Shakespeare: The Biography » (Unabridged)

Peter Ackroyd is a bestselling writer of both fiction and nonfiction. His most recent books include The Lambs of London; Shakespeare: The Biography; and J.M.W. Turner, the second biography in the Ackroyd Brief Lives series. He has also written full-scale biographies of Dickens, Blake, and Thomas More and the novels The Clerkenwell Tales, The Trial of Elizabeth Cree, Milton in America, and The Plato Papers. He has won the Whitbread Award for Biography, the Royal Society of Literature Award under the William Heinemann Bequest (jointly), the Somerset Maugham Award, the South Bank Award for Literature, and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, and The Guardian fiction prize. He lives in London.

This is the big one from Peter Ackroyd and a worthy companion to London: The Biography.

Only Peter Ackroyd can combine readable narrative and unique observation with a sharp eye for the fascinating fact. His method is to position Shakespeare in the close context of his world. In this way, he not only richly conjures up the texture of Shakespeare s life, but also imparts an amazing amount of vivid, interesting material about place, period and background

The New York Times - John Simon

Ackroyd, though not a professional Shakespeare scholar, is a novelist, poet, critic and, above all, prolific biographer, with books on Chaucer, Thomas More, Blake, Dickens, Pound and T. S. Eliot, some of whom he aptly brings in here. Comparisons with Dickens, who was, in a way, the Shakespeare of the novel, are particularly suggestive; but Ackroyd, fruitfully, quotes many foreign opinions, old and new, as well. Especially effective is the brevity of his chapters, each dealing with a specific matter, and with a title slyly drawn from Shakespeare's words. That the endnotes are purely bibliographical, and everything else is right in the text, is also laudable.