Creates a vivid portrait of Shakespeare. Recounts how the teenage Shakespeare was sent to a Catholic household in Lancashire; his shotgun wedding to Anne Hathaway; his time moonlighting as a horse-minder and prompter before acting and co-writing plays. When the plague closed the theatres, he wrote poems -- which he though would prove to be his real claim to immortality. Describes how Shakespeare fell in love, how he endured the pangs of sexual jealousy, and how by the time of his retirement, he had become a wealthy landowner fretting about his daughters' future and haunted by the death of his son.