Her Infinite Variety: Stories of Shakespeare and the Women He Loved

Her Infinite Variety: Stories of Shakespeare and the Women He Loved earns a 2.5. (I explained my book ratings in February.) The creative liberty alone helped push this book past the standard rating of 3. Here's a snippet that I particularly enjoyed in which Shakespeare is describing a story he is working on to a lady friend.

"My prince...He does not see death as you and I do. To him it is weighted equally with life. Only another place." ...
"An undiscovered country."
"Yes."
"To be or not to be, as if there is almost no difference," she said.
"Yes."

I love it. I love it showing a scenario with Shakespeare getting inspiration for one of his most famous lines EVER from a woman in a casual conversation they have one regular day. It's beautiful.

Who are the women in Shakespeare's life? They are both real people and imagined characters - his mother, his wife, his daughters, his mistress, the queen of the fairies from A Midsummer Night's Dream, Lady Macbeth, the list continues. It has been awhile since I last read Shakespeare (2-3 years?) so it was a challenge to immediately come up with the who, what, when, where, and why info that, well let's be honest, was never really readily available - I'm not a Shakespearean scholar, but the stories are well-known even to those who last read his plays in high school (for my friends this was quite some time ago, eh?) that I was able to piece together what was happening with the barest minimum of context.

At the very least, this is a cleverly constructed and engaging book outlining the life of one of the greatest writers ever.