Ungentle Shakespeare: Scenes From His Life by Katherine Duncan-Jones (Arden, £20)

WARWICKSHIRE, diamond-shaped and heavily forested, was truly the precious stone set in the crown of Elizabethan England.

The Faerie Queen herself knew and loved this corner of her kingdom. Long regarded as a "bookish" county, she visited Kenilworth during her royal progress of 1575.

A contemporary picture shows her standing on a map of her realm, with a dainty, regal heel firmly planted in this land of Arden.

The son of a glover from Stratford-upon-Avon, William Shakespeare also knew and revered his native turf. Little wonder that allusions to Warwickshire punctuate his works, as do the county's dialect, vocabulary and place names.

Katherine Duncan-Jones has collected evidence throughout the Bard's life from his reluctant marriage, the lean years struggling with debt, the jealousy of other writers, closure of theatres due to the plague through to his eventual material success and prosperity.

The poet may have been generous with words but in other areas he was utterly miserly.

For, despite becoming wealthy, Shakespeare was a man who hoarded corn during bad harvests, failed to pay his parish dues, and gave little back to his local community, leaving the poor of Stratford only a token £10 in his will.

But although the author presents a fallible and occasionally disagreeable person, she never questions his boundless capacity to entertain and delight. And he often needed to draw on reserves of strength to cope with adversity.

For in addition to outbreaks of disease affecting his livelihood, he had to contend with the deaths of close friends and the burning down of the Globe Theatre in 1613. Yet much of his most brilliant writing was provoked by such negative circumstances.

To a great degree a Tudor and early Jacobean social climber, his quest for self-gentrification, both through the acquisition of a coat of arms and the amassing of property in and around Stratford, illustrates the lengths to which he would go in pursuit of position and influence.

This is a fascinatingly original work and is recommended to all who are interested in the world's greatest playwright and his times.

John Phillpott