The Life of the Author: William Shakespeare delivers a fresh and exciting new take on the life of William Shakespeare, offering listeners a biography that brings to the foreground his working life as a poet, playwright, and actor. It also explores the nature of his relationships with his friends, colleagues, and family and asks important questions about the stories we tell about Shakespeare based on the evidence we actually have about the man himself.

The book is written using scholarly citations and references, but with an approachable style suitable for listeners with little or no background knowledge of Shakespeare or the era in which he lived. The Life of the Author: William Shakespeare asks provocative questions about the playwright-poet's preoccupation with gender roles and sexuality and explores why it is so challenging to ascertain his political and religious allegiances. Conservative or radical? Misogynist or proto-feminist? A lover of men or women or both? Patriot or xenophobe? This introduction to Shakespeare's life and works offers no simple answers but recognizes a man intensely responsive to the world around him, a playwright willing and able to collaborate with others and able to collaborate with others, and, of course, his exceptional, perhaps unique, contribution to literature in English.