[Will Shakespeare: The Untold Story] is a fictionalized biography…. The author has created a chatty, colorful narrator, Jack Rice, a member of Shakespeare's company, to fill in the gaps in what we know of the life. Mortimer, a novelist and playwright, is delightfully imaginative as he reveals the genesis of some of Shakespeare's best lines and scenes. He has steeped himself in the period and in Shakespeareana, apocryphal as well as substantiated; he uses everything that comes to hand with intelligence, wit, and good taste. The book's charm increases in direct proportion to the amount of knowledge the reader brings to it. In the best tradition of Shakespeare-spoofery, as irreverent as Shaw's Dark Lady of the Sonnets, as inventive as Wilde's Portrait of Mr. W. H., it is at the same time as full of action and color as a novel by Jeffrey Farnol.

Dorothy E. Litt, in...