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Walking Shadow
- Author Greg Doran
- Publisher Bloomsbury Publishing
- Publish Date 23 April 2026
- Run Time 10 hours and 50 minutes
- Format Audio
- Genre Narrative theme: Death, grief, loss.
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What to expect
'A deeply involving, humane book' ROWAN WILLIAMS
'Intimate, humorous, yet profoundly moving' SIR STANLEY WELLS
'Deeply enjoyable' DAME HARRIET WALTER
A compelling blend of memoir, travelogue and investigation, Walking Shadow sheds new light on the past while Doran himself emerges from the darkness of loss.
After the death from cancer of his husband, Antony Sher, Greg Doran stepped down from his role as artistic director of the Royal Shakespeare Company. In the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s First Folio, and inspired by the surprising history of the company’s own copy, he set out to see how many of these important volumes he could find. Walking Shadow relives the months leading up to Sher’s death, told via the two men’s raw and loving diaries, and maps Doran’s quest to track down folios worldwide.
The journey took him to Japan, where Doran met the emperor, and to New Zealand and South Africa where the legacy of Shakespeare has become entwined with the story of colonialism. In Europe, his trip to Frankfurt takes him to the place where the First Folio was initially offered for sale in 1622. While in England, he visits the places where Shakespeare and his actors once walked. Each copy has its own unique features – often visible only to the eagle-eyed – and remarkable tales.
By his journey’s end, Doran had seen more than 200 First Folios – over 90 per cent of all the surviving copies – including one whose existence was previously unknown. He had also gained a greater understanding of Shakespeare and his times, as well as his impact on the world.
'Intimate, humorous, yet profoundly moving' SIR STANLEY WELLS
'Deeply enjoyable' DAME HARRIET WALTER
A compelling blend of memoir, travelogue and investigation, Walking Shadow sheds new light on the past while Doran himself emerges from the darkness of loss.
After the death from cancer of his husband, Antony Sher, Greg Doran stepped down from his role as artistic director of the Royal Shakespeare Company. In the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s First Folio, and inspired by the surprising history of the company’s own copy, he set out to see how many of these important volumes he could find. Walking Shadow relives the months leading up to Sher’s death, told via the two men’s raw and loving diaries, and maps Doran’s quest to track down folios worldwide.
The journey took him to Japan, where Doran met the emperor, and to New Zealand and South Africa where the legacy of Shakespeare has become entwined with the story of colonialism. In Europe, his trip to Frankfurt takes him to the place where the First Folio was initially offered for sale in 1622. While in England, he visits the places where Shakespeare and his actors once walked. Each copy has its own unique features – often visible only to the eagle-eyed – and remarkable tales.
By his journey’s end, Doran had seen more than 200 First Folios – over 90 per cent of all the surviving copies – including one whose existence was previously unknown. He had also gained a greater understanding of Shakespeare and his times, as well as his impact on the world.
Critics Review
One of the most searingly beautiful Shakespeare, love and detective stories ever written
A deeply involving, humane book: Greg Doran slowly unwraps the still open wound of bereavement while chronicling with liveliness and wit a long and varied pilgrimage into the heart of the inspiration that fuelled decades of brilliant work. The conversation between Doran and his life-partner, Antony Sher, especially in Sher's last illness, forms a strong, sombre groundbass to the fascinating narrative of Doran's exploration of the varied fortunes of Shakespeare's First Folio: two interwoven loves
Walking Shadow is a book of two parts: the first almost unbearably moving, the second uplifting, as we’re taken on a Shakespearean odyssey to the four corners of the globe. Combined, it explores deep grief, letting go and deciding to live. Magnificent
From the last journey of his husband Antony Sher which he intimately describes, Greg Doran converts his grief into a solo journey, to see as many copies of Shakespeare’s First Folio as possible. He takes us with him across centuries and continents, gathering stories of the eccentrics, scoundrels and scholars into whose hands the Folios fell, speculating about each ink blot, wine stain and possible tear drop that mark the ancient pages. His is the best kind of scholarship, born of true curiosity and openness. A deeply enjoyable and eclectic history lesson with many an anecdotal diversion. Inevitably grief ambushes him at times and then so often it is a quote from Shakespeare that restores him. I can’t think of anyone whose inner resources and particular set of talents better equip them to take on this quest
Both Greg Doran and his life-partner, the late Antony Sher, are memorable storytellers — whether recounting (in Sher’s case) his final months, or (in Doran’s) a subsequent and global Shakespearean quest. Drawing on both their voices and journeys, Walking Shadow, in telling of ‘things dying and things newborn,’ is a haunting, uplifting, and beautiful book
A profoundly moving memoir about grief, mortality and continuity … This book narrates how, after Tony Sher’s death from cancer in 2021, his devastated widower consciously used his continuing passion for Shakespeare as a prompt to find a new life, embarking on a quest to visit all the surviving Folios around the globe. Walking Shadow is at once a meticulous contribution to our understanding of Shakespeare’s place in the world, and a searching meditation on how great drama can enable us to understand and to negotiate even the most cruel personal losses
There was always a third person in Gregory Doran’s marriage to Antony Sher: Shakespeare, who brought them closer and closer together. In Walking Shadow, Sher speaks from beyond the grave, with characteristic and unsparing directness, in his Dying Diaries. After Sher’s death, Doran throws himself into a wonderfully various and enlightening global quest to see as much as possible of Shakespeare’s literary remains, in the year of the 400th anniversary of the First Folio. Only when that quest is complete is he ready to read the Dying Diaries for the first time. Walking Shadow is an utterly personal work with much to teach everyone, and not just about Shakespeare. It is a record of a remarkable marriage and Shakespeare’s part in it. It has the power to rend and repair the heart
Sir Greg Doran’s intimate, humorous, yet profoundly moving account of the final illness and subsequent death of his husband, the actor Sir Antony Sher, followed by Doran’s worldwide journey in search of every surviving copy of the Shakespeare First Folio of 1623, deserves to be recognised as a classic testament of grief and ultimate healing
Greg Doran is probably the only theatre professional in history to have directed all of Shakespeare’s plays — and now he has seen almost all the surviving copies of the great First Folio that gathered and preserved those plays. HIs love of Shakespeare — and of his late partner Sir Antony Sher — shines from every page of this book as brightly as his knowledge of the works and their insights into the human heart
Walking Shadow is as much an epic journey through the wounded heart as it is through Shakespeare’s ever-resonating global legacy; a stupendous, candid and deeply humane monument to the two greatest loves of Sir Gregory Doran’s life. Doran’s quest for the Bard’s First Folios is a story of resilience through tragedy, of the timeless instinct to memorialise the human bonds that sustain us, and of the healing power of hope. A stunning achievement and a vital literary moment in the history of Shakespeare scholarship
Walking Shadow, the story of Greg Doran’s quest in search of all extant Shakespeare Folios in Britain and America, is given an overwhelming emotional charge by being rooted in the heartbreaking journals he and Antony Sher kept during the latter’s agonising death from cancer. Shakespeare was at the very centre of their lives and every page of Walking Shadow is profoundly informed by that mutual passion. Doran has written a book whose reach goes even beyond Shakespeare, but in doing so, illuminates him deeply from within
Grief is one of Shakespeare’s most sublime and visceral themes. Throughout this unforgettable In Memoriam, Greg Doran becomes inspired by his grief to pay tribute to a great actor, his late partner Tony Sher, and also to the inextinguishable fascination of the First Folio four hundred years after publication. A love-letter to Sher in his final days, and Shakespeare through the centuries, Walking Shadow is a must-read for every avid theatre-goer
Beautiful, haunting, and healing. Like Shakespeare’s plays themselves, Doran delivers a complex gift that will continue to inspire long after the last page
Brutally, beautifully moving, funny and honest. A love letter to loves lost and love everlasting. A privilege to read
This is one of the most moving books you'll ever read about Shakespeare. Greg takes you achingly through the final days of his life with Tony Sher, and the sense of grief and desperate loss that comes from love; he then embarks on a global search for as many copies of the First Folio as he could find - all of them subtly different - and he finds ultimately that Shakespeare brings with him the ability to heal
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