The truth about William Shakespeare: fact, fiction and modern biographies

Abstract

This is a polemical attack on how recent Shakespeare biographers have disguised their lack of information. How is it that biographies of Shakespeare can continue to appear when so little is known about him, and what is known has been in the public domain for so long? Why is it that a majority of the biographies published in the last decade have been written by distinguished Shakespeareans who ought to know better? This book attempts to solve this puzzle by examining the methods the biographers have used to hide their lack of knowledge. At the same time, by exploring efforts to write a life of Shakespeare along traditional lines, it asks what kind of beast biography really is and how it can ethically be approached. From this book, the reader can learn all that is directly known about Shakespeare. It exposes the lie of the Shakespeare biography industry where books marketed as biographies are nothing of the kind. It questions how we acquire our knowledge of other people and what an ethical expectation of a biography could be.