For generations scholars have labored scrupulously to try to separate the facts of William Shakespeare's life from the myths that have entangled them. However, those who have written fictions about the bard have operated under no such constraints. They offer solutions to the identities of W.H. and the Dark Lady, suggest Shakespeare's role in the shaping of the King James Bible, and trace his relationships with Sir Thomas Lucy, Francis Bacon, Elizabeth I, Kit Marlowe and Ben Jonson. And they speculate endlessly about Shakespeare's pets and poaching, his sources and inspiration, his melancholy and death. From Alexandre Duval's Shakespeare (1804) to Anthony Burgess's "The Muse," this is an anthology of nineteen fictional depictions of Shakespeare. They include Edward H. Warren's account of Shakespeare playing the stock market on Wall Street (with the Three Weird Sisters making stock predictions near a blast furnace in New Jersey), Leon Rooke's vivid memoir of the Bard's dog, and the works of such notables as George Bernard Shaw, Rudyard Kipling and Edward Bond are included.

Maurice J. O'Sullivan, Jr., is the chairman of the English department at Rollins College in Winter Park, Florida.