What a treat!

Cornwell is a brilliant author. I am quite the fan. Anyone who enjoys the character of Utred from the Last Kingdom series will be able to love Richard, the protagonist of this tale. Richard is the brother of the most well known playwright of Christendom. This book follows the brotherly relationship of Richard and William, with Richard facing a familiar conflict; both looking up to his brother, wanting his approval whilst also wanting to find a place in the world as his own man.

This book is one of drama, both laminated by events in Richard's life and the characters that the theatre company portray. The sense of the story is quite believable, but over all, it is incredibly enjoyable.

Read this book. You will not regret it.

A marvellous thriller,set in Elizabethan England,where the new fashion is going to see plays and other distractions in newly built theatres alongside the river Thames. Playwrights are much in demand and skilful men of letters can earn small fortunes by writing such plays and becoming attached to titled personages and protected by their patronage. Best known are William Shakespeare and Kit Marlowe,and any new play by these people is always at threat of being stolen. This is the premise of this book, a play has been stolen that was due to be shown at a grand society wedding. Lord Hunsden's granddaughter is being married and the family has close Royal links, his mother was Mary Boleyn and his father was rumoured to be King Henry v11. What follows are convoluted attempts to steal back the play by Richard Shakespeare on behalf of his brother William,leading to attempts at blackmail,sword fights,death threats,alongside rehearsals for the new plays A Midsummer Nights Dream and Romeo and Juliet ,and the ever constant worry of the Percies, Pursuivants, who monitor all activities in the theatres for links to Catholicism and sedition against the Queen.
I loved this book!! I found it to be full of historical fact,but not dry and fusty, but full of atmosphere and humour,fast paced and an absolute joy to read. Life in London is sharply contrasted with provincial Stratford upon Avon and it portrays Shakespeare as an obsessed man, only concerned with his writings and his troupe of players, his wife and domestic details are extremely sparse. I do hope this will be the first of a new series of novels, I loved the Sharpe books and am enjoying The Last Kingdom as well. I have posted a copy of this review on Goodreads today. Thank you for letting me have this book, I am a massive fan of this author.

I enjoyed this. Haven't tried this author before and it's not my usual type but was a welcome change on the usual books I go for!

My Review is 4.5 star.
Set in Elizabethan England, at a time when static playhouses are still in their infancy, as the days of players touring the country will gradually decline.  The story focuses on one playhouse and it's players known as the Lord Chamberlain's Men.  It is here where the reader in introduced to Richard, a small time actor who has followed his estranged brother to London.  His brother is the script writer William Shakespeare and scripts are becoming a valuable commodity.  Because the audiences are now going to the playhouse then there is a need for more plays.  It is at this time that William is creating A Midsummer Nights' Dream and also Romeo and Juliet.

Richard is where the focus of this story lies, we are told why and how he decided to follow his older brother to London as well as his experiences of acting, living and social conditions  This is at a time when the playhouses are being targeted by the Pursuivants, who have the belief that what they the players do is all a lie, cheat and are generally considered to be rogues and criminals, luckily for us Queen Elizabeth and other notable aristocracy of the time were big supporters and so we have access to theatres today. 

This is a really good read with a lot of historical research.  Cornwell is well-known for his historical fiction books, they tend to be more battle based.  This is a shift away from that style, this is has a real different feel to his previous works.  It is lighter and entertaining, but still shows the huge amount of research as his other books.  There are many characters to get to know, but once that is done the story becomes very addictive and a page turner.

Cromwell has included a very interesting "Historical Notes" addition at the end of the book, here he discusses the origins of the playhouse as well as the historical figure he has used in the story. 

If like me you like historical fiction genres, then this is a book I would recommend.  It has a great cast of characters, that will lead the reader through jealous rivalries, romance, betrayal as well as having some great historical content.  I would like to thank NetGalley and Harper Collins for my eARC copy of this book.  My views expressed are my own and are unbiased.

A pleasant surprise - not what I was expecting from Bernard Cornwell. Set in Elizabethan times, it centres around Shakespeare's brother Richard. Cromwell evokes the atmosphere of the time brilliantly; one can almost smell the stench and feel the cold. A very enjoyable book.

