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'A Shakespeare for our time, scholarly, witty and bold' - Melvyn Bragg ' Holden's book...deserves its place in the turbulent and constantly expanding firmament of Shakespearean studies' - The Times

smooth, professional. CONTEMPORARY REVIEW It deserves its place in the turbulent and constantly expanding firmament of Shakespearean studies. DAILY TELEGRAPH Holden's book is lively, readable and lit with real enthusiasm for the play and poetry. It should reach a wide audience who will be fascinated by the riddles which make up Shakespeare's life story. OBSERVER There's no denying the precision with which he nails his narrative with a well-chosen line. And those lines tend to be good. SUNDAY TIMES A Shakespeare for our time; scholarly, witty and bold -- Melvyn Bragg

British journalist and biographer Holden (Charles at Fifty, 1998) tries his hand at Shakespeares life, poring over numerous sources in an earnest attempt to separate historical truth from legend.With hundreds of Shakespeare biographies already in existence, Holdens task was not an easy one. Many voices speak from the pages of his work, but Holden does not give in to any single opinion or theory (from speculations regarding the obscure period of Shakespeares youth to his possible but unlikely participation in the translation of King Jamess Bible). The Shakespeare portrayed here is a talented writer, a pragmatist rather than romantic in his vision of himself and his legacy. According to Holden, Shakespeare never expected his plays to outlive him, and he wrote his most beautiful sonnets for a narrow circle of intimates. Despite powerful patrons (including Queen Elizabeth and King James) and his immediate and stable fame, when it came to worldly affairs Shakepeare relied uniquely on his shrewd mercantile sense. Besides being a playwright and an actor, he was usually involved in the theater as a manager and shareholder (he owned one-tenth of the celebrated Globe playhouse, for instance). Although he never spent sufficient time with his family (deserting his native Stratford shortly after his marriage to Anne Hathaway and coming back only for brief stays until his retirement at 47), Shakespeare established his household in the biggest house in town and took the trouble to purchase a coat-of-arms. Holden indicates the obvious shortcomings of Shakespeare as husband and father, while also effectively debunking the common belief in his homosexuality. Shakepeare felt deep grief over the childhood death of his only male heir, Hamnet, and the tragic interruption of a father-son relationship resonates in his later works, reaching an acute pitch in Hamlet. A solid but uninspiring biography that is heavy on facts but lacks an engaging reading of Shakepeares own writings. (Kirkus Reviews)

The false assumption that we really don't know anything much about the world's greatest author has long been proved false: the problem is that the facts we have aren't the facts we want. This is why so many attempted biographies of Shakespeare are full of wild conjecture, when they are not composed of crackpot literary theory. Fortunately, almost every generation throws up a writer besotted with the subject who has the ability to write engagingly about it: the latest is Holden, who, having dealt with Prince Charles, Tchaikovsky and Laurence Olivier, now turns to a more difficult subject, and deals with it triumphantly. He gives us all the facts, is splendidly dismissive of the lunatic 'who wrote Shakespeare' argument, and is excellent on the relationship between the play texts and the life. This is notoriously dangerous ground, but Holden treads lightly - his conclusions are often persuasive, and even when at first they seem wild (Shakespeare had an affair with his landlady?), almost all of them, given thought, seem not only possible but probable. The illustrations, some in colour, are profuse and interesting - so that this book becomes the natural successor to Samuel Schoenbaum's great Documentary Life. A really fine and scholarly popular biography. (Kirkus UK)

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Anthony Holden is an award-winning journalist who has published more than thirty books, including biographies of Laurence Olivier, Tchaikovsky and Shakespeare. He has published translations of opera, ancient Greek plays and poetry. With his son Ben, he has edited Poems That Make Grown Men Cry and Poems That Make Grown Women Cry.

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