Most Shakespeare biographies fail because there's so little we know for certain about the man that it all ends being conjecture without the honesty of admitting it. Flights of fancy are welcome, provided you don't try to pass them as academia. Here James Shapiro takes a clever, reductive angle. He writes about just ONE YEAR in the life of the playwright; but with a limited structure he lets his readers navigate the world of Elizabethan London on their own, letting the details of the period come alive and with a clear narrative flair. It also has one of the best opening scenes in any book, fiction or non-fiction: the image of Shakespeare and fellow company actors carrying the wood of their old theatre across a frozen Thames is obviously apocrypha, but unforgettable.
Word-boy and cleverest of the clever, novelist Anthony Burgess wrote the book I love most in the world (Nothing Like The Sun) on this very subject: an imagined life of Shakespeare. But here it's that novel's non-fiction twi - a sharp and concise biography of the poet, accesible to any reader. A thin, wonderful volume. It is a great book to kick off your Shakespeare readings, if you've never picked up a biography of the man.
A deep, lyrical, excellently-researched meditation on how the events in Shakespeare's life and the period he lived in could have influenced, coloured and facilitate the writer's work. With a fortunate focus on Shakespeare's language, this is a book to keep near you at all times.
If you are a word-geek like me, obsessed with the way Will Shakespeare was obssessed with language, this is the book for you. Kermode has a keen eye and explains things very well, even I - who doesn't have English as my first language - could get through the whole business easily. It explores the peculiar language of each play extensively, but never gets too academic for the average reader.
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