Shakespear.

Tudor England.

Political intrigue.

Religious bigotry.

Love triangles.

Sword fights, drunken brawls, and backstabbing enemies.

Hypocrites abound.

The Greatman’s plays come to life.

No one does historical fiction better than Bernard Cornwell. In his latest book, Fools and Mortals, he brings us into the bawdy, robust and dangerous world of London during the Elizabethan era. Rivalries abound. The theater has become a cultural icon. Plays are worth their weight in gold, and people were willing to do anything to obtain a Shakespeare play.

Read the entire review at https://journalingonpaper.com/2017/10/09/book-review-fools-and-mortals-by-bernard-cornwell/

This is a book that takes the reader into the real Elizabethan era and London. The emerging playwright Shakespeare dominates the story because he is a familiar name brought to life as we watch him becoming famous. The closeness of London, the nearness of the court, the brutality of survival are all portrayed impressively. Even if historical fiction is not your first choice, this one will persuade you.

Having read several of Bernard Cornwall's previous books (and with several still to read), having initially read the naval books and moving to other themes this seemed a slightly different proposition again.
However once past the start (which often is a little slow) the writing became as good as normal and the story one which is believable and also entertaining. Another era which could perhaps be the start of another mini series to look forward to and wait for with anticipation.
I find it one that I can put down and pick up as I needed to slip it in between other things I was doing but one that made me want to go back to find out what would be happening in the next pages, so it was not too long before I found myself drawn back for my next instalment

I thoroughly enjoyed this book. I sometimes have problems with historical fiction. It's great when the author has done a lot of research into their subject, but not so great when they get the urge to shoe horn it all into the book to prove to the reader that they have. There needs to be a balance between the narrative and the facts that make the book both readable and credible. I am delighted that this book does this incredibly well. I love the premise and I really liked the character of Richard, Shakespeare's younger brother. As the protagonist he carries the narrative beautifully, and I liked the fact that he was a complex and well fleshed out character in his own right, rather than just a foil for Shakespeare himself. The plot was nicely tense and the background of how Midsummer Night's Dream originated was charming and a great counterpoint to the main plot line.

I have never read a book by Bernard Cornwell before, so I now have the pleasure of reading his back catalogue. This book tells the story of Richard Shakespeare, brother of William. The reader is plunged into life in Elizabethan days, complete with the fear of being found to be believing in the 'wrong' religion. The descriptions of the horrors of living in cold, damp lodging make the reader glad of their own home comforts. My favourite parts were when tensions ran high when Richard was accused of stealing. Overall, a very entertaining and enjoyable read.

Loved every single page of this book. The setting in late Elizabethan London was so vivid, I could here and smell it!

Seeing William Shakespeare from the eyes of his younger brother was fascinating. The skulduggery that went on was intriguing and I could sense the pressure on the Bard to produce work.

This is all against the background of the evolving Midsummer's Night's Dream.

I received an ARC in exchange for an honest review.

I am a fan of Bernard Cornwall’s writing but was very disappointed with this. It seems to be aimed at an O Level audience with the intention of bringing Shakespeare’s era alive. The continuous details about the characters and plot of A Midsummer Nights Dream was unnecessary and repeated for no reason. On its own this is an average book - as a Cornwall book its poor.

A wonderful change of direction for this author,a clever yarn of Shakespeare and A Midsummer Nights Dream with a fictional brother this rattles along splendidly. Heroic actors, dark villains all appear in this beautifully described story. Hope there may be more for this cast but it works fine as a standalone piece. Excellent!

