What is the full name of the playwright who wrote Romeo and Juliet?

William Shakespeare wrote Romeo and Juliet, probably during the 1590s.

Shakespeare was an English playwright, poet, and actor associated with the playing companies the Lord Chamberlain’s Men and, later, the King’s Men. Romeo and Juliet belongs to the group of tragedies that established his reputation, alongside works such as Hamlet, Macbeth, and King Lear.

The play’s surviving early editions identify Shakespeare by name, although Elizabethan authorship and printing practices were different from modern publishing. The title page of the 1597 First Quarto calls it a play by “W. Shakespeare.” Later editions helped establish the fuller title and text familiar today.

Shakespeare’s version was not invented from nothing: it adapted an established European love-story tradition, especially Arthur Brooke’s 1562 narrative poem The Tragical History of Romeus and Juliet. Shakespeare significantly reshaped the material through dramatic dialogue, comic scenes, and poetic imagery.