William Shakespeare is the most celebrated writer in the history of the English language. He is also one of the least understood.

We know almost nothing reliable about his actual life. The biographical record is so thin that the man who wrote Hamlet and King Lear left behind almost no letters, no diaries, no personal documents of any kind — only legal records about property transactions, a will that doesn't mention his plays, and a handful of signatures. Everything else is inference, imagination, and myth.

William Shakespeare cuts through four centuries of mythology to examine seven things most readers don't know about the man and his work. We know almost nothing about his life — and what we think we know is largely invented. He was a shrewd businessman and investor who cared deeply about money and social status. He borrowed every plot he ever used and sometimes collaborated with other writers — which was entirely normal for his time. His original audience was nothing like a modern theater crowd — they stood in the open air, ate and drank during performances, and had spent the previous Sunday watching a bear fight. He shaped the English language so thoroughly that words and phrases we use every day came directly from his plays. The authorship question — the claim that someone else wrote the plays — is ultimately a class argument, not a historical mystery. And his sonnets, written in the first person and addressed to specific people, raise questions about his inner life that have never been satisfactorily answered.