The Roaring Boys
Description:... "The King's Men" is what King James had dubbed William Shakespeare and his colorful troupe of players, but the people of London, watching them swagger through the streets, had a different name for them. They called them... The Roaring Boys. Here, in this exciting novel about Shakespeare and his players, is all the gusto, glitter, and earthiness of Elizabethan and Jacobean England. It was a time when Shakespeare's genius was at its height. But he was a troubled man -- proud, gentle, lonely -- a man moved by moods that ranged from serene calm to blackest melancholy. Despite this, he was not one to forsake the world around him: we see him striding through the streets of plague-ridden London, intriguing with the Earl of Southampton, at odds with his strange and beautiful daughter Judith, bedeviled by Ben Jonson, refusing honors from the hand of King James. We see him as a man who found that only by plunging into life could he free himself at times from the phantoms of inner conflict. It is the story, too, of passionate lives and intrigues of the players, of Robin Goffe and his near-fatal love affair, of Jamie Sands, who cared for little by his master and the glory of the stage. And it is the story of Shakespeare's favorite brother, Edmund, whose fragile life was at last snuffed out by the plague in 1607. Watching his brother's name inscribed in the burial register at St. Saviour's Church in Southwark and hearing "forenoon knell of the great bell" Shakespeare knew that a whole period of his life had come to an end. London in a plague year, the performance of "Hamlet" in the Great Hall of Wilton Palace, the boisterous Mermaid Tavern, the sweaty clamor of the Globe Theater - Robert Payne has recreated the age with impeccable authenticity, and, more important, with the eyes and feeling of a contemporary. "The Roaring Boys" is an historical novel of the rarest sort.
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