William Shakespeare: An Illustrated Biography Book

In William Shakespeare: An Illustrated Biography Anthony Holden makes intelligent use of the evidence that exists to produce a convincing portrait of the Stratford grammar schoolboy who travelled to London and became one of the most successful men of theatre of his day. The wealth accrued from this success eventually enabled him to purchase the largest house in his native town. But, like all previous biographers, Holden is inevitably fascinated by the missing evidence. The conventional wisdom is that hardly any direct documentary evidence of the life of Shakespeare has survived. In fact we know more about Shakespeare than about almost any other Elizabethan and Jacobean dramatist. However, since our interest in Shakespeare is so much greater than our interest in, say, his sometime collaborator Anthony Munday, we are more acutely aware of the missing evidence. Where was Shakespeare in the "lost years" of 1579-1587? Who were the real personalities lurking behind the people described in the sonnets? Like all previous biographers, Holden has his theories and is reasonably convincing when he claims, for example, that Shakespeare--product of a Catholic background--spent some of the "lost years" in the service of a leading Lancashire Catholic family. However, he does have a tendency to assume that intelligent, informed guesswork has been miraculously transformed by writing it down in a published biography into incontrovertible fact. None the less, this is, by someway, the best popular biography of Shakespeare available. In this illustrated edition Holden's text is wonderfully enhanced by a rich selection of images, ranging from 16th and 17th-century engravings to 18th and 19th-century paintings of scenes from the plays. --Nick RennisonRead More