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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I am most grateful to the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust and the Globe Theatre for their thoughtful and illuminating displays of Shakespeare’s life and work and for the helpfulness of their staff. Further afield, I would like to thank the staff at the Museum in Dubrovnik and the Ducal Palace in Mantua. I have seen some wonderful productions of Twelfth Night over the years staged by the Royal Shakespeare Company, but I am most indebted to York University Drama Society for their exuberant and spirited outdoor production, which I saw one hot summer day by the river in Stratford and started me thinking, what if . . .

There are very few indisputable facts known about the life of William Shakespeare. Even the date of his birth is uncertain. I have ventured an explanation that, since nobody knows, is as valid as any. Much of his life is open to speculation in this way, which leaves the writer a certain latitude. Despite this lack of documented detail, very many books have been written about him. It is impossible to list all the books that I have consulted, but I am grateful for the scholarship and insights offered by the following writers: Germaine Greer, Shakespeare’s Wife (Bloomsbury, 2007), Jonathan Bate, Soul of the Age (Viking, 2008), Peter Ackroyd, Shakespeare: The Biography (Chatto and Windus, 2005) and James Shapiro, 1599 (Faber and Faber, 2003). Also, Leslie Hotson, The First Night of Twelfth Night (Rupert Hart-Davis, 1954), George Morley, Shakespeare’s Greenwood, (David Nutt – At the Sign of the Phoenix, 1900). For other aspects of Elizabethan life: Judith Cook’s Roaring Boys – Shakespeare’s Rat Pack and her book on Doctor Simon Forman. The A to Z of Elizabethan London, compiled by Adrian Proctor and Robert Taylor was as invaluable as its modern counterpart. For Illyria, I made considerable use of guidebooks for Croatia and Dubrovnik, Venice and the Italian City States, but I also found Jan Morris’s The Venetian Empire very helpful, Mary McCarthy’s Florence and Venice Observed (Penguin Classics, 2006) and Rebecca West’s account of her travels in Yugoslavia: Black Lamb and Grey Falcon (Macmillan, 1942).