The country background -- Reading and writing -- The family home and trades -- religion -- school and Latin -- the early theatre -- poverty -- butchery and by-products -- John Shakespeare's Catholic testament -- Lancashire -- the law clerk -- Lucy and his deer; marriage and departure -- theatre, work and company -- the battle of the books -- wits and their butts - Marlowe, Greene, Nashe, Lodge, Peele, Lyly. Appendices: allies - Harvey and Spenser -- the Parnassus plays -- Willobie his avisa -- the sonnets; the actor-playwright of the 1590s -- Style - the noted weed -- Ur Hamlet -- Hamlet 1603 -- the taming of a shrew -- the troublesome reign -- contention and true tragedy -- faire em and locrine -- man's wit and the dialogue of dives -- early start and revision -- "Bad Quartos" and "Memorial Reconstruction by Actors" -- "Source Plays", "Derivative Plays" and plagiarism -- dating and "Collaboration"; "Stylometry" -- handwriting -- documents.

In this vivid and meticulous account of the first thirty years of Shakespeare's life, Eric Sams controverts all orthodox editions, biographies and reference books. He reveals how, in conventional Shakespeare scholarship, the reality of the playwright's youth has been concealed within a web of elaborate literary theories which misrepresent his life and work, and reject, ignore, or misdate his early plays. Pioneering a revolution in our understanding of the early years, Sams exposes the gulf between the accepted view and documented fact. Analysing the evidence carefully and thoroughly, he reveals Shakespeare to have been a disadvantaged country boy from an illiterate Catholic background, removed from school at the age of about thirteen to help on the family farm. Far from being a late developer, as conventionally portrayed, he was a husband and father at eighteen, and an actor and writer of popular plays soon afterwards. Sams traces the impact of Shakespeare's upbringing in the language and imagery of his early comedies, histories and tragedies, not only those of the Folio editions but others, including the so-called 'Bad Quartos', widely but wrongly assumed to have been the result of 'memorial reconstruction by actors'. Through detailed textual analysis, he argues compellingly against the established view that Shakespeare wrote nothing until his middle twenties, nor revised his own work.