A book that I've passed several times, and I finally bit and borrowed it. It's extremely well researched, but as Shakespeare scholars know, so little survives from this time period that constructing coherent histories of individual people depends more than a good researcher would like upon leaps of imagination. Unfortunately, the leaps in this book are boring and don't stray far from legal documents. There are many individuals described in this book, but it lacks a coherent narrative or a revisionist twist, which makes it seem merely a pile of facts without a spirit to animate it. The four stars are for the research, though, which if boring is still vital and contributes to historical knowledge.