Shakespeare's Professional Career

We tend to think of Shakespeare as the finished product he is today, the plays we see on stage with their costumes and trappings and the world's best actors, or those aspirants in High School tripping over light cables behind the scenery. He had a beginning, though, and like everyone who survived to adulthood in his age, he worked for a living. Reading this book you can imagine him trotting on stage for his part in a play, getting called up during a rehearsal to recast some lines one of the other actors found uncongenial. Rather like Beetle in Stalky and Co., only more solid somehow. It is a splendid book and illustrates the man and his age with the effortlessness of good scholarship. It is too short, but for those who really want to know what things were like around Shakespeare in his own day, get this book. Imagine Shakespeare helping to lug the giant timbers of a large building across the frozen Thames to build the Globe. Back then as now, Theatre people did what had to be done for the show to go on.