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You will not find a better book on Shakespeare . . . Ackroyd has genuinely set a new standard for accounts of Shakespeare's life. <br>-Colin MacCabe, Independent <br> If you were to read only one book on Shakespeare, you would do well with this one. <br>-Allan Massie, Literary Review <br> Shakespeare: The Biography is everything one would expect from a biographer at the top of his game . . . his recreation of London life is masterful. He knows the plays and understands better than academic biographers how Shakespeare went about researching and writing . . . His biography ranks with the best of them. <br>- Financial Times <br> His biography is conventional, even cautious; grounded in common sense and wide reading, and written with the sensibility of a working novelist. <br>-Nicholas Shakespeare, Saturday Telegraph

This is a commendably thorough, engagingly self-effacing new look at a writer whom literary history has never quite managed to pin down, nor ever will. It is the book Peter Ackroyd was born to write -- Anthony Holden * Daily Mail * Shakespeare: The Biography is everything one would expect from a biographer at the top of his game... his recreation of London life is masterful. He knows the plays and understands better than academic biographers how Shakespeare went about researching and writing... His biography ranks with the best of them * Financial Times * His biography is conventional, even cautious; grounded in common sense and wide reading, and written with the sensibility of a working novelist -- Nicholas Shakespeare * Saturday Telegraph * A big, expansive, densely imagined book -- Sam Leith * Spectator * You will not find a better book on Shakespeare... Ackroyd has genuinely set a new standard for accounts of Shakespeare's life - Colin MacCabe, Independent

This is a commendably thorough, engagingly self-effacing new look at a writer whom literary history has never quite managed to pin down, nor ever will. It is the book Peter Ackroyd was born to write -- Anthony Holden Daily Mail Shakespeare: The Biography is everything one would expect from a biographer at the top of his game... his recreation of London life is masterful. He knows the plays and understands better than academic biographers how Shakespeare went about researching and writing... His biography ranks with the best of them Financial Times His biography is conventional, even cautious; grounded in common sense and wide reading, and written with the sensibility of a working novelist -- Nicholas Shakespeare Saturday Telegraph A big, expansive, densely imagined book -- Sam Leith Spectator You will not find a better book on Shakespeare... Ackroyd has genuinely set a new standard for accounts of Shakespeare's life - Colin MacCabe, Independent

You will not find a better book on Shakespeare... Ackroyd has genuinely set a new standard for accounts of Shakespeare's life - Colin MacCabe, Independent A big, expansive, densely imagined book -- Sam Leith * Spectator * His biography is conventional, even cautious; grounded in common sense and wide reading, and written with the sensibility of a working novelist -- Nicholas Shakespeare * Saturday Telegraph * Shakespeare: The Biography is everything one would expect from a biographer at the top of his game... his recreation of London life is masterful. He knows the plays and understands better than academic biographers how Shakespeare went about researching and writing... His biography ranks with the best of them * Financial Times * This is a commendably thorough, engagingly self-effacing new look at a writer whom literary history has never quite managed to pin down, nor ever will. It is the book Peter Ackroyd was born to write -- Anthony Holden * Daily Mail *

Ackroyd (Chaucer, Jan. 2005, etc.) continues his exploration of his native country's imaginative landscape with a portrait of the life and times of the quintessential English artist. Given the enormous amount of attention devoted to the life of William Shakespeare (1564-1616) in the four centuries since his death, it's hard to offer something truly new about either the man or his plays. Ackroyd doesn't, but his discursive biography capably synthesizes current knowledge with just enough of a point of view to make it interesting. He's solid on Shakespeare's origins in a family of recusant Catholics-a fairly new but now generally conceded point-and on the Bard's rise in dynamic, rapidly changing Elizabethan society: a young man's world in which ambition and aspiration might lead anywhere and everywhere. But the author sometimes gets perilously near radical oversimplification when he suggests that the writer merely threw hordes of great characters onto the stage in plots whose plundered sources he barely bothered to alter. The extensive historical background ranges from marvelously atmospheric material on Elizabethan theater, which illuminates the network of rivalries and camaraderie within which Shakespeare operated, to tedious references to academic disagreements about which the general reader will care naught. We get a wonderful sense of Shakespeare's personality: educated but not particularly intellectual, ambitious, shrewd about money, eager to reassert his family's genteel origins, something of a philanderer, suspicious of all dogma. Ackroyd offers less compelling material, stressing Shakespeare's fluency and fertility, his ability to cannibalize others' work and shape it to his own ends, without being very specific as to what exactly those ends were. Newcomers to Shakespearean studies will find this a good place to start. Those more familiar with the field will find that it palls in comparison to Stephen Greenblatt's Will in the World (2004). (Kirkus Reviews)

Author Information

Peter Ackroyd is an award-winning historian, biographer, novelist, poet and broadcaster. He is the author of the acclaimed non-fiction bestsellers London- The Biography, Thames- Sacred River and London Under; biographies of figures including Charles Dickens, William Blake, Charlie Chaplin and Alfred Hitchcock; and a multi-volume history of England. He has won the Whitbread Biography Award, the Royal Society of Literature's William Heinemann Award, the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, the Guardian Fiction Prize, the Somerset Maugham Award and the South Bank Prize for Literature. He holds a CBE for services to literature.

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