faraway places, the fantasies that excited his imagination seem often to have had their roots in the actual circumstances of his life or rather in the expectations and longings and frustrations generated by those circumstances. Hence, in settings as remote as the mythical Athens of A Midsummer Night’s Dream or the romantic Bohemia of The Winter’s Tale, there are notes that take us back to the young man who grew up on Henley Street in Stratford and dreamed that he was a gentleman. Sometime in his late adolescence, the young man awoke to find that the dream had fled, along with his mother’s
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