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Who’s there? Shakespeare’s most famous play opens with this slightly hokey line, and the question remains for his countless audiences, biographers and scholars. Who was this man? What makes his works so apparently endless? Like the plays, his life is studded with riddles. Even the basic facts are slippery and over-determined.
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The Great William: Writers Reading Shakespeare, by Theodore Leinwand (University of Chicago Press, £24.50); Shakespeare’s First Folio: Four Centuries of an Iconic Book, by Emma Smith (Oxford University Press, £19.99); Hamlet: Fold on Fold, by Gabriel Josipovici (Yale University Press, £20); Lunatics, Lovers and Poets: Twelve Stories after Cervantes and Shakespeare, edited by Daniel Hahn and Margarita Valencia (And Other Stories/ Hay Festival, £10). Daniel Swift’s most recent book is The Heart is Strange: New Selected Poems of John Berryman.
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