A competent biography of the celebrated playwright. Much of the details I already knew. What this book adds is a (slightly speculative) suggestion that Shakespeare was a closet-Catholic in his youth, having lived in a Catholic household in Lancashire during the 'lost years' when he was young. I also hugely enjoyed the very start of chapter one in which Holden roundly trashes the "usually snobbish attempts" to deny that Shakespeare was the author of the plays via conspiracy theories that must assume that Ben Jonson and Robert Greene and Will Kemp and King James I all lied when naming Shakespeare as a playwright/actor/shareholder.

While one can always quibble with anybody about the chronology of the plays (eg the BBC recently put Titus Andronicus first, as a collaboration with George Peele, while Holden gives primacy to Henry VI), this book is a useful reference for sources; it is both scholarly and well written.

A useful addition to the canon.