The tragedy of Othello marks the beginning of the most sublime series of consecutive dramatic works in the history of literature.

We're talking about the tragic procession.

In an astonishing burst of genius that will sustained for 14 months.

The playwright wrote four works back to back that would change the landscape of literature forever.

After the books of the Bible, it is these four tragedies

that would exert the most extensive,

the deepest and most profound influence on every great writer

that came after Shakespeare. I read these works as secular scripture, and I strongly believe

that you can reread and re-watch these plays all the days of your life. You can study these aesthetic and

cognitive marvels, these inexhaustible masterpieces year after year, and you will always

draw wisdom from them. The four works are Othello, King Lear, Macbeth, and Anthony and Cleopatra.

To experience these tragedies back to back is to experience the human condition at its most powerfully expressed.

And we cannot help but wonder as we immerse ourselves in the dark universe of the tragic procession, what life looked like for the great writer.

Well, in order to peek in on Will, dipping his quill into his pot of ink and ferociously scrawling the opening of Othello,

we need to take a trip to Stratford upon Avon. The year is 1603.

Queen Elizabeth is dead and King James I of England and sixth of Scotland is on the throne.

Shakespeare and his troop, the Kingsmen, are royally appointed. And one of the new monarch's first actions was to order the Jacobian version

of lockdown as bubonic plague tears through London. If a citizen were to fall ill, their house

had to be closed for six weeks and they were asked not to interact with other people. If they did

leave their house, they had to wear marked clothing as a warning that they carried the disease.

Now James ordered collections to be made to provide for those with plague who couldn't work. Doctors tried frantically to provide

cures through bloodletting, yeah, applying leeches and herbal remedies. But the country's best efforts

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