Why read Shakespeare's Dog?

Book cover of Shakespeare's Dog: A Novel

Book description

Will Shakespeare's dog, named Hooker, reports on the young poet and playwright's tumultuous Stratford household and on his and his master's shared and growing desire to be away to London

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Why read it?

1 author picked Shakespeare's Dog as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

Theodore Irvin Silar

Author

Shakespeare’s Dog is the craziest Shakespearean book I’ve ever read. Not only is the young Stratford Shakespeare’s tale told by his dog, Hooker ̶ the dog speaks a kind of faux-Shakespearean: full of Elizabethan-esque vocabulary and syntax, Anglo-Saxon bawdry, new-coined usages of common words (“the wind flummoxed”; “I knelled the truth”). Moreover, Rooke must really know his dogs. Because the dog-viewpoint (a frustrated Shakespeare “bites his toenails”) seems right on the money. The struggle of a prodigy youth and his prodigy dog to escape the tawdry, shallow, raucous banality of provincial small-town life is told with vividness, wit, and…

From Theodore's list on The best fiction books set in the 16th century.