Shakespeare's life

Hamnet, Maggie O’Farrell’s acclaimed novel, is now a major film. O’Farrell and director Chloé Zhao discuss adapting the story of Shakespeare’s son, reimagining Shakespeare as a husband and father, and building the film’s vivid world.

Before Shakespeare became a literary icon, he was a working writer trying to earn a living in an often precarious new industry. Daniel Swift traces how his creativity unfolded at London’s first commercial playhouse, The Theatre.

Darren Freebury-Jones explores the ways in which Shakespeare reshaped the works of contemporaries like John Lyly, Thomas Kyd, and Christopher Marlowe into something distinctly his own.