What Shakespeare Taught us about Life and Death

In the spring of 1616, William Shakespeare returned to his hometown of Stratford-upon-Avon for good. He was fifty-two years old and, by outward appearance, in decent health. He had already written his final play. The London stages had gone quiet. His daughters were grown, one of them newly married. He had signed his will a few weeks earlier, and two days after his birthday, he was dead. The official records say little, but a local vicar later wrote that Shakespeare, along with fellow writers Ben Jonson and Michael Drayton, drank too much at a dinner and caught a fever that killed him. The story is thin, but it holds just enough truth to make you think: The world’s greatest poet may have laughed himself right into the grave. And maybe he was at peace with that. Because somewhere in the middle of his plays, buried in his kings, his clowns, his traitors and lovers, Shakespeare had already made peace with death. Not as something to run from, but something to understand. To name. To live beside. “A coward dies a thousand deaths,” he wrote in Julius Caesar, “the valiant taste of death but once.” The ones who fear it die from it daily. But the ones who look it in the eye, who learn to carry it, die just once. And they live better because of it.