The Danish critic sets out to prove that a biography of Shakespeare is difficult but not impossible, moving from Stratford, marriage and the London theatre through the Henry VI plays, Marlowe and every later work. Brandes reads plays and sonnets as clues to the poet’s moods and experience, set against Elizabethan politics, religion and manners.
Translated by William Archer and others under Brandes’s own revision, it remains a landmark of European Shakespeare criticism. Download the free EPUB.