Short answers, pulled from the story.
Raphael Holinshed was a 16th-century English chronicler, born around 1525 and died around 1580, best known for compiling Holinshed's Chronicles. The work is described as the first complete printed history of England composed as a continuous narrative, and it served as a major source for Renaissance writers including Shakespeare, Marlowe, Spenser, and Daniel.
Holinshed's Chronicles is the common name for The Chronicles of England, Scotlande, and Irelande. The first edition was published in two volumes in 1577, and a second edition followed in 1588. The project originated with London printer Reginald Wolfe, who conceived it in 1548 as a universal world history.
Shakespeare used the 1587 revised second edition of the Chronicles as the source for most of his historical plays, including Richard III, Macbeth, and portions of King Lear and Cymbeline. The Chronicles also influenced Christopher Marlowe's Edward II, which borrowed details including the circumstances of Edward II's murder at Berkeley Castle in Gloucestershire.
The Privy Council ordered the removal of certain pages from the 1588 second edition of the Chronicles because they contained passages considered offensive to Queen Elizabeth and her ministers. The suppressed passages were eventually published separately in 1723, and a complete reprint of the Chronicles appeared in 1807.
Raphael Holinshed died around 1580 at Bramcote Hall near Warton in north east Warwickshire, having retired to the countryside a few months after the Chronicles were licensed. His will was proven on the 24th of April 1582, leaving his estate to a Mr. Burdet, whom he called his master.
Reginald Wolfe originally conceived the project in 1548 as a universal cosmography covering the history of every known nation in the world, complete with maps and illustrations. After Wolfe died in 1573 with the work unfinished, a consortium of London stationers took over and narrowed the scope to a history of Britain and Ireland, which became the work published under Holinshed's name.