William Shakespeare

William Shakespeare was an English playwright and actor whose plays, staged first by the Lord Chamberlain's Men and later the King's Men at London's Globe Theatre, did more than any other single body of work to establish the professional public playhouse as an art form in its own right rather than a lesser cousin of court masque or classical drama. As a shareholder in his own company as well as its principal writer, he practiced theatre as a working trade, dramatist, sometime actor, and part owner of the building his plays were staged in, and his history plays, tragedies and comedies together set the template later English language theatre measured itself against. His literary works themselves, and his authorship as a writer, are the subject of the Literature Atlas's own entry for him; this entity covers his place in the Theatre art form specifically, as its essential founding practitioner.