This is not the sort of book I would normally read. The title is misleading, it is not biographical at all, but a year of events and issues in England, which would have impacted on Shakespeare.
Scholarly and hard work, the premise is to weave events in England around the plays he wrote that year – Henry V (insurrection in Ireland), Julius Ceasar (regicide), As You Like It (seasonal uncertainty?) and finally Hamlet (times being out of joint).
Interesting on technical issues, like how (I think) soliloquies in the later plays derived from Montaigne’s essays and how a conjunction called ‘hendiadys’ (noun and noun) was used in new ways far more than ever before in English (‘Law and order’ is commonplace, but ‘angels and ministers’, ‘book and volume of my brain’ are unique).
Throws a new light on the plays, but a bit difficult for me.
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