Shakspere, Personal Recollections

A Union Army colonel and versifier sets out to prove that he understands Shakespeare better than the professors, and produces a biography half research and half self-portrait. John A. Joyce also claimed to have written Solitude, the poem Ella Wheeler Wilcox published, and lost that argument publicly. The book is a curiosity of American letters: a confident amateur at full stretch on a subject he cannot reach. Fifty-eight plates, among them Turners and Millais, catch the Victorian taste for Shakespeare, portraiture, and the sea that shaped the world Joyce claimed as his own.