Robert Nye

Did Shakespeare Write Shakespeare?

Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare

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Jonathan Cape 406pp £20 order from our bookshop

The Age of Shakespeare

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Weidenfeld & Nicolson 194pp £12.99 order from our bookshop

Weidenfeld & Nicolson 194pp £12.99

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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