After Shakespeare’s death, his plays didn’t immediately become sacred texts, they became commodities. In this episode, we dive into the publishing chaos of the early 1600s, where bad quartos, cash grabs, and loose copyrights threatened to fracture his legacy. Enter John Heminges and Henry Condell, two friends determined to wrestle Shakespeare’s work back from the mess. Along the way, we unpack how Ben Jonson’s audacious move to publish his own complete works, the original literary box set, helped light the fuse.

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?

Shakespeare’s death in 1616 could have meant the loss of his words forever. Many of his plays existed only in fragile manuscripts and cheap, error-filled quartos. Then, seven years later, two of his fellow actors—John Heminges and Henry Condell—took on the monumental task of preserving their friend’s work.

Their project became the First Folio of 1623: the first collected edition of Shakespeare’s plays. Without it, we would have no Macbeth, no Twelfth Night, no The Tempest. With it, Shakespeare’s reputation leapt from playwright of his time to literary giant for all time.

Season 4 of Will: What Is He Good For? uncovers the story of the First Folio: how it was assembled, why it mattered, and how one book turned Shakespeare into a legend whose words continue to shape our world four centuries later.