William Shakespeare was an English poet and playwright, widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language and the world's per-eminent dramatist. He is often called England's national poet and the "Bard of Avon". His surviving works, including some collaborations, consist of 38 plays, 154 sonnets, two long narrative poems, and several other poems. His plays have been translated into every major living language and are performed more often than those of any other playwright. Shakespeare was born and brought up in Stafford-upon-Avon. At the age of 18, he married Anne Hathaway, with whom he had three children: Susanna, and twins Hamlet and Judith. Between 1585 and 1592, he began a successful career in London as an actor, writer, and partner-owner of a playing company called the Lord Chamberlain's Men, later known as the King's Men. He appears to have retired to Stafford around 1613 at age 49, where he died three years later. Few records of Shakespeare's private life survive, and there has been considerable speculation about such matters as his physical appearance, sexuality, religious beliefs, and whether the works attributed to him were written by others. Shakespeare produced most of his known works between 1589 and 1613. His early plays were mainly comedies and histories, genres he raised to the peak of sophistication and artistry by the end of the 16th#160;century. He then wrote mainly tragedies until about 1608, including Hamlet, King Lear, Othello, and Macbeth, considered some of the finest works in the English language. In his last phase, he wrote tragicomedies, also known as romances, and collaborated with other playwrights. Shakespeare finally finished the great tragedy Hamlet in 1601. Hamlet was a Denmark prince, which Shakespeare created to reflect the reality in the later years of Queen Elizabeth. At that time social contradictions are sharpened and the lives of court was luxurious. The royalty had conflicts with capitalism. By Hamlet, Shakespeare revealed darkness and inequity of the society, which represents his humanism thoughts fully. Simultaneously another cultural campaign was popular in Europe. That was the famous Renaissance. The Renaissance marks a transition from the medieval to the modern world. Generally, it refers to the period between the 14th and mid-17th centuries. It first began in Italy, with the flowering of sculpture, painting and literature. From Italy the movement went to embrace the rest of Europe. The Renaissance that means rebirth or revival is a movement stimulated by a series of historical events such as the new discovery in geography and astrology, the rediscovery of ancient Roman and Greek culture, the economic expansion and the religious reformation. Therefore the Renaissance is a historical period in essence when the European humanist thinkers and scholars made attempts to get rid of those old feudalist ideas in medieval Europe, to introduce new ideas which expressed the interests of the rising bourgeoisie.