Massive stone heads carved by the Olmecs provide a dramatic beginning to the story of American sculpture

Thespis, traditionally considered the first actor, wins the drama competition in Athens

Aeschylus wins the prize for tragedy at the City Dionysia in Athens

Sophocles wins the prize for tragedy in Athens, defeating Aeschylus in the competition

Euripides enters the drama contest at the City Dionysia in Athens for the first time

Athenians vote to kill all the men on the captured island of Mytilene, but the next day change their mind - almost too late

Aristophanes wins first prize in Athens for his comedy The Acharnians

Socrates is now sufficiently prominent to be satirized in Clouds, a comedy by Aristophanes

Plautus and Terence, in the second and third century BC, create a Roman drama based on Greek originals

Mark Antony gives a dramatic speech in praise of Caesar, calming the crowd but also positioning himself for the next stage in an ongoing power struggle

Kalidasa, the most distinguished of India's authors in classical Sanskrit, is at the Gupta court in Patna

Peter Abelard teaches philosophy at Notre Dame until an affair with one of his pupils, Héloïse, brings his career to a dramatic end

Tannhäuser is one of the Minnesinger, the German equivalents of the French troubadours

The king of France, Francis I, wins a dramatic victory at Marignano and captures Milan

Marlowe and Shakespeare are born in the same year, with Marlowe the older by two months

The first dramatic ballet, the Balet Comique de la Reine, is presented during French wedding festivities

The 18-year-old William Shakespeare marries Anne Hathaway in Stratford-upon-Avon

Marlowe's first play, Tamburlaine the Great, introduces the swaggering blank verse of Elizabethan and Jacobean drama

After tentative beginnings in the three parts of Henry VI, Shakespeare achieves his first masterpiece on stage with Richard III

Shakespeare's central character in Hamlet expresses both the ideals of the Renaissance and the disillusion of a less confident age

William Shakespeare's name appears among the actors in a list of the King's Men

Ben Jonson writes The Masque of Blackness, the first of his many masques for the court of James I

The satirical voice of the English playwright Ben Jonson is heard to powerful effect in Volpone

Shakespeare's last completed play, The Tempest, is performed

William Shakespeare dies at New Place, his home in Stratford-upon-Avon, and is buried in Holy Trinity Church