Robert Nye
Did Shakespeare Write Shakespeare?
Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare
By Stephen Greenblatt
Jonathan Cape 406pp £20 order from our bookshop
The Age of Shakespeare
By Frank Kermode
Weidenfeld & Nicolson 194pp £12.99 order from our bookshop
THE EFFIGY CARVED in the north wall of the chancel in Holy Trinity Church, Stratford-upon-Avon, depicts a man who looks like a successful pork butcher rather improbably in the act of poetic composition, with his fat right hand on a golden cushion and holding a golden quill. The first thing to say about Stephen Greenblatt’s William Shakespeare is that he would have written nothing with a golden quill, and that it is unlikely that he ever rested his hand on golden cushions.
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