Shakespeare Dies: The Bard's Immortal Words Live On

William Shakespeare died on April 23, 1616, in Stratford-upon-Avon, possibly on his 52nd birthday if the traditional April 23 birthdate is accurate. He had retired from London's theatrical world several years earlier, returning to the large house he purchased with the profits of a career that produced at least 37 plays, 154 sonnets, and two long narrative poems. His will, signed a month before his death in a shaky hand, famously left his wife Anne his "second best bed," a detail that has launched centuries of speculation about their marriage. Shakespeare's reputation at the time of his death was solid but not yet monumental. He was respected as a successful playwright and shareholder in the Globe Theatre, but Ben Jonson was considered the more serious literary figure, and many of Shakespeare's plays existed only in unreliable quarto editions. His lasting fame owes an enormous debt to John Heminges and Henry Condell, two fellow actors who compiled 36 of his plays into the First Folio in 1623, preserving works like "Macbeth," "The Tempest," and "Twelfth Night" that might otherwise have been lost entirely. The scale of Shakespeare's influence on the English language alone is staggering. He coined or popularized an estimated 1,700 words, including "assassination," "eyeball," "lonely," and "generous." His phrases have embedded themselves so deeply in everyday speech that most people who quote him do not know they are doing so: "break the ice," "wild goose chase," "heart of gold," "in a pickle." Beyond vocabulary, he expanded what English drama could do, blending comedy with tragedy, prose with verse, and philosophical depth with popular entertainment in ways no predecessor had attempted. His death passed with little public notice. No elegies appeared in print until the First Folio's publication seven years later, when Jonson wrote that Shakespeare was "not of an age, but for all time." That judgment, which must have seemed generous in 1623, turned out to be one of the most accurate literary assessments ever made.