When I first read the blurb for this book (quite some time ago), I was disappointed and felt that despite all of Bernard Cornwell's prior success he had decided to sell his soul to Satan. The Tudors and the Elizabethan period, in particular, have, as far as I'm concerned, been done to death. I vowed I wouldn't read the book - I won't read anything that's Tudor/Elizabethan anymore because I can't believe that there's anything to say about the period that hasn't been covered elsewhere.
However, when this came up on NetGalley, I decided to take a chance. I'd read a few other reviews, and looked at the 'star' ratings on Goodreads and was just a bit curious.
My first impressions were not that great - it's a ridiculously easy book to read - even with all the quotations from the plays - but none of the characters are at all 'pleasant' and London, as ever, has been depicted as gross and disgusting (even if it's historically accurate, I'm sure that there's no need for such detail). It probably doesn't help that the book is set during the winter and so everyone is cold and freezing most of the time.
Yet, I was intrigued enough to keep on reading - quite avidly. And so I did. Slowly some of the characters developed a few more personable traits - Will Shakespeare is a grumpy man to his brother, but sometimes pleasant to others - his brother is needy and a little desperate. All of the other 'players' are sketched with firm strokes, although we never really get to know them well.
The storyline concerning the work of the players, the way the theatres of London worked, and the precariousness of their position, is told very well. But the 'main' story (perhaps - maybe it's not actually the main part after all - in true Shakespeare play within a play style) is a little weak and ends quite abruptly.
The story is at its best when describing the Shakespearian play being 'played' and it's here that most will find the story a real joy to read and will appreciate the vision of Shakespeare that Cromwell has.
It would perhaps have been better to release this book under a pseudonym. Fans of Uhtred will be disappointed - and those who love stories of Elizabethan England might be put off by the 'warlike' nature of many of Cromwell's previous books. It means that the people who would enjoy this book might miss it all together, whereas though who shouldn't read it, just might and will be disappointed by it.
It's a shame really. The book will more than likely be a huge commercial success - but in terms of ratings and reviews, it might well falter for these reasons.
Overall, I enjoyed the novel. Thank you for allowing me to read it before everyone else!
(Links will be added when the book goes live - as requested).

A feel-good romp of a novel that bears more than a passing resemblance to Shakespeare in Love, albeit without the romance and emotional edge. Cornwell's research is sometimes worn a bit heavily ('Titania! A lovely name,' Father Laurence said, 'your brother took it from Ovid, didn't he?' 'Did he?' 'From the Metamorphoses, of course') but overall he gives a good account of what it must have been like to be a player in the mid 1590s.

I enjoyed that the focus isn't so much on William but on his younger brother Richard and while the main thrust is about a performance of A Midsummer Night's Dream for Lord Hunsdon's daughter's marriage, the real story is one of Richard's coming of age and the growth of understanding between the brothers.

It is, of course, absurd that a 21-year-old man whose voice has broken and who needs to be shaved should be playing women's roles - I'm sure Cornwell knows perfectly well that boys stopped taking on female roles once they reached adolescence and started growing a beard and having their voices deepen, but this anomaly is necessary for the theme of masculine coming of age and brotherly coming together. A fun, light read.

