Jessica, Ophelia, Miranda, Imogen, Audrey, Celia, Cordelia, Marina, Cressida, Viola, Phoebe, Ariel—where do these names, increasingly common in almost every country in the world, come from? He invented them from Shakespeare, or found them in his sources and more or less reshaped them. We encounter him constantly. Everyone knows his name, without necessarily having read a line of what he wrote or attended a single one of his plays.
We encounter his face everywhere, his eyes stare at us, while among the portraits that circulate, there is probably not a single one that was painted during his lifetime, and most are probably apocryphal. Writers, chroniclers, and prominent people cite to support what they want to demonstrate sentences that he put into the mouths of his characters and others that he never wrote, but which are attributed to him.
There is not one Shakespeare myth, there are several.
But he actually lived and wrote, from 1564 to 1616, under two reigns, that of the last of the Tudors and the first of the Stuarts, Queen Elizabeth I and her successor in 1603 James VI of Scotland who became James I of England.
This book does not intend to demystify Shakespeare, if that verb implies a depreciation, a desire to debunk. On the contrary, it strives to explain why the most famous young poet and playwright in the world has achieved a prestige that has only increased over the years and that places him at such an intimidating height that it provokes veneration as well as blasphemy and incredulity.
