Katherine Duncan-Jones must be granted a certain originality. There cannot be many Shakespeare scholars who combine a refusal to accept that Hand D in the manuscript of Sir Thomas More has been demonstrated beyond reasonable doubt to be Shakespeare’s, with a willingness to believe that he might have been part-author of a run-of-the-mill domestic drama of c. 1605 called A Yorkshire Tragedy. When, moreover, we find Duncan-Jones misquoting the editors of the latter play—attributing to them the statement that “there is very strong evidence” for Shakespeare’s authorship when they actually say “there is apparently very strong external evidence” (italics added)—and failing to acknowledge that they are not persuaded by this evidence, we are less than impressed. This curious combination of wariness and rashness occurs elsewhere in Ungentle Shakespeare. She refrains, for example, from deciding whether Shakespeare was a Protestant or a Catholic, but is willing to believe that he may have had a sexual relationship with the Earl of Southampton.

Her title strikes the keynote. Shakespeare was “ungentle”: a social upstart, a sexual opportunist, and mean with his money. He was eager to escape the cares of marriage and fatherhood for bachelor lodgings and distinctly cool towards his native town. Duncan-Jones’s account of his last illness and death is every bit as unpleasant as Edward Bond’s in his terrifying play Bingo. Syphilitic, troubled with heart and circulation problems, Shakespeare takes to the bottle, falls out with old friends, insults the beneficiaries in his will, and