Shakespeare

What This Book Covers

1. Prologue
2. Chapter One - Stratford’s Ghost
3. Chapter Two - London Is a Stage
4. Chapter Three - The Playwright Nobody Can Touch
5. Chapter Four - Friends in High Places
6. Chapter Five - The Globe Is Born
7. Chapter Six - Love, Death, and Wordplay
8. Chapter Seven - The Dirty Bard
9. Chapter Eight - Shakespeare and the Supernatural
10. Chapter Nine - Macbeth, King Lear, and the Bleakness of Power
11. Chapter Ten - The Bible Conspiracy
12. Chapter Eleven - The Authorship Debate
13. Chapter Twelve - The Final Curtain
14. Chapter Thirteen - Shakespeare’s Afterlife
15. Chapter Fourteen - Willie Was a Virus

Excerpt

PROLOGUE NOBODY KNOWS WHO he really was. Let’s start there. That’s not a romantic metaphor. That’s a biographical crisis. We don’t know what he looked like. We barely know what he sounded like. We’ve got six shaky signatures, zero manuscripts in his own hand, and a will that mentions no books. And yet — he’s the most famous writer who ever lived. How? How does a glove-maker’s son from a market town no one had heard of become the operating system of the English language? How does a man who never went to college end up cited more than the Bible? How does one playwright from plague-era England end up shaping every genre, every classroom, every meme, and half the world’s movies? It’s not just...