Shakespeare: The Biography

Acknowledgements

For ease of reference I have quoted line numbers from The Complete Works, Original-Spelling Edition, published by Oxford University Press (1986), easily the best modern edition of Shakespeare’s plays. I would also like to express my obligation and gratitude to its editors, Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor, for providing the closest possible transcription of Shakespeare’s printed words.

I would like to register a more private debt to my assistants, Thomas Wright and Murrough O’Brien, for their help in research and elucidation.

I would also like to thank Katherine Duncan-Jones and Jenny Overton for their invaluable suggestions and emendations and my editor, Penelope Hoare, for her patient work upon the typescript. All surviving errors are, of course, my own.