"This playful but gently probing novel portrays Shakespeare as one has never seen him before, through the eyes of Anne, a tamed but not unloving shrew. Writing her memoirs seven years after his death, she reminisces about her now-famous husband, recalling in particular that unforgettable week in April 1594 and what happened to her in a certain strange bed in his lodgings above a fishmonger's shop - an enormous four-poster that the playwright referred to as their "private playhouse." Mrs.