The UK’s earliest literature can be traced back to the oldest surviving epic poem in the English language Beowulf, the earliest manuscript of vernacular European literature from around AD 1000. Middle English and the spread of the London dialect saw the first great writer of the UK, Geoffrey Chaucer, with his major work The Canterbury Tales. The Elizabethan era brought a great flourish of British literature, especially in poetry and drama. The most famous writer of this period was the poet and playwright William Shakespeare. The English novel was a popular form of writing during the 18th Century, with such writers as Daniel Defoe, Samuel Richardson and Henry Fielding. After a period of decline, Robert Burns revived interest in vernacular poetry and literature. The Romantic period comprised flowering poetry with such great poets as William Blake, John Keats, Lord Byron and William Wordsworth. The reign of Queen Victoria was an age of Realism and the golden age of the English novel, with writers Jane Austen, the Bronte sisters, Charles Dickens, George Elliot, William Thackeray and Thomas Hardy. Other world-renown novelists include Arthur Conan Doyle, D.H. Lawrence, George Orwell and Mary Shelley.

Theatre was introduced to the UK from Europe by the Romans, and auditoriums were erected throughout the country. William Shakespeare, the first great British playwright, was a major figure of the English Renaissance and wrote about 40 plays of tragedies, comedies and history, which are still performed in theatres all over the world today. Other important Elizabethan playwrights were Ben Johnson, Christopher Marlowe and John Webster. The most famous playwrights and figures in theatre of the 19th Century were George Bernard Shaw and Oscar Wilde. The Royal Shakespeare Company operates today in the birthplace of Shakespeare at Stratford-upon-Avon in England, showing his plays.