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LEAH: Who was William Shakespeare? We know he looked something like this, but because he lived so long ago we don’t know a huge amount about his life.

RICKY: But what we do know is that he is one of the greatest writers of plays the world has ever known…

LEAH: Shakespeare wrote plays about almost everything.

RICKY: He wrote about funny things.

EXTRACT A MIDSUMMER NIGHT’S DREAM – BOTTOM ENTERS + ACTOR FAINTS

LEAH: He wrote about scary things.

EXTRACT MACBETH – WITCHES CALL “Macbeth! Macbeth! Macbeth!”

RICKY: And he wrote about very sad things.

EXTRACT ROMEO AND JULIET – ROMEO: “Death that hath sucked the honey of thy breath and had no power yet upon thy beauty.

LEAH: But in everything he wrote William Shakespeare explored what it’s like to be a human being, what it’s like to be alive…

RICKY: And, even now, when we watch his plays, we can learn a lot about the world and about ourselves.

LEAH: Shakespeare was born in the year 1564 in the town of Stratford upon Avon. All those years ago it was just a small town surrounded by countryside. This is the farm just outside Stratford where William’s mother Mary Arden used to live when she was young.

RICKY: When Mary grew up and married a man called John Shakespeare they moved here to this house in Henley Street - where Mary gave birth to William…

PAUL EDMONDSON:His father was bailiff which is the equivalent of mayor of Stratford which gave the Shakespeares a good social status in the town.

LEAH: Aged 7, William went to school…

PAUL EDMONDSON:You had to go to school at 6am in the morning during the summertime, and 7am in the wintertime. And you had two half days off, Thursdays and Saturdays, and you got hardly any school holidays.

RICKY: When he was 14 or 15 William Shakespeare left school. Not long afterwards he fell in love with Anne Hathaway – who lived in this cottage.

LEAH: She became pregnant, and in those days that meant they had to get married – Anne was 25 and William was just 18.

CAROL RUTTER:They had a first child, and then a year later they had a set of twins, so Shakespeare by the time he was 21 years old was the proud father of three children.

RICKY: With a family to look after, William needed to find a job…so it seems he decided to become a writer…

MICHAEL ROSEN:He would have heard merchants coming back from London arriving in Stratford and saying there are amazing entertainments going on in London. You can see these great stories, because that’s at the heart of Shakespeare’s plays – are great stories. So Shakespeare came to London and London was this huge, bustling place, and it would have been mucky and horrible and smelly. But also it was the place where the Queen was so that meant it was the palace and so there would have been courtiers and soldiers in the street. Certainly when he first came here it would have been absolutely strange and bewildering and amazing.

LEAH: This was a world in which William Shakespeare could use his great talents to earn a living. He worked as both a writer and a player – in those days actors were called players - and he was good at both of them.

RICKY: But his plays were what began to set him apart from the crowd and make him successful - because his plays were big hits. Shakespeare wrote the blockbuster films of his day and people from all walks of life could enjoy them in places like this, the Globe.

LEAH: But his success made some other writers jealous…

MICHAEL ROSEN:When he first started writing some people were a bit snobbish about him. They called him an “upstart crow” – which is quite a sort of funny thing to call someone. It was as if they were saying, “Who do you think you are writing plays?”

RICKY: Shakespeare didn’t care. He continued to write BRILLIANT plays like Romeo and Juliet – plays that were enjoyed by everyone, rich or poor…

FARRAH KARIM-COOPER:You only had to pay a penny to stand in the yard around the stage. And you could fit around 1500 people in the yard in those days. Then as you move up you probably pay a little bit more, and then you pay another penny to get a cushion so you can sit comfortably. And then you have these decorated boxes called the gentlemen’s boxes – and only gentry could sit in them.

RICKY: Audiences flocked to see plays like Macbeth, the story of a ruthless and ambitious man who commits dreadful murders so he can become all powerful.

LEAH: Today, more than 400 years later, some people say they don’t get Shakespeare because the old words he sometimes uses are hard to understand…

MICHAEL ROSEN:Sometimes you think, well what does that mean? But quite a lot of Shakespeare you get almost just from the feel of it. Just think about Macbeth – he does these horrible things and he goes “tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow…creeps in this petty pace…from day to day…to the last syllable of recorded time.” And you might think, what’s a petty pace? And what’s the last syllable? But we can feel his misery and then maybe some of those difficult words and phrases like petty pace we can fill in later.”

EXTRACT MACBETH – “It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing!”

Those words were first spoken on a London stage in the year 1606. Today, they can still be heard in theatres all over the world. Shakespeare’s plays have proved to be timeless…

RICKY: William Shakespeare’s successful career came to an end in 1613. It seems he became poorly and returned to Stratford.

LEAH: He died in 1662. He was just 52 years old – but left behind 37 plays and hundreds of poems.

LEAH: Not everyone can be a William Shakespeare, but everyone can have a go at writing a play. Why not get together with some friends and have a go? It doesn’t need to be very long – just a few scenes that tell a story that means something to you.

RICKY: Remember what Shakespeare once wrote: “To thine own self be true, and it must follow, as the night the day, thou canst not then be false to any man.”

LEAH: He’s showing off now…