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William Shakespeare was baptized on 26 April 1564 in Stratford-upon-Avon, Warwickshire, the son of John Shakespeare, a glover and wool dealer who served as an alderman and bailiff of the town, and Mary Arden, the daughter of a landowning farmer. He probably attended the King’s New School in Stratford, where boys were drilled in Latin grammar and classical authors. In 1582, at eighteen, he married Anne Hathaway; their daughter Susanna was born in 1583 and the twins Hamnet and Judith in 1585. Hamnet died in 1596 at the age of eleven.
By 1592 Shakespeare was working in London as an actor and playwright. When plague closed the theaters in 1592–1594 he turned to narrative poetry, publishing Venus and Adonis (1593) and The Rape of Lucrece (1594), both dedicated to Henry Wriothesley, Earl of Southampton. He became a sharer in the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, later the King’s Men, and in the Globe Theatre, built in 1599. Over about twenty-five years he wrote or co-wrote nearly forty plays, among them Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth, and The Tempest.
In 1598 Francis Meres mentioned Shakespeare’s “sugared sonnets among his private friends,” and two of them appeared in The Passionate Pilgrim in 1599. The full sequence of 154 sonnets was published in 1609 by Thomas Thorpe as Shake-speares Sonnets, with a dedication to the mysterious “Mr. W. H.” Sonnets 1–126 are addressed mainly to a young man, urging him first to marry and then celebrating, praising, and reproaching him; Sonnets 127–152 concern a woman often called the Dark Lady; and the two closing sonnets retell a classical epigram about Cupid. Almost all follow the form now named for him: three quatrains rhyming abab cdcd efef and a closing couplet gg.
Shakespeare spent his last years largely in Stratford, where he had bought New Place, one of the largest houses in the town, in 1597. He died on 23 April 1616 and was buried in Holy Trinity Church. In 1623 his fellow actors John Heminges and Henry Condell gathered thirty-six of his plays in the First Folio, which Ben Jonson prefaced by calling him “not of an age, but for all time.”
The sonnet texts on Poetry Catalog follow the public domain Project Gutenberg edition of Shakespeare’s Sonnets, with modernized spelling, so punctuation and wording may differ slightly from other editions. For the linked list of his sonnets on this site, visit William Shakespeare Poems.