Memoir

Jonathan’s most recent book is Mad about Shakespeare: Life Lessons from the Bard (William Collins, 2023, originally published in 2022 with the sub-title from Classroom to Theatre to Emergency Room). It is a very personal “bibliomemoir” about his life with literature in general and Shakespeare in particular.

Described by Sir Ian McKellen as “enlightening, moving”, it explores ways in which the gift of words may give joy or comfort in the face of the death of a loved one, the mess of war, the experience of being schooled, falling in love, growing old, losing your mind. Along the way we meet actors such as Judi Dench and Simon Callow, and writers such as Dr Samuel Johnson, Robert Burton, John Keats, Virginia Woolf, Robert Lowell, Vladimir Nabokov and Sylvia Plath, who turned to Shakespeare in their own dark times.

It touches not only on Jonathan’s experience in the theatre, including the creation of Being Shakespeare, his acclaimed one-man play, but also on the work of The ReLit Foundation, a charity devoted to reading for wellbeing founded by Jonathan and his wife, the author Paula Byrne, for which, together with Dr Andrew Schuman and Professor Sophie Ratcliffe, they edited the anthology Stressed Unstressed: Classic Poems to Ease the Mind (Williams Collins, 2016), and which receives all author royalties from Jonathan’s collection of his own (amateurish) poems, The Shepherd’s Hut.