William Shakespeare

Shakespeare left Stratford-upon-Avon for London sometime in his twenties, leaving behind a wife, Anne Hathaway, and three children, and surfaces in the historical record as an actor and playwright by the early 1590s, a working member of the company that became the King's Men rather than a solitary literary genius.

He wrote roughly thirty-seven plays across every register (comedy, history, tragedy, romance) while also holding a financial stake in the Globe theater itself, making him unusually prosperous among Elizabethan playwrights. Hamlet (1601), likely his most performed and quoted tragedy, took a bloody old revenge-play plot and slowed it down around a prince who can't stop questioning his own capacity to act.

He retired to Stratford a wealthy man years before his death in 1616, and it was two former colleagues, not Shakespeare himself, who compiled his plays into the 1623 First Folio, without which roughly half of them, including Macbeth and The Tempest, would likely be lost.