Shakespeare: a Life

      John Mortimer. Will Shakespeare (1977) Supposedly written by Jack Rice, a boy actor in Shakespeare’s troupe. Well done. It covers the “lost years” of Shakespeare’s life, and provides a plausible version of Shakespeare’s marriage to Anne Hathaway. I would have welcomed a longer and more detailed book, but then Mortimer would have had to invent additional narrators.
      The better you know Shakespeare’s plays, the more pleasure in the reading. There’s a convincing (at least while you read it) explanation of the “two loves” of the Sonnets. Mortimer knows theatre, his descriptions of Elizabethan theatre have the ring of truth. As do his accounts of the many ways which people scrabbled for a living in a time without social safety nets, when patronage was the best, if also riskiest, path to professional advancement, and sickness was likely to kill you without warning.
     I enjoyed the book. The cover announces that it was made into a TV series, of which I know nothing. The book is worth looking for. ***
     The TV series is available (low resolution) on Youtube.