Tag Archives: biography

Shakespeare’s family and the “lost years”

In the last week or so I’ve been hearing about, and reading about, Shakespeare’s parents, who they were, what they were like, and how his family life might have impacted on his career. In her afterword to the new book … Continue reading

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Anthony Burgess’s Shakespeare

It’s been a good many years since I looked at Anthony Burgess’s 1970 biography Shakespeare. While working in the library at the Shakespeare Centre I always favoured Samuel Schoenbaum’s Documentary Life, so safely based on verifiable facts. Burgess was a … Continue reading

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Robert Bell Wheler, “the historian of Stratford”

2014 is being celebrated as the 450th anniversary of Shakespeare’s birth, but in Stratford there is also another significant anniversary this year. It is just 200 years since Robert Bell Wheler published his Guide to Stratford-upon-Avon. Aged 21, Wheler had … Continue reading

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Lives of Shakespeare

For a man about whom we are supposed to know next to nothing, an awful lot of books have been written about Shakespeare’s life. A couple of weeks ago I wrote a piece about Nicholas Fogg’s new biography of Shakespeare, … Continue reading

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