The Arden Shakespeare / Nine Lives of William Shakespeare

silence". -- Times Literary Supplement Though always displaying allegiance to the traditional Shakespeare story, Holderness critiques the biographies in useful ways and shows just how weak and tenuous many of their assertions are... a dazzling satire. -- The Brooklyn Rail 'Required reading for anyone interested in Shakespeare's life or in how literary biography gets written. There's no better place to turn for distinguishing facts and traditions from more imaginative accounts of how Shakespeare became Shakespeare. Graham Holderness is a terrific guide and a talented writer.' -- James Shapiro, author of 1599 and Professor of English at Columbia University "Like Prospero, Graham Holderness has conjured up a world -- inks and quill pens, lost manuscripts, sheep-shearing fairs, courtship rituals, seventeenth-century acting techniques, religious rites, business dealings. To name a few. There have of course been hundreds of biographies of William Shakespeare down the centuries, but none so breathtakingly nimble and adroit as this one. Shakespeare has long been a battleground between what can be historically verified ( not much ) and what in the end is simply speculation ( of which there has been a very great deal ). Holderness -- who is saturated in his subject -- disentangles fact from fiction, but then starts to weave beautiful new tapestries of his own. This is the best and most enjoyably imaginative book on Shakespeare since Anthony Burgess' Nothing Like the Sun -- high praise, as Burgess' only rival was the chapter about Shakespeare in James Joyce's Ulysses. Were he to bound back from beyond the grave, this is the volume Shakespeare himself would most love reading." -- Roger Lewis, author of The Life & Death of Peter Sellers and Seasonal Suicide Notes ... takes a fresh look at the facts, the traditions, and the possible relations between his life and the works that life created. http://perthshakespeareclub.blogspot.com/ -- Perth Shakespeare Club website 'Graham Holderness knows the power of the Shakespeare myth and its fictions... in this volume, he offers a twist... Recognising the flimsy factual basis for Shakespeare biography, he draws on wit and wordplay to flesh out a fiction more palatable than the po-faced fantasies of the scholarly biographers. The nine Shakespeares on show here - writer, player, butcher boy, businessman, husband, friend, lover, Catholic and portrait - are each lovingly dissected before being painstakingly reassembled' -- Times Higher Education Supplement Posts by author Graham Holderness on 'Blogging Shakespeare'. http://bloggingshakespeare.com/nine-lives-of-william-shakespeare http://bloggingshakespeare.com/queering-shakespeare-and-sherlock-holmes