There are very few clearly established facts about the life of England's greatest dramatist and poet, William Shakespeare (1564-1616).

Biography:

After his marriage to Anne Hathaway and the birth of twins, Shakespeare left his native Stratford for London about 1587.
First a minor actor, he began writing plays, Robert Greene (Groatsworth of wit,1952) spoke of him as "an upset crow, beautiful with our feathers, that with his tiger's heart wrapped in a player's hide,supposes he is as well able to bombast out a blank verse as the best of you". His first published work was a poem, venus and Adonis (1593); his first published drama, Titus Andronicus, appeared anoynmously a year later. He wrote 37 plays before retiring to Stratford, where he died April 23,1616. 

Shakespeare as poet:

During the 1590s, Shakespeare wrote sonnets that were published as a sequence in 1609 and are considered his finest work except for the dramas. His sonnet sequence follows the lead of Sidney and Spenser, but eclipses them in poetic quality and originality. Motifs in the sonnets include: the beauty of a young man and the poet's involvement with him, a "dark lady," a rival poet, and the ravages of time and the immortality of art.

Authorship disputed:

Shakespeare was accepted as the author of the plays  until 1769, when Herbert Lawrence argued that a relatively uneducated minor actor could not have produced the Shakespearean canon.  Theorists have proposed Sir Francis Bacon , Christopher Marlowe, or the Earl of Oxford, as the true author of the plays . There is no evidence to support these conjectures.

Text: 

All printed plays by Shakespeare appeared in small cheap quartos until 1623, when the first of four folio editions was published. It contained 36 plays, divided arbitrarily into histories, comedies, and tragedies. The third folio , though not the others, includes Pericles .