Alas, Tom Stoppard's movie script is mostly fiction. Still, authors keep probing the life of the greatest English playwright and this new entry by American scholar Park Honan, emeritus professor of English at the University of Leeds, will fascinate all Shakespeareans. Honan's style is dense.
Every page is packed with minutiae.
But cumulative credibility is the reader's reward as the author describes Elizabethan England's deathly plagues, Protestant-Catholic tensions and surprising penchant for legal jousting, including Shakespeare's bid to prevent his wife Anne Hathaway's brothers from controlling his estate by shortchanging her in his will. Like a good detective, Honan presents the facts without drawing controversial conclusions. He clearly believes Shakespeare wrote all the 38 or 39 plays regularly attributed to him, but he leaves open the question of his relationship with the possibly homosexual Earl of Southampton. Theaters were opened and closed at the whim of the city fathers or royal court. The emerging merchant class filled the seats, and tickets cost as little as a penny.