The summit of English literature, master of the stage
The greatest playwright and poet of the English-speaking world, author of Hamlet, King Lear, Romeo and Juliet, Macbeth, and nearly forty plays. His insight into the subtleties of human nature and his forging of language have gone unmatched for four hundred years — the words and phrases he coined or fixed still live in everyday English. His Hamlet, Othello, and Lady Macbeth long ago passed beyond the stage to become a set of archetypes for understanding human nature.
The soliloquy "To be, or not to be" in Hamlet is the most famous in all of English literature. Through a prince’s hesitation over life and death, Shakespeare wrote out the whole of human wavering between action and evasion, vengeance and conscience — and the line became, ever after, shorthand across Western culture for "the human predicament."
On "whether Shakespeare’s plays are really by his hand," various "authorship" doubts have existed in history (the Baconian theory, the Oxfordian theory), but mainstream scholarship broadly affirms his authorship; this site states that the dispute exists.
Below are how modern works borrow or reinterpret this name or story — not the original material. The two differ, so keep them apart.