'After so much ado, why not a metabiography of the Bard that explores all his guises?' asks the Times Higher Education in this fantastic review of one of our most exciting new books, Nine Lives of William Shakespeare.
'Graham Holderness knows the power of the Shakespeare myth and its fictions, the "fur coat and no knickers" tradition of bardolatrous biography prevalent among Stratfordian autograph-hunters. In this volume, Holderness offers a twist… The nine lives of the title are nine theories or scraps of evidence eked out by the Bard's biographers that Holderness approaches from different angles, as scholar, sceptic and creative writer, dividing each chapter into "Facts", "Traditions" and "Speculations". His lives are a meeting of sorts between the nine muses and the nine worthies. 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.'
As mentioned in our announcement of the book on this blog, Nine Lives of William Shakespeare is a uniquely written re-imagination of Shakespeare's life and we are delighted that this has been recognised so enthusiastically in the Times Higher Education.
'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.'
The icing on the cake is that the book was also named their 'Book of the Week'. Congratulations to our author Graham Holderness!
To celebrate this excellent review I have created a digital preview above through which you can read the Introduction to the book and one of Shakespeare's 'lives' created by Graham Holderness – Shakespeare the Businessman .
Jenny
Marketing Executive