For a man who died well before the Mayflower reached Plymouth Rock, William Shakespeare still looms large in the American mind. Words and phrases he coined permeate our daily language, and his plays captured many of humanity’s most enduring characteristics. Teenagers who understand Romeo and Juliet have a better perspective on their seasons of puppy love; readers of The Merchant of Venice recognize the racist hatred against Jews spewing out of campuses across the country.

The Bard’s plays cover with equal felicity everything from the most intimate details of private life to soaring affairs of state, and he is considered the greatest of English authors for good reason. In The Hollow Crown, Johns Hopkins University professor Eliot A. Cohen describes how Shakespeare weaves together the high and the low to show how power works.