I just don't know how I feel about Levi's tome, a vastly under-reviewed but clearly vital piece of Shakespearean scholarship.

In painstaking detail, Levi sorts through countless aspects of Shakespeare's life, sources, lifestyle, theatrical notions, as well as the legends and rumours surrounding the Bard. Moreso than some of the great Shakespearean biographers of our day - such as James Shapiro - Levi is sometimes tempted more by hearsay and tradition. On the other hand, he believes very much that a lot of the story of Shakespeare can be told or inferred from what was happening in the era. On this ground, he is brilliant. Sorting through so much information, Levi pulls together convincing discussions of everything from Shakespeare's family background to his final years, drawing a lot of inferences, but also connecting all of the extant elements of the Bard's life into one cohesive whole. This is clearly a labour of love, and it shows.

There are some flaws, however. Number one being that the book was clearly either self-published or by a smaller company, as it hasn't been proofread all that well. Levi was a poetry professor, and one gets the verbal style of an orator who needs an editor. Combine this with his off-handed references to political or religious history which are oblique enough that they could only be fully grasped by people of his age, class, and religious background, and there's a feeling that Levi's intended audience is a small one. (This is most notable in the early chapters on English history, where he will sometimes draw comparisons to points of the aristocracy or religion that have no baseline reference for a 25-year-old Australian like myself!) Beyond this, the sheer ambition of Levi's scope is sometimes overwhelming. This is part-biography, part-hypothesis, part-history, part-literary analysis, and (as many commentators have pointed out) part-epic poem. Sometimes, the book fills full-to-bursting with dense information. It doesn't help that - as I mentioned - sometimes I felt like an outsider, even though I consider myself a bit of an armchair Shakespeare scholar.

In short, this book is not for beginners. Unlike some of the better 'popular non-fiction' titles on the Bard, Levi's work is for people who consider themselves reasonably adept in Shakespeare's accepted history, in a solid number of his works, and preferably in a bit of English history of the time. Once you have brushed up on that, the complexities of Levi are worth a visit.

As for the religious element, well it's there. Levi talks in the introduction about his own religious affiliations, and they add to the occasional confusing moments of commentary - confusing, that is, to someone not of his time and place. Still, when he begins disclosing his fascinating amount of knowledge about Shakespeare's era, his experience shines through. And Levi himself clearly has the mentality of a poet, as his literary analyses are - even if you don't always agree - truly absorbing.

I firmly believe that failing ambitiously is better than succeeding with mediocrity. In Levi's case, he hasn't failed - he's just over-egged the pudding somewhat. This is a multi-faceted book: slow reading but worthy, poetic, sometimes fantastical but sometimes deeply pragmatic. One of the great trends of modern Shakespearean scholarship is to accept that there is much we will never know about William Shakespeare (as there is much we can never know of any genius, let alone one who lived in an era where few personal records remain), but we can make some reasonable assumptions. There were parts of Shakespeare's mind that would have been inaccessible even to those closest to him. There were parts of his life which are lost due to carelessness, a lack of foresight, and simply the verisimilitudes of the era. But beyond that, Shakespeare was a man, a jobbing writer, and a product of his time. In that regard, we can look to the world around him, to the idiosyncrasies of the specific theatre companies he wrote for, and the monarchs, commoners, and systems he was part of. We may not find all the answers there but, if we can believe Levi and his cohort, we can at least hazard a guess. ( )