Kevin Harber’s Reviews > A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare, 1599 > Status Update

Learned today that Shakespeare’s cousin and a few relatives on his mom’s side were part of a plot to assassinate Queen Elizabeth. His cousin took a gun with him to London to shoot the Queen but was apprehended.

This is shaping up to be one of the best nonfiction books I’ve read lately. It makes up for the dearth of primary source materials re. Shakespeare by focusing on one critical year in his life and presenting a sort of negative space portrait of him by relating the historical context, cultural zeitgeist, and literary trends of that time, along with an examination of his source materials and secondary accounts.