F. E. Halliday presents in vivid detail what we know about Shakespeare's life after three centuries of discovery, and illuminates and animates the story with illustrations of Elizabethan personalities, pages from the early folios, maps, and photographs of Stratford-upon-Avon. Much of the great playwright's biography is mysterious, but Halliday (an authority on Elizabethan and Jacobean literature, and especially on Shakespeare) documents the Bard's life and work — reassuring us, incidentally, that William Shakespeare of Stratford-upon-Avon really was the author of the plays attributed to him.