Beautiful Stories from Shakespeare

Edith Nesbit (1858–1924), who published as E. Nesbit, was born in London and spent an itinerant childhood following her widowed mother around England and the Continent in search of a healthier climate for a sickly older sister. In 1880 she married Hubert Bland, with whom she co-founded the socialist Fabian Society the following year; his chronic infidelity and the unconventional household that resulted — for years she raised two of his children by his mistress and secretary alongside her own — left her the family's primary breadwinner, and she wrote constantly and commercially to support it. Turning to children's fiction in her forties, she found her lasting form in stories of ordinary children who stumble into real magic within recognisably everyday English settings: Five Children and It (1902), introducing the cantankerous sand-fairy the Psammead, began a trilogy continued in The Phoenix and the Carpet (1904) and The Story of the Amulet (1906), alongside The Railway Children (1906). Her blend of the fantastic and the domestic directly shaped later writers including C. S. Lewis and Edward Eager. She died in Kent at sixty-five.

William Shakespeare (1564–1616) was born in Stratford-upon-Avon, Warwickshire, and by the 1590s was established in London as an actor, playwright, and shareholder in the Lord Chamberlain's Men (later the King's Men), the theatre company for which he wrote nearly all of his plays and whose Globe Theatre he part-owned. His 154 sonnets, addressed variously to a young man and to a "dark lady" whose identities remain unknown, were published in 1609, likely without his direct involvement, though most are thought to have been written more than a decade earlier and circulated privately among friends. Alongside the sonnets and two long narrative poems, he wrote or co-wrote roughly three dozen plays across every major dramatic genre of his day, a body of work whose influence on English literature and language has no real parallel. He retired to Stratford-upon-Avon in his later years and died there at fifty-two.