Presumptuous? Yes, I'm guilty as charged. But, as a chronic Shakespeare groupie and an actress and playwright, it was only a matter of time before I turned my focus directly onto Will Shakespeare, the man I love. How much of each of my plays is fictional? A lot. But the fiction is based upon research, as well as a lifetime of responding to the tenor of Will's imagination in his plays. Don't we all feel that we sense this man at work, working harder than was required merely to succeed in his profession. (My daughter, who took a course in Elizabethan Plays Exclusive of Shakespeare, said to me, "Of course, they loved his plays and preserved as much as they could. The other stuff was not very good!")

An over-simplification, of course, but when we experience his plays, either watching them performed or reading them ourselves, we sense that the work, though commercially successful, was to Will about something much more than mere success. They are the creations of an extraordinary mind testing its limits, and testing the limits of both language and imagination--his enormous, flexible, illuminating imagination.