Who Was…William Shakespeare

The Mystery of the World’s Greatest Playwright

William Shakespeare is famous all over the world. Everyone has heard of his plays. So why do we know so little about the man who wrote them?

This book is a detective story which goes back over the four hundred years to the dramatic events of the reign of Queen Elizabeth I, and explores how a brilliant and ambitious young man was caught up in a violent world of murder, revenge and treason!

‘Nobody has ever used the English language with more power than Shakespeare did. Like a great soccer player dribbling and bending and heading the ball, he can make words do anything or go anywhere. The plays and poems show that he had a vocabulary of over 25,000 words, about three times as many as most people.

Nearly two thousand of these words had never been written down before Shakespeare’s plays – ‘blanket’, ‘gossip’, ‘assassination’, ‘champion’ and ‘generous’ are just a few of them…’

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