What Was Shakespeare Really Like?

William Shakespeare may have left plenty of literary records from his own hand, but how much can we use these to draw conclusions about William Shakespeare the man? Does it even matter? Eminent Shakespearean Stanley Wells’ book What Was Shakespeare Really Like? seeks to utilise the available evidence in order to flesh out this elusive character. Drawn from a series of lectures delivered during the pandemic, it covers the following subtopics: What manner of man was he? How did Shakespeare write a play? What do the sonnets tell us about their author? What made Shakespeare laugh? What I’ll say first off is that you start to notice quite a bit of crossover, both between and within chapters; this doesn’t matter so much in a series of weekly lectures (it’s good to recap and link things together), but in a relatively short book like this it does become repetitive rather quickly. It probably would have been better to take the original material from those talks and completely reformat them for…