Also, there was a surprising amount of literature in the early
colonies too, though the study of Shakespeare might be needed to read
it.

"The Literature of Virginia In the Seventeenth Century" by Howard
Mumford Jones with the aid of Sue Bonner Walcott, the small Second
Edition paperback c) 1968 by the Rector and Visitors of the University
of Virginia, (first edition  c) 1946 by Howard Mumford Jones) is very
interesting in that regard, that is contemporary of William
Shakespeare early renown perhaps?

It opens with "1. The General Movement of Prose: To speak of the
literary life of the seventeenth- century Virginia, if by "literary"
one implies belles lettre, is in one sense ludicrous, but in another
sense that colony not only produced a surprising amount of writing but
also the cause of literature in others. Before Plymouth and
Massachusetts Bay the Jamestown settlement regarded itself as a
providential fact of the highest consequence in its own time and of
historical significance for generations to come. It did not fail to
record its own annals. The first ships returning to England - the
"Sarah Constant" and the "Godspeed" - as a Virginian historian points
out, carried a literary cargo as well as samples of the natural
products of the country. That budget of manuscripts included "A report
of His Majesties Counsel for the first Colony [in] Virginia to His
Majesties Counsel for Virginia in England"; "A relayton of the
Discovery" by " A Gentleman of the Colony" (presumably Gabriel
Archer); Robert Tindall's "dearnall of our voyage," which has
disappeared; a letter from Tindall to the Prince of Wales; one from
George Percy to a Mr. Warner; one from a Dutchman to John Pory (in
Latin), and one from William Brewster to the Earl of Salisbury,
besides other material not now identifiable. Within a decade of its
founding, a dozen or so pamphlets or treatises on the infant
enterprise had been penned, histories had been written, and a variety
of letters (a Jacobean letter was usually a serious affair) had
described Virginian life. Also the rudiments of a literature of
political theory existed in "posse", if not in "esse." This represents
literary activity so out of proportion to the population as to suggest
that "Virginia Britannia" was regarded as something novel in English
history; and in fact the same sense of the divine significance which
led Mathers to record "providences" overhung Jamestown. The
providential "note" of the sermon preached before Lord de Warr (my
note: "erstwhile Governor of Virginia") when he landed may be gleaned
from its text, and the providential not is characteristic:

"Now the Lord said unto Abram, Get thee out of thy country, and from
thy kindred, and from thy father's house, unto a land I will shew
thee. And I will make of thee a great nation...and in thee all
families of the earth be blessed."

Interestingly, Pocahontas' earrings, of a rare shell only found on the
east side of the Bering Sea, are now on exhibit kept in the family
after her untimely death in England and her interment there.