Having given the evidence for William Shakespeare's Catholicism in two previous books, literary biographer Joseph Pearce turns his attention in this work to the

This book is a history of love and the challenge love offers to the laws and customs of its times and places, as told through poetry from the Song of Songs to J

The complex and sometimes contradictory expressions of love in Shakespeare's works—ranging from the serious to the absurd and back again—arise primarily fro

These two criticisms are based on the presumption that only a socially and intellectually elite reader is able to view the author's language in terms of its org