A biography of William Shakespeare written for general readers. Burgess follows the playwright from Stratford to London, describing his family, the theatre world of the time, and the writing of the plays and poems. He is frank about how little is known for certain, and offers lively guesses that he marks as such. The book blends scholarship with a novelist's feeling for character and for the sound of Elizabethan English, and it conveys real affection for its subject.
Quotes
It was all a matter of a Goddess – dark, hidden, deadly, horribly desirable.
There he lieth, tossing in the guilt of his lewdness, the primal lecher, neglectful of his duties to a fair wife but all too ready to plunge his sizzling steel into the slaking black mud of a base Indian.
The West is eveningland, the East morningland.