Shakespeare's Shattered Youth: Laming or Elixir? From a Close Reading of the Sonnets / Lucy Sullivan

A forced marriage at the age of eighteen and three children by the age of twenty do not bode well for a talented young man. This book examines Shakespeare's own assessment of this misfortune as expressed in his sonnets and plays, and its long-lasting frustration of his personal ambitions and passionate pursuit of friendship. Did Shakespeare blame these misadventures on a broken family background? Did he believe his eldest daughter was not actually his own? Shakespeare's plays explore many of the problems of our own fractured society.