The Late Mr. Shakespeare

From the writer whom Peter Ackroyd called “one of our best living novelists,” comes the most original, exciting, and provocative novel about Shakespeare since Anthony Burgess’s classic Nothing Like the Sun.

Our guide to the life of the Bard is an actor by the name of Robert Reynolds, also known as Pickleherring. Pickleherring asserts that as a boy he was not only an original member of Shakespeare’s acting troupe but played the greatest female roles, from Cleopatra to Portia. In an attic above a brothel in Restoration London – a half century after Shakesperare had departed the stage – Pickleherring, now an old 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 firsthand and far-fetched, he means to set the record straight. Was Shakespeare actually ever “in love”? Did he write his own plays? Who was the Dark Lady of the sonnets?

Brilliantly in tune with today’s Shakespeare renaissance, this is an outrageously bawdy, language-loving, and edifying romp through the life and times of the greatest writer who ever lived.

“Engaging . . . Nye’s novel has more of the real Shakespeare in it than the soufflé-light Shakespeare in Love.” –The New York Times Book Review