{"product_id":"the-late-mr-shakespeare-a-novel","title":"The Late Mr. Shakespeare: A Novel","description":"\u003cp\u003eFrom the pen of the writer whom Peter Ackroyd called one of our best living novelists comes a work that is rich, strange, and wonderful. Welcomed in Shakespeares own land as the most original, exciting, and provocative novel about the playwright since Anthony Burgesss classic Nothing Like the Sun, Robert Nyes The Late Mr. Shakespeare is a literary event. Our guide to the life of the Bard is an actor by the name of Robert Reynolds, known also as Pickleherring, who asserts that, as a boy, he was not only an original member of Shakespeares acting troupe, but also played the greatest female roles, from Cleopatra through Portia. In an attic above a brothel in restoration Englanda half century after Shakespeare had departed the stagePickleherring, now an ancient man, sits down to write the full story of his former friend, mentor, and master.Ancient he may be, but fond, faithful Pickleherring has forgotten not one jot, and using sources both first hand and farfetched, he means to set the record straight. Gentle readers will learn much that will open their eyes. One by one, chapter by chapter, Pickleherring teases out all the theories that have been embroidered around Shakespeare over the centuries: Did he really write his own plays? Who was the Dark Lady of the sonnets? Did Shakespeare die a Catholic? What did he do during his socalled lost years, before he went to London to write plays? What were the last words Shakespeare uttered on his deathbed? Was Shakespeare ever in love? Pickleherring turns speculation and fact into stories, each bringing us inexorably closer to Shakespeare the mancomplex, contradictory, breathing, vibrant. Robert Nye has given us an outrageously bawdy, languageloving, and edifying romp through the life and times of the greatest writer who ever lived. The Late Mr. Shakespeare proves how alive he was.Nye brilliantly weaves together almost all the known facts about Shakespeare, a great many of the spurious anecdotes which have been attached to his life, and a tissue of rare inventions of his own. Times Literary SupplementAnyone who loves Shakespeare will love this book. . . . Wildly inventive and satisfyingly steeped in the dramatists work. Sunday Telegraph\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Arcade","offers":[{"title":"Nye, Robert \/ paperback","offer_id":47841024278773,"sku":"SONG1611457157","price":13.38,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0737\/5804\/8501\/files\/81RGRcskpxL.jpg?v=1773753062","url":"https:\/\/ergodebooks.com\/products\/the-late-mr-shakespeare-a-novel","provider":"Ergodebooks","version":"1.0","type":"link"}