(A slightly larger shelf could be filled by a related but distinct subgenre, which I’ve written about elsewhere: books on the real-life inspirations behind famous literary characters. In Bigger: A Literary Life (2024), the scholar Trudier Harris devotes a full chapter to “a selection of some of Bigger’s words and my responses to them.” Margaret, Juliet, Alison of Bath—they’re more than words on a page or parts fleetingly inhabited by Elizabethan boys in wigs; they’re a she. As we explain in the book’s introduction, Margaret “does not appear on twenty-first-century stages with much frequency. He is the author of three nonfiction books, most recently Shakespeare’s Margaret: The Dramatic Life of a Warrior Queen (2026), co-written with Charles O’Malley.