All about Shakespeare

This book is a modest version of the 1975 extravaganza. William Shakespeare: A Documentary Life. The earlier edition, a large, handsomely illustrated, unwieldy and practically unreadable volume, represents a novel solution to the problem of how to write Shakespeare's biography. The most curious and perhaps the saddest fact of literary history is that the life of the most renowned English poet seems to have been prosperous, relatively happy and quite unremarkable. Shakespeare, the poet par excellence of human passions, is the most objective of our great writers and the one least prone to presenting his works as a cumulative autobiography. By perusing the known facts of his life (and these are much more numerous than usually imagined) we gain a portrait of an eminently sensible and practical businessman who had amassed by the end of his life considerable wealth through wise investments and through the nurturing of his entrepreneurial talents, and who disposed of it in a careful will designed to prevent the dispersal of this prudently guarded property. But his life tells us next to nothing about the processes of artistic inspiration.