Celebrating the 400th Anniversary of Shakespeare's First Folio

William Shakespeare died at 52 in Stratford-upon-Avon on April 1616 and was buried two days later. His career spanned merely 28 years (give or take), and of his writings, 19 plays had been published in various states of completion during his life. Considering that today, he is credited with having written twice that many scripts and over 150 sonnets and poems, that was barely a third of his output preserved when he died. The next seven years were a struggle to collect all of Shakespeare's works in one place and put them together in a single volume. Three years after Shakespeare's death, a preliminary copy with several false title pages and dates came out, a scandal known as the "False Folio" affair. Steven Knight and Sarah Lancashire are currently dramatizing all of this in a new TV limited series due out in 2024.

However, seven years after the playwright passed, on November 8, 1623, Mr. William Shakespeare's Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies, now referred to as the "First Folio" of William Shakespeare's plays in modern scholarship, was registered. It is considered one of the most influential books of literature ever published, alongside Dante's Divine Comedy and Geoffrey Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales. It is the most influential book of plays published, and upon reaching its 400th birthday, a pillar of the United Kingdom's main export: Culture.

Shakespeare only wrote plays for three decades, but his stories have entertained and influenced audiences worldwide for four centuries. Here are some of his best writings, read by the best actors the U.K. has to offer.