William Shakespeare was born in Stratford-upon-Avon, Warwickshire, in 1564. The date of his birth is unknown but is celebrated on 23 April, which happens to be St George's Day, and the day in 1616 on which Shakespeare died.

Aged eighteen, he married Anne Hathaway. They had three children. Around 1585 William joined an acting troupe on tour in Stratford from London, and thereafter spent much of his life in the capital. By 1595 he had written five of his history plays, six comedies and his first tragedy, Romeo and Juliet. In all, he wrote thirty-seven plays and much poetry, and earned enormous fame in his own lifetime in prelude to his immortality.

A member of the generation of British poets who achieved fame during World War I, Rupert Brooke (1887–1915) burst on the literary scene when two of his war sonnets ("The Dead" and "The Soldier") were published in London's Times Literary Supplement on March 11, 1915. Less than two months later his 1914 and Other Poems was published and went through 24 impressions by June, 1918. After being inducted into the British Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve, Brooke sailed on a Navy ship in February, 1915, heading toward the fighting at Gallipoli in Turkey. He died shortly thereafter, at age 27, on a French hospital ship moored off Skyros in the Aegean Sea from sepsis derived from an infected mosquito bite. Brooke was buried in an olive grove on Skyros.