King Henry VIII; Or All Is True: The New Oxford Shakespeare - Paperback

William Shakespeare was born in April 1564 in the town of Stratford-upon-Avon, on England's Avon River. When he was eighteen, he married Anne Hathaway. The couple had three children--an older daughter Susanna and twins, Judith and Hamnet. Hamnet, Shakespeare's only son, died in childhood. The bulk of Shakespeare's working life was spent in the theater world of London, where he established himself professionally by the early 1590s. He enjoyed success not only as a playwright and poet, but also as an actor and shareholder in an acting company. Although some think that sometime between 1610 and 1613 Shakespeare retired from the theater and returned home to Stratford, where he died in 1616, others believe that he may have continued to work in London until close to his death.

Laura Jayne Wright is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at Newcastle University, working on sensory and visionary experience in drama. Her current project, Sounds of Distress, investigates women's screams, moans, and complaints in performance. Her first monograph, Sound Effects: Hearing the Early Modern Stage (2023), examines early modern sound effects and their capacity to unsettle the spatial dynamics of the playhouse.

Will Sharpe is a full-time Teaching Fellow in Shakespeare at the University of Birmingham. He contributed a monograph-length study on 'Authorship and Attribution' to the RSC volume William Shakespeare and Others: Collaborative Plays (2013), and edited All Is True: Or, King Henry VIII for The New Oxford Shakespeare (2016). He is the author of Shakespeare and Collaborative Writing (2023) for Oxford University Press.