William Shakespeare (1564-1616), the greatest writer in English and perhaps the greatest dramatist of all time, wrote 39 plays (some with collaborators), 154 sonnets, and other poetry. His father was a glover, and his mother came from a Catholic family. They lived in a prosperous market town in the English Midlands, Stratford-upon-Avon. The town’s grammar school would have provided William with an excellent education in oratory, rhetoric, and classical literature. At 18, he married 26-year-old Anne Hathaway. They had a daughter, Susanna (six months after their wedding), and not two years later, twins were born, Judith and Hamnet (who died at 11). Sometime after losing his only son, Shakespeare would have begun his career in London as an actor, playwright, and part-owner of a playing company called the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, which became the King’s Men after the death of Queen Elizabeth and the accession of King James in 1603. He seems to have produced his plays between 1589 and 1613—comedies, histories, tragedies. Outbreaks of the plague shut down theater performances periodically throughout these years.

Most of his last plays belong to a hybrid tragicomic genre that has been called “romance.” One of these is The Tempest, the last of his solo-authored plays. It is a valedictory work, in which Shakespeare explores his great themes of forgiveness and reconciliation, the power of artistic creation, the possibilities for redemption in politics. Given the recently established British colonies in North America, Shakespeare also addresses colonialism and the new world dawning before old Europe.