Shakespeare’s Other Lives

For generations scholars have labored scrupulously to try to separate the facts of William Shakespeare’s life from the myths that have entangled them. However, those who have written fictions about the bard have operated under no such constraints. They offer solutions to the identities of W.H. and the Dark Lady, suggest Shakespeare’s role in the shaping of the King James Bible, and trace his relationships with Sir Thomas Lucy, Francis Bacon, Elizabeth I, Kit Marlowe and Ben Jonson. And they speculate endlessly about Shakespeare’s pets and poaching, his sources and inspiration, his melancholy and death.
From Alexandre Duval’s Shakespeare (1804) to Anthony Burgess’s “The Muse,” this is an anthology of nineteen fictional depictions of Shakespeare. They include Edward H. Warren’s account of Shakespeare playing the stock market on Wall Street (with the Three Weird Sisters making stock predictions near a blast furnace in New Jersey), Leon Rooke’s vivid memoir of the Bard’s dog, and the works of such notables as George Bernard Shaw, Rudyard Kipling and Edward Bond are included.

Maurice J. O’Sullivan, Jr., is the chairman of the English department at Rollins College in Winter Park, Florida.

Edited by Maurice J. O’Sullivan, Jr.
Format: softcover (6 x 9)
Pages: 231
Bibliographic Info: appendices, bibliography, index
Copyright Date: 2005 [1997]
pISBN: 978-0-7864-2280-7
Imprint: McFarland

Preface     vii


Introduction     1

Alexandre Duval     25

Walter Savage Landor     44

John Brougham     59

William Rendle     66

Franklin Harvey Head     68

Richard Garnett     80

George Bernard Shaw     92

Maurice Baring     109

Charles Williams     117

Edward H. Warren     128

Rudyard Kipling     148

Edward Bond     159

John Mortimer     169

Leon Rooke     176

Anthony Burgess     185

Jorge Luis Borges     201

Appendix I     205

Appendix II     210

Bibliography     215

Index     219

“O’Sullivan’s ingenious, wide-ranging compilation records a surprising wealth of novels, plays and stories”—The Library Association Record; “the reissue of O’Sullivan’s anthology provides a useful and highly entertaining compilation of heretofore obscure primary sources”—South Atlantic Review.