Curated playlist
English male dramatists and playwrights
- Charles DickensAt twelve, Charles Dickens pasted labels on boot blacking pots in a rat-infested warehouse.
- William ShakespeareWilliam Shakespeare called himself in "perfect health" in his will, then died within a month.
- Percy Bysshe ShelleyPoet Percy Bysshe Shelley's body was identified partly by a copy of Keats's Lamia in his jacket.
- Lord ByronWestminster Abbey refused Lord Byron's body for questionable morality. It finally gave him a memorial in 1969.
- Ben JonsonBen Jonson killed a man in a duel and escaped hanging by reciting a Bible verse.
- John MiltonJohn Milton sold Paradise Lost for five pounds. The blind poet handed it to a publisher in April 1667.
- Benjamin DisraeliBenjamin Disraeli bought a controlling stake in the Suez Canal within days in 1875.
- W. H. AudenW. H. Auden died hours after reading his poems aloud in a Vienna hotel.
- Leonard Digges (writer)Leonard Digges translated a Spanish text in 1622, and John Fletcher used it for two plays.
- Christopher MarloweQueen Elizabeth's Privy Council once wrote to Cambridge to make sure Christopher Marlowe got his degree.
- Willy RussellWilly Russell left school at fifteen to become a women's hairdresser. He later wrote Educating Rita and Blood Brothers.
- John Fletcher (playwright)John Fletcher was once as famous on the English stage as Shakespeare. He wrote or co-wrote close to fifty plays.
- Robert Greene (dramatist)Most scholars agree a pamphlet attributed to Robert Greene mocked Shakespeare as an 'upstart Crow'.
- Thomas KydThomas Kyd may have written the most popular play of Shakespeare's age, yet people nearly forgot him.
- Clive BarkerUnhappy with how others filmed his screenplays, Clive Barker directed Hellraiser himself. It opened in 1987.
- Tom StoppardTom Stoppard arrived in England knowing not a word of Czech. He fled Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia as a child.
- John DrydenHired thugs beat poet John Dryden in a London alley in December 1679.
- Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of OxfordEdward de Vere, Earl of Oxford, was buried in an unmarked grave in 1604. Some still say he wrote Shakespeare's plays.
- Henry WottonHenry Wotton's joke that an ambassador lies abroad nearly wrecked his career.
- David GarrickA wine merchant's apprentice packed London's theater with dukes. David Garrick played Richard III in 1741.
- Nicholas Rowe (writer)Nicholas Rowe made the first eighteenth-century edition of Shakespeare.
- Thomas NasheThomas Nashe co-wrote a play so scandalous that his partner Ben Jonson went to jail.