Ahead of the 400th anniversary of his death, a flurry of new books discover Shakespeare in the most unlikely places

"Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale her infinite variety,” said Enobarbus of the queen in Antony and Cleopatra. Change the gender and the same could describe the man who composed the lines. Shakespeare wrote sonnets, narrative poems and plays that encompassed tragedy, history and comedy, as well as others so unclassifiable that we call some “romances”, others “problem plays”.

He was an actor first, a playwright second, a serial dramatic collaborator, a shareholder in his theatrical company and a prosperous family man of substantial property in London and Stratford. In his lifetime, he saw many of his plays published, the reading public drawn to his “great feast of language” and stories that imagined a world reaching from Bermuda to North Africa, Greece and India, chronicling the lives of English kings, Danish princes, Italian noblewomen, Jewish merchants and Moorish generals.