I was interested in reviewing this book, set in the world of Elizabethan theatre, because I'm a big Bernard Cornwell fan and reading Carol McGrath's The Woman in the Shadows has given me a taste for fiction set in the 16th century. Perhaps this meant that I came to it with too many preconceptions. In the end, though it is a pleasant enough read, I was disappointed.
Fools and Mortals is the story of Richard Shakespeare, William's younger brother. There was a real Richard Shakespeare, but given how little is known of William's early life it seems that Richard’s is likely to be even more conjectural. Although Cornwell provides a long and fascinating historical note, he doesn't say anything about the real Richard. The fictional Richard runs away from Stratford, where he has beaten and robbed the man he was apprenticed to, and throws himself on the mercy of William in London. William, in this account, is not a particularly nice person and seems to harbour a peculiar antipathy to his younger sibling. Perhaps there was some clue I missed, but I have no idea of why. Neither character seems that well-developed because this is, in the end, not a book about people but a book about theatre.
Bernard Cornwell is an enthusiastic member of an amateur theatre group and his love for theatre in general and Shakespeare's works in particular shines through this book. There is an awful lot of detail of what it would have been like performing in the Theatre (where Shakespeare's troupe performed before moving to the Globe), the Curtain, the Swan, or any of the other playhouses that were growing up on the outskirts of London. The political background is also well described.
There is a plot, centring on a stolen script, but that is really a vehicle to carry a story which is far more interested in the opening night of A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
The account of how Dream was written, and what the first performance (at the Lord Chancellor's mansion, rather than in a theatre) would have been like, is fascinating stuff, but it highlights the weakness, as well as the strength, of the book. In order for us to follow what the actors are trying to achieve and what is going on on stage, Cornwell provides a potted summary of the plot. As Cornwell himself admits (and as all the players in the tale know) the story of Dream makes no sense at all. When condensed to a plot summary it is even more ludicrous. So why bother with the plot at all? Clearly Cornwell is concerned that he needs to carry with him readers who have never met Titania or Oberon and never seen Bottom with his ass’s head. But if you are so totally ignorant of the play, why would you be interested in reading a book which is, essentially, about Shakespeare's life? And if you read it anyway, can you honestly have any idea of what is going on based on this sort of super condensed Cliffs notes? It just doesn't make sense.
Once you start asking yourself who the book is supposed to appeal to, a lot of other issues arise. For example, Cornwell clearly explains that Elizabethan audiences were rowdy and boisterous and the plays were seen in a completely different atmosphere to that in which they are watched nowadays. But is there anybody interested enough to read this book who didn't already know that?
Cornwell's focus is very tightly maintained on the theatre. There is a lot about costume, the layout of the buildings, and the mechanics of a production. But this hardly extends beyond the stage. For example, we are frequently told that there is an orchestra and what instruments are in it, because this might well interest an actor and obviously interests Cornwell. But we aren't told anything about how the instruments are played. By contrast, when a character uses an old wheel lock pistol Cornwell, the writer of military history, gives an enormous amount of detail about how exactly it fires. The arbitrary concentration on those aspects of Elizabethan life that appeal and the disregard of everything else left me feeling that the story lacked the texture that I have come to expect from the Cornwell I met describing Sharpe’s life in the Napoleonic wars.
Perhaps I would be less critical if I hadn't just come from Carol McGrath's tale, set slightly earlier in the 16th century. What so impressed me about that book, which also uses quite a thin storyline to carry a lot of period detail, was just how much I found myself inhabiting the period. In McGrath's book I am with Elizabeth Cromwell as she lives her day-to-day life, while in Cornwell's I am detached, watching Richard Shakespeare moving across an imaginatively realised, but never fully three-dimensional, Elizabethan background.
This is not to say that this is a bad book – just a rather disappointing one. Anyone looking for an easy introduction to the world of Shakespeare's theatres will probably enjoy it and anybody who knows that world already will find fascinating insights. For example, I knew that Shakespeare's troupe was called ‘The Lord Chamberlain's Men’, but I never understood that this was because they were the Lord Chamberlain's men. Perhaps I'm almost alone in my ignorance, but the role of the aristocracy in offering patronage and political protection to theatre groups was something I never understood before.
If you're not looking for a primer on Elizabethan theatre, this is a story with some evil villains, a cunning plan, occasional violence, a love interest and a happy ending. What's not to like? One of the messages of the book is that not everything that Shakespeare wrote was great art and that sometimes writers pad out their oeuvre with lesser works. We shouldn't hold it against Bernard Cornwell that he has written better stuff elsewhere.

I adore Bernard Cornwell and this book lived up to expectations. It's not all-action like the Sharpe series or Uhtred of Babbenburg, but does have a couple of exciting fights that are entirely in context. As usual it's beautifully written so you don't want to put the book down and naturally it is impeccably researched.
This story was of particular interest to me as I have taken to a little bit of acting in my retirement and last year appeared in a production of A Midsummer Night's Dream, so it was fascinating to see the supposed development of the play and learn about how things were staged, the history of the playhouses and so on at the time.
I really hope this is the start of the series and that I'll learn more about Will's plays and Richard's acting and life with Silvia.

Bernard Cornwell is, without a doubt, one of the finest historical novelists writing in the genre imho and this is no exception.
It's a slight departure from his usual style as there's no warfare or great battles as in the Sharpe or the Warlord novels, instead it takes the reader firmly into Elizabethan England at a time when William Shakespeare was in the city establishing The Globe theatre and getting into conflict with the Lord Chancellor's Men a vival theatre company, and fighting with the rising Puritanical influence on the entertainments of the city.

The hero is William's brother Richard, again a real historical figure although not one we know as much about as his famous sibling, and he's a fully rounded character, neither sympathetic nor villainous. William isn't portrayed in a particularly flattering light so lovers of the Bard take heed!

The plot focuses on the rehearsals and first night performance of A Midsummer Night's Dream, in the book it's written to celebrate the marriage of the Lord Chancellor's daughter (again with the historical placement of the narrative which I love from Cornwell) so there's all the usual rivalries, backstabbing, petty feuding and problems with the production.

There are familiar faces from history too, the great actor Will Kemp makes an appearance, there's visits from the nobility and, arcing over the whole thing, is the pressure to perform the play and get one over the new rival theatre which has been established at The Swan.
The intrigue keeps the reader interested, there's a side order of romance to bring a bit of light-hearted relief, and the fractious relationship between William and Richard elevates the plot with petty jealousies as only sibling rivalry can.

For lovers of Cornwell it's a no brainer to add this to your bookshelves, but for lovers of both Elizabethan history and of the great playwright it's a romp through a fascinating period in time when England really did rule the waves both economically and intellectually.

Just as brilliant as I trusted it would be.

Bernard Cornwell has already provided me with hours and hours of downtime enjoyment; from my early days travelling in the footsteps of Wellington with Sharpe to adventuring with Uhtred I have thoroughly enjoyed every one of Cornwell's stories. And this is no exception.

A slightly slow start as we're introduced to our main character, William Shakespeare's brother Richard (and at first he's not the most likeable of leads) soon settles into the usual high class storytelling. The tale itself evolves slowly, and it's not exactly rollicking at any point, but this is all to the good as we're given insight into the plays and the players at this astonishing time of creativity and invention. The social divides are made clear and the rise of the Puritan looms large - as usual the research that takes place before Cornwell puts pen to paper is absolutely clear, but this research informs, it does not direct or detract from the story Cornwell wants to share.

Running away from Stratford-Upon-Avon seemed like a sensible thing to do at the time. Richard Shakespeare was sure that his eldest brother, William, would be glad to see him. Alas, that was not the case. But he was here now. There was nothing William could do about that. Following in his brother's footsteps, Richard becomes a player as well as the occasional thief.

As the years roll on, Richard Shakespeare becomes more and more discouraged. He is way past the age of playing the girl parts in his brother’s plays, but William insists that he play them. When William finally casts Richard in his first male role, Richard is overjoyed. But this was William they were talking about, Richard should have known there would be a catch. Now Richard has a decision to make, should he stay with the Lord Chamberlain's men, or should he leave them to join Langley and his new impressive theatre, The Swan?

Rich with historical detail and with characters that leap off the page, Fools and Mortals by Bernard Cornwell is a must for all fans of Shakespeare and the Elizabethan era.

The story is told from Richard Shakespeare perspective, and therefore it does not portray William in such a great light. Fans of William Shakespeare be warned! The story itself is very fast in the telling, and it was so gripping that I read this book in a day and I have to say that I enjoyed every minute of it.

Fools and Mortals reminded me greatly of the 1998 period costume drama Shakespeare in Love. There was the same feel to it, except the play in the spotlight this time is A Midsummer Nights Dream.

Mr. Cornwell depicts in great detail what it may well have been like to be a player in Elizabethan England. It was very believable and very real in the telling. Kudos Mr. Cornwell!

The story itself is full of intrigue and plots between the rival playhouses. There is, of course, the ever-present threat of the zealous Protestants who wanted to see the playhouses close for good. There is also a sweet romance.

The Last Kingdom it is not, but for fans of Shakespeare, and the Elizabethan era it is a must read.

I Highly Recommend.

*I received a copy of this book from the publishers, via Netgalley, for review consideration.”