About the Author

Stephen Greenblatt is Cogan University Professor of the Humanities at Harvard University. He is the author of twelve books, including The Swerve: How the World Became Modern, which won the National Book Award and a Pulitzer Prize, as well as the New York Times bestseller Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare and the classic university text Renaissance Self-Fashioning.

He is General Editor of The Norton Anthology of English Literature and of The Norton Shakespeare, and has edited seven collections of literary criticism.

Reviews

A vast shelf of biographies of the Bard exists, but this is the book I would take with me to a desert island
*Guardian*

A work of wonderful erudition that can be read as an accessible introduction to the social and political milieu from which Shakespeare emerged, and as an elegant guide to the astonishing poems and plays themselves
*New Statesman*

Both insightful literary criticism and a gripping piece of psychological detective work … Stephen Greenblatt has few equals as a Shakespeare scholar
*Metro*

A delight, full of new insights and infused with a rich understanding of precisely why Shakespeare’s writing gives us such lasting pleasure … quite superb
*Sunday Times 'Books of the Year'*

Thought-provoking … full of unexpected touches … beautifully written
*Daily Telegraph*

Riveting
*Independent*

Really gives a sense of being in touch with the man. Greenblatt’s knowledge of the plays and the times in which they were written is so encyclopaedic that he can assemble a convincing portrait of Shakespeare without resorting to smoke and mirrors
*Sunday Times*

The most complexly intelligent and sophisticated, and yet the most keenly enthusiastic, study of the life and work taken together that I have ever read
*New Yorker*

One of the finest recent Shakespeare biographies
*Guardian*

Greenblatt’s fantastically readable biography of our greatest writer paints a riveting portrait of Elizabethan England
*Daily Telegraph*

Compulsively readable and deeply imaginative
*Stanley Wells*

At last, the book Shakespeare has deserved: a brilliant book written by a virtual eyewitness who understands how a playwright takes the stuff of his life and his world and makes it into theatre
*Charles Mee*

A tour de force … a book for artists and ordinary people as well as scholars and students
*Tina Packer*

A wonderful piece of work
*Simon Russell Beale*