Season 4, Episode 1: The End of the Road

By 1609, William Shakespeare had been writing plays for nearly two decades. He was a household name in London, his company—now the King’s Men—enjoyed royal patronage, and their new indoor stage at Blackfriars promised a fresh era of theatrical success. By all accounts, Shakespeare was still at the height of his career. But behind the curtain, things were shifting. The endless grind of plague closures had slowed his output. His family life was changing—his daughter Susanna married, his mother passed, his first grandchild was born. And in his plays, we see something else: a tone that grows more experimental, more reflective, even more personal than before. Fathers soften. Endings grow stranger. And Shakespeare himself seems to be stepping back, handing the reins to younger playwrights, and perhaps preparing for retirement. In this episode, we explore the final stretch of Shakespeare’s career: from the collaborative experiments of Timon of Athens and Pericles, to the intimate revelations of the Sonnets, and finally, to his last solo masterpiece, The Tempest—a play that reads like his farewell to the stage. We’ll also meet the rising talent John Fletcher, soon to become Shakespeare’s partner in his last works, and learn how the fire that consumed the Globe in 1613 symbolized the end of an era. And then, silence. By 1616, Shakespeare is gone. But his words are not. The question is: how would those words survive? And who would ensure they reached us?