Shakespeare The Later Years

Shakespeare: The Later Years continues and completes the biography Russell Fraser began with Young Shakespeare . It opens with the playwright, at 30, bidding for immortality with Romeo and Juliet , and ends with his death in Stratford in 1616. In the years between, he produced most of the work posterity remembers. With Fraser as our guide, we travel through Renaissance England, following Shakespeare and his company of performers in and out of plague-ridden, war-haunted London. Fraser immerses us in Elizabethan gossip, and the jealousies and hatreds that festered at Court, in the theatre, and in the superheated brains of Puritans. It explores how these political and social conditions acted on Shakespeare's work, and how his audiences helped to sponsor and to inspire his plays.