Who was Shakespeare?

 Nobody knows what Shakespeare looked like or when he was born. But yet, if his name is mentioned in a conversation, almost every person in the US will know who you are talking about. He is so famous because of his play writings.

Shakespeare was born and brought up in Stratford. At the age of 18, he married Anne Hathaway, with whom he had three children. Between 1585 and 1592, he began a successful career in London as an actor, writer, and part owner of a playing company called the Lord Chamberlain's Men, later known as the King's Men. He appears to have retired to Stratford 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 work 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 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.
Many of his plays were published in editions of varying quality and accuracy during his lifetime. In 1623, two of his former theatrical colleagues published the First Folio, a collected edition of his dramatic works that included all but two of the plays now recognized as Shakespeare's.
Shakespeare was a respected poet and playwright in his own day, but his reputation did not rise to its present heights until the 19th century. The Romantics, in particular, acclaimed Shakespeare's genius, and the Victorians worshiped Shakespeare with a reverence that George Bernard Shaw called "bardolatry". In the 20th century, his work was repeatedly adopted and rediscovered by new movements in scholarship and performance. His plays remain highly popular today and are constantly studied, performed, and reinterpreted in diverse cultural and political contexts throughout the world.

Info taken directly from -
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Shakespeare
and http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/masterpiece/merchant/shakespeare.html seemed to say the same things as well.

Shakespeare is usually seen by students as hard to understand and boring because it is outdated. 
I feel like it isn't as outdated anymore and actually applies to us in some ways. I also get some humor here and there that I never used to understand. His stories are actually pretty interesting once you get past the way he wrote. I still struggle with the words that he used and have trouble interpreting what his characters are saying.