Contraversial, though I enjoyed fresh and unforgettable language of the author.

A very deft overview of the life and works of Shakespeare. Burgess painstakingly hews to the documented facts about the Bard, and then indulges in occasional flights of fancy, which are carefully announced as such. Not as copious in scope as Ackroyd or Greenblatt's biographies (and much shorter than either), and obviously not as fun as his own novel,
Nothing Like the Sun, this is still a valuable bit of Bardology.

"We need not repine at the lack of a satisfactory Shakespeare portrait. To see his face we need only to look in a mirror. He is ourselves, ordinary suffering humanity, fired by moderate ambitions, concerned with money, the victim of desire, all too mortal. To his back, like a hump, was strapped a miraculous but somehow irrelevant talent. It is a talent which, more than any other the world has seen, reconciles us to being human beings, unsatisfactory hybrids, not good enough for gods and not good enough for animals. We are all Will. Shakespeare is the name of one of our redeemers."

So: not Bacon, not Essex, not (as Malcolm X argued) James I. We are Shakespeare, Shakespeare is us.

I enjoyed the author's witty writing style but it didn't really add anything new to my knowledge of Shakespeare. It's always interesting to read a new perspective though.

Wonderful life of the man in context of the times.

Written by a fine writer in his own write, this book imagines Shakesepeare as he could be intuitively imagined through the eyes of a novelist. There are multiple technical observations. Chiefly among them, I was very interested in Burgess’s take on Shakespeare’s predecessor’s and contemporaries. The Earl of Surrey’s innovation in 1557 was key to the development of Elizabethan drama. The book was a translation of Virgil and written “in blank verse, a form Surrey devised in order to meet the rhymeless challenge of Virgil’s hexameters. It is, of course, profitless to speculate what might have happened to Elizabethan drama (or the Miltonic epic, for that matter) if Surry had not tried to find a suitable verse-medium for rendering Latin epic poetry.” (34) If not for Surrey, would there have been Shakespeare? It is an interesting question. In Richard III, Shakespeare finds another innovation, “an approach to the three-dimensional drama, in which men are not always what they seem. For the first time, in Clarence’s dream speech, the unconscious mind is netted and landed.” (99) Philosophically, Burgess has a number of observations as well. “Hamlet is really about the impact on a Montaigne-like man of the harsh world of power and intrigue. The tragedy of the prince derives from his having to act, and to base that action on a premise which a Montaigne-like man is bound to find uncomfortable.” (106) “That Falstaff should be one of the great lovable characters of all literature is—to those who equate lovability with moral excellence—an eternal mystery. But to those who see no virtue in war, government propaganda, sour puritanism, hard work, pedantry, Rechabitism, and who cherish fallen humanity when it reveals itself in roguery and wit, then there is no mystery. The Falstaffian spirit is a great sustainer of civilization. It disappears when the state is too powerful and when people worry too much about their souls.” (149)

The book overall is organized simply, and easy to read. Burgess shares his guesses and his opinions freely. It is a lively biography, and an imagined one based in reason underpinning intuition. It is very, very good.

See my other reviews here!

An enjoyable if dated entry from my favorite genre of speculative fiction, Shakespeare biography. The documented facts of Will's life would scarcely fill ten pages (though I hasten to add that even this scant record would still point any serious person directly to the Stratford actor and not some grand conspiracy), so even the most scrupulous biographers must be willing to pad out their work with contextual detail, inference, educated guessing, and some plain assumption. Burgess is by his own admission not especially scrupulous, though he does showcase an impressive understanding of the Elizabethan/Jacobean world and the types of people who populated it—even if I could have stood slightly fewer pages about the Earl of Essex, personally. I found Burgess most interesting when elucidating the networks of kin, neighbors, business associates, literary rivals, and courtly connections Shakespeare was enmeshed in, which often get glossed over in narratives of the lone genius appearing to the world in a meteoric flash. In general Burgess is on the side of a human rather than a godlike Shakespeare, which always earns some points from me. His verve for language and novelistic imagination also make this quite a bit more engaging than many comparable texts.

Burgess is much less convincing when he tries his hand at psychoanalyzing the playwright, and—though he should know better as a fiction writer himself—he can't resist the urge to pick and choose details from the plays to read autobiographically. (He’s especially enamored with the idea, apparently Joyce's, that Will's wife Anne slept with his brother Richard.) A boy's club attitude towards all women not named Elizabeth I and a casuistic refusal to engage—as even the most conservative Shakespeareans do these days—with the possibility of Will's bisexuality are hard to look past as well.

All depictions of Shakespeare will ultimately reflect the times and the personality which conceive them, and Burgess' Shakespeare—witty, hard-working, unglamorous, depressive, anxious about money and rank, a little bit leering, with more or less the attitudes and hangups of a mid-20th-century English literary type—strikes me mostly as a portrait of Burgess himself. "To see [Shakespeare's] face we need only to look in a mirror," he asserts in his final paragraph. Well, at least he acknowledges it.

This is a decent biography. It's well-written and somewhat interesting although I just don't know enough to know whether it's based on good research or not. I just tend not to like biographies.

This should be called, 'an inferred' biography. Anthony Burgess, using historical context, peer histories (Marlow, Greene and Johnson) and the bards own writing attempts an educated guess at the less documented particulars of the life of one Will Shakespeare. The sleuthing and organization of the material is half the pleasure of the book. Worth a read for Shakespeare junkies, everybody else is going to have to plow hard and learn much corollary material to get even a glimpse the shadow that is the subject.

Following his well-developed inclinations and inspired by the example of his subject, author Burgess presents here an impressionistic biography of the poet/playwright filled with erudite word play. This most certainly is not a scholarly biography but rather an attempt to get at the spirit of Shakespeare, his colleagues and competitors, and his times.

I've read several biographies of Shakespeare but this one is special. Burgess not only had a deep grasp of the poet but also of the times. Unlike "Will in the World" which has many "Could it be that..." detours, Burgess uses some speculation but always within reason.

A delight, and wickedly funny.

This book was a scholary biography salted with a fair deal of artistic liberty. Burgess does a good job of filling in the gaps that history has left in Shakespeare's life. While I am not a real Shakespeare fan I thought it was an interesting book. Despite being a struggle at times it was definetly worth it. My only criticism would be that he tends to over play the relationship between the art and the artist's life, constantly looking for parallels between Shakespeare's characters and his real life friends, foes, and self. I think he overdoes this at times but he knows more about the plays and Shakespeare then me so who am I to complain.