Drawing on an extensive range of sources, Michael Wood takes us back into Elizabethan England to reveal a man who was very much a product of his time. Marked by murderous plots and state terror, religious divisions and rebellious movements, the Spanish Armada and the colonization of the Americas, Shakespeare's dramatic world is here conjured like never before. Using a wealth of unexplored archive evidence - including nineteenth-century photographs of Tudor buildings that survived London's Great Fire - the author dramatically conjures up the neighborhoods where Shakespeare lived and worked during his glittering career. We enter the lodgings where he wrote his greatest plays, and meet the real-life characters who inspired him: doctors, landladies, musicians, foreigners and members of London's black population. We learn of his family's Catholic roots, light is shed on his father's changing fortunes, and new evidence for the dating of the sonnets reveals anguished reactions to the death of his only son.

Stocked with fresh insights and discoveries, this compelling work of investigative journalism reinstates the image of William Shakespeare as a thinking artist, a man who held up a mirror to his age, but who was also, as his friend Ben Jonson said, "not of an age, but for all time."