This book is a bit of a patchwork, pieced together of tantalizing inferences and hunches from official documents and plays and poetry by Shakespeare and his contemporaries, but that’s what makes it interesting. Nicholls takes as his jumping-off point the only known record of Shakespeare’s words (not written but spoken by him): testimony in a court case in which he was a witness. From this little incident—the daughter of his London landlady sues her father for failing to provide a promised dowry—the author discovers the neighborhood in which the playwright lived and wrote, its cast of characters, and his attitudes about love, property, and morals. An interesting micro history, particularly in the interlocking relationships among Shakespeare, other theatre-people, and tradespeople in the neighborhood.