespeare, a supreme genius whom it is impossible to characterize briefly. Shakespeare is unequaled as poet and intellect, but he remains elusive. His capacity for assimilation—what the poet John Keats called his “negative capability”—means that his work is comprehensively accommodating; every attitude or ideology finds its resemblance there yet also finds itself subject to criticism and interrogation. In part, Shakespeare achieved this by the total inclusiveness of his aesthetic, by putting clowns in his tragedies and kings in his comedies, juxtaposing public and private, and mingling the artful with the spontaneous; his plays imitate the counterchange of values occurring at large in his society. The sureness and profound popularity of his taste enabled him to lead the English Renaissance without privileging or prejudicing any one of its divergent aspects, while he—as actor, dramatist, and shareholder in the Lord Chamberlain’s players—was involved in the Elizabethan theatre at every level. His career (dated from 1589 to 1613) corresponded exactly to the period of greatest literary flourishing, and only in his work are the total possibilities of the Renaissance fully realized.