Gentleman scholar John Aubrey spent his life collecting anecdotes, gossip, and biographical details about his contemporaries, and these biographical sketches are the result--a colorful evocation of poets and philosophers, including Francis Bacon, George Herbert, Thomas Hobbes, Philip Sidney, and William Shakespeare. "Mr. William Shakespeare was born at Stratford upon Avon in the county of Warwick. His father was a butcher, and I have been told heretofore by some of the neighbors, that when he was a boy he exercised his father’s trade, but when he killed a calf he would do it in a high style, and make a speech." An unorthodox approach to the art of biography, full of lively and witty detail, these sketches are a singular portrait of a tumultuous age.