The Bard on the Bard is a haunting, introspective, and darkly humorous work in which William Shakespeare, long dead but still eloquent, returns to critique his own canon. In twenty razor-sharp chapters, he confesses the manipulations, indulgences, and compromises that fueled his so-called genius. From murdering Mercutio out of envy to turning kings into hollow symbols, from silencing the women he wrote so beautifully to hiding his fears behind puns and poetry, Shakespeare dismantles the myth of himself. The result is not a denunciation, but a deeply human reckoning: a playwright unmasking his greatest character-himself.
More than literary criticism, The Bard on the Bard is a ghost's memoir and an artist's confessional. It strips away the marble and myth to reveal a man who wrote not from divine inspiration but from hunger, anxiety, ambition, and craft. It is a portrait of genius as labor, performance as compromise, and legacy as illusion. In these pages, Shakespeare does not apologize-but he does finally tell the truth.