Dr Simon Forman - Softcover

"Brilliant, written with wit and relish, packed with detail" (The Times)

"Judith Cook writes lucidly about Forman and his idiosyncrasies... Her knowledge of the period is extensive and places this strange and fascinating man convincingly in his dramatic times" (Daily Mail)

"An intriguing and lively study" (Independent on Sunday)

"Her research is thorough and intriguing... Her book enters teh Elizabethan world in media res so that th reader is immediately surrounded by it" (The Times)

Simon Forman was one of the most extraordinary personalities of Elizabethan and Jacobean London.
Charismatic, volatile and ambitious, he was doctor to the giants of the theatre and his 'playbook' contains the first eye-witness accounts of Shakespeare's plays. Like most doctors he was also an astrologer, reading the stars for all and sundry.

Constantly on the fringes of great events and court intrigues, his name has been linked with Sir Walter Raleigh's mysterious group, 'the School of Night' and with the notorious Overbury poisoning case, in which the beautiful Countess of Essex was accused of murder.

Also uncovered is Forman's private world, that of a compulsive womaniser who kept a coded diary, never fully deciphered before, a record of promiscuity as colourful as the journals of Pepys and Boswell.