Shakespeare: The Biography [Hardcover]

"It really is a stupendous achievement . . . Peter Ackroyd is back at the height of his powers."
-Phil Baker, "Sunday Times"

Peter Ackroyd's method is to position Shakespeare in the close context of his world. In this way, Ackroyd not only richly conjures up the texture of Shakespeare's life, but also imparts an amazing amount of vivid, interesting material about place, period and background. The book is packed with gems - and the reader turns the pages eagerly, keen to absorb the next nugget of information. Some snippets: Shakespeare was secretly a Roman Catholic; he wrote many more plays but these have been lost; the witches in Macbeth were not hags but women fairies or nymphs played by boys; the 'best' bed was for guests which was why he bequeathed his wife his 'second best' bed (the matrimonial bed in which he probably died); 'ham acting' derives from the strutting walk which showed off the ham-strings; an actor called 'Will' played female parts - could it have been Shakespeare himself?; and the strongest bond in the plays is between father and daughter perhaps reflecting Shakespeare's own family life.

A 'living attempt to reach into the world and heart of Shakespeare'. Written with intuition and imagination unique to Peter Ackroyd, a book by a writer about a writer, this marvellous biography is a tour de force

Peter Ackroyd was born in London in 1949. He achieved a Double First at Cambridge and studied in America at Yale as a Mellon Fellow. His first two publications were books of poetry; his first biography was about Ezra Pound and his first novel was about Oscar Wilde. He is a successful novelist (taking most of his backgrounds from history) and has written biographies of T.S. Eliot, Dickens, Blake and Thomas More, as well as short books on Chaucer and Turner. He has written and presented two TV series for the BBC (Dickens and London) and is the author of London: the biography and Albion: the origins of the English Imagination.

Preface
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