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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…’