Chapter 1 Summary and Analysis

This book takes two sources of information, biographical documentation and the writings of William Shakespeare, and proposes theories about the relationship between the two, asking the question what in Shakespeare's life caused him to write what he did in the way he did. It takes a roughly chronological approach, chronicling events in the playwright's childhood through to his death a little more than fifty years later. The book's core thematic exploration relates to the question of what goes into the making of art, not just Shakespeare's plays and poems, but art in general.

"Primal Scenes" This chapter explores several aspects of Shakespeare's early life in his home town of Stratford-upon-Avon, and offers possibilities for how they appeared in his later works. The first aspect is his education, which the author describes as probably taking place in a school attended only by...