This is the book that contributed the plot for what became the film 'Shakespeare in Love'. But while the film concentrated on the story of William Shakespeare, playwright, actor, and bad husband, and his cross-dressing actor girlfriend Viola, in this book they have to share the plot with a host of other characters: Queen Elizabeth I, reminiscing with her favourite pirates about their victory over the Spanish Armada; Sir Walter Raleigh, wishing that just once he could go out in his finest clothes without someone walking all over them; and Francis Bacon, desperately trying to earn Her Majesty's favour so that she might let him have a bed she's slept in - perhaps even the second-best bed...

Very unusually for me, I preferred the film, but this is an intelligent and entertaining read.

I released this at a BookCrossing meeting in Havant. It was a very small meeting (only four of us turned up), but for me, as a very new BookCrosser, it was an unthreatening way to meet and chat to other members. PDB11 and I got on so well with Spacehamster that we gave her a lift to her job (in Southampton, where PDB11 and I have been staying while visiting my parents) afterwards.

An amusing and entertaining tale, much wider and more ambitious in scope than Shakespeare in Love, which it inspired.