Dr Simon Forman: A Most Notorious Physician

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 eyewitness 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.