Curated category
English male dramatists and playwrights
- Charles DickensCharles Dickens earned six shillings a week pasting labels onto pots of boot blacking in a tumble-down warehouse overrun with rats.
- William ShakespeareWilliam Shakespeare signed his last will and testament on the 25th of March 1616, describing himself in it as being in "perfect health." Within a month he…
- Percy Bysshe ShelleyPercy Bysshe Shelley was drowned in a storm off the Italian coast on the 8th of July 1822, age 29, before most of the world had ever read a word he wrote.
- Lord ByronLord Byron got up at two in the afternoon. By the time he sat down to dinner, the house around him resounded with the unarbitrated quarrels of ten horses…
- Ben JonsonBen Jonson killed a man in a field on the 22nd of September 1598 and walked away from the gallows by reciting a Bible verse.
- John MiltonJohn Milton sold the rights to one of the greatest poems in the English language for five pounds. On the 27th of April 1667, he handed Paradise Lost to the…
- Benjamin DisraeliBenjamin Disraeli climbed what he called "the top of the greasy pole" to become Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, not once but twice, despite arriving at…
- W. H. AudenW. H. Auden died on the 29th of September 1973 in a Vienna hotel room, a few hours after reading his poems aloud at the Palais Pálffy.
- Leonard Digges (writer)Leonard Digges entered University College, Oxford in 1603. This was the same year his mother remarried Thomas Russell of Alderminster.
- Christopher MarloweChristopher Marlowe was baptised on the 26th of February 1564 at St George's Church in Canterbury, just two months before William Shakespeare was baptised in…
- Willy RussellWilly Russell was born on the 23rd of August 1947 in Whiston, Lancashire, and by the time he was fifteen he had left school to become a women's hairdresser.
- John Fletcher (playwright)John Fletcher was baptised on the 20th of December 1579 in Rye, Sussex, and for much of the seventeenth century his name stood alongside William…
- Robert Greene (dramatist)Robert Greene died on the 3rd of September 1592, reportedly after a surfeit of pickle herring and Rhenish wine. He was 34 years old, buried in the New…
- Thomas KydThomas Kyd entered the world through a church record on the 6th of November 1558. The entry at St Mary Woolnoth in London listed him as the son of Francis…
- Clive BarkerClive Barker was three years old when he saw a man fall out of the sky. At an air show in Liverpool, the French skydiver Leo Valentin plummeted to the ground…
- Tom StoppardTom Stoppard was born Tomáš Sträussler in Zlín, Czechoslovakia, on the 3rd of July 1937, and he died on the 29th of November 2025, at his home in Dorset…
- John DrydenJohn Dryden was attacked at around 8 pm on the 18th of December 1679, beaten by hired thugs in Rose Alley behind the Lamb and Flag pub in Covent Garden.
- Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of OxfordEdward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford was born on the 12th of April 1550 at Hedingham Castle in Essex, heir to the second-oldest earldom in England.
- Henry WottonHenry Wotton was born on the 30th of March 1568 at Bocton Hall in Kent. His father Thomas Wotton died in 1587 leaving Henry only a hundred marks a year.
- David GarrickDavid Garrick stepped onto the stage at Goodman's Fields Theatre on the 19th of October 1741 and, within weeks, had London completely transfixed.
- Nicholas Rowe (writer)Nicholas Rowe died on the 6th of December 1718, and within a year the King of England had sent his widow a pension. Not as condolence, exactly. As payment.
- Thomas NasheThomas Nashe was baptised in Lowestoft on the 30th of November 1567, the son of a curate who would eventually be awarded the living at the church of All…