Or not and possibly didn’t exist at all.
One sure sign of a playwright is how he’s drawn by the critics of his time, and Shakespeare was roundly criticized by the critics of his.
His work may well have been lost if not for the actors John Heminges and Henry Condell, who had known and worked with Shakespeare, and had prepared 36 of his plays for the First Folio edition, which was dedicated and embellished by two poems of the playwright Ben Johnson, who was certainly known to have existed, and in which Shakespeare’s name was mentioned in both.
Probably my favorite biography of him is “Will In The World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare” by Stephen Greenblatt (2004)