- Hardcover: 320 pages
- Publisher: Chatto and Windus (1998)
- ISBN-10: 0701167246
- ISBN-13: 978-0701167240
- Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
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Product Description
Product Description
Shakespeare comes alive beneath the pen of the writer whom Peter Ackroyd has called ""one of our best living novelists."" From the pen of the writer whom Peter Ackroyd called ""one of our best living novelists"" comes a work that is rich, strange, and wonderful. Welcomed in Shakespeare's own land as the most original, exciting, and provocative novel about the playwright since Anthony Burgess's classic Nothing Like the Sun,Robert Nye's The Late Mr. Shakespeareis a literary event. Our guide to the life of the Bard is an actor by the name of Robert Reynolds, known also as Pickleherring. Pickleherring asserts that as a boy he was not only an original member of Shakespeare's acting troupe but played the greatest female roles, from Cleopatra through Portia. In an attic above a brothel in restoration England--a half century after Shakespeare had departed the stage--Pickleherring, now an ancient man, sits down to write the full story of his former friend, mentor, and master. Ancient he may be, but fond, faithful Pickleherring has forgotten not one jot, and using sources both first hand and far-fetched, he means to set the record straight. Gentle readers will learn much that will open their eyes. One by one, chapter by chapter, Pickleherring teases out all the theories that have been embroidered around Shakespeare over the centuries: Did he really write his own plays? Who was the Dark Lady of the sonnets? Did Shakespeare die a Catholic? What did he do during his so-called lost years, before he went to London to write plays? What were the last words Shakespeare uttered on his deathbed? Was Shakespeare ever in love? Pickleherring turns speculation and fact into stories, each bringing us inexorably closer to Shakespeare the man--complex, contradictory, breathing, vibrant. Robert Nye has given us an outrageously bawdy, language-loving, and edifying romp through the life and times of the greatest writer who ever lived. The Late Mr. Shakespeareproves how alive he was.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
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Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase
Having read this at the public library I decided I wanted a copy to keep. It's both learned and a great entertainment. I've been teaching Shakespeare for 40 years and this is some of the most fun I've ever had with him. A wonderful imaginary book as if it was written by a member of Shakespeare's acting company.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
The time and place is Restoration London and the comedian Pickleherring is writing the first biography of William Shakespeare. Pickleherring played the female roles in Shakespeare's plays when he was a boy and they were new. Now he's a strange old man lives over a brothel and has a thing for ladies' underclothes. Pickleherring tackles all the controversies of Shakespeare's life and adventures. Half-invented and half-real, his series of tales about the Bard is mostly amusing.
3 of 5 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
It may be me, but I find this kind of book difficult.
This is Shakesperean scholarship dressed up as fiction. Told as the life story of one of Shakespeare's boy actors, we hear a version of Shakespeare's early life, his sex life, and the roots of the sonnets. This is erudite stuff, and the humorous fictional dressing struggles to hide the erudition.
The theories are probably sound - I respect the author - but the rendition is clumsy. I much prefer his other, more rumbustious book, Mrs Shakespeare.
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