Who was alive in Shakespeare's time?

Answer 1

Quite a lot of people, really. There were probably between 500 and 600 million people alive at that time, and the population of England alone reached about 5 million. Attempting to name everyone is impossible, but some people who were alive at the same time as Shakespeare were Nostradamus and Suleiman the Magnificent (who both died when Shakespeare was 2), and La Rochefoucalt, the famous French maxim writer (who was born 3 years before Shakespeare died.)