From "one of our best living novelists"(Peter Ackroyd) comes the most original, exciting, and provocative novel about Shakespeare since Anthony Burgess"s classic Nothing Like the Sun. Our guide to the life of the Bard is an actor called Pickleherring, who asserts that as a boy he was an original member of Shakespeare"s acting troupe. In an attic above a brothel in Restoration London--a half century after Shakespeare has departed the stage--Pickleherring, now an old man, sits down to write the full story of his former friend, mentor, and master. Fond, faithful Pickleherring has forgotten nothing over the years, and using sources both firsthand and far-fetched he means to set the record straight. Was Shakespeare ever actually "in love"? Did he write his own plays? Who was the Dark Lady of the Sonnets? Brilliantly in tune with today"s Shakespeare renaissance, Robert Nye gives us an outrageous, language-loving, and edifying romp through the life and times of the greatest writer who ever lived. "Outrageous and deliciously obscene. . . . Deserves a place on the same shelf with Shakespeare"s plays. Never from a work of scholarship or criticism have I learned so much about Shakespeare and his art than from this novel, nor do I remember reading a more lovable book."-- Marvin Hunt, San Francisco Examiner "Fantastic, poignant, bizarre . . . Nye skillfully summons up the sights, sounds, and language of Pickleherring"s time and place."-- Los Angeles Times