This novel purports to be an account by Anne Hathaway, Shakespeare's wife, who never read his plays or sonnets, never even saw a play, about the only week she spent with him in London - and incidentally about his personality, his family and his children who she raised essentially by herself in Stratford. Nye is an expert on the Bard.

Actually a lovely, fast-reading, if somewhat bawdy, work. Not too explicit, but if you don't care for sex in your novels, this isn't for you.

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Smart, well written and funny as hell. Beginning with his Merlin, Nye has tried to singlehandedly revive the bawdy tradition in literature. His forerunners are Aristophanes and Plautus, Chaucer and Shakespeare, Rabelais and Pope, Swift and Sterne, Byron and Cabell. The humor is crude, lewd, blasphemous, and side-splittingly funny, but Nye has done the reading and his historical settings are right on the mark. This particular book searches for the Dark Lady of the Shakespearean sonnets, and finds her in an unexpected place. If you can enjoy historical speculation and still laugh at the occasional fart joke, Nye is right up tour alley. However, this book is not for the easily offended or humor deprived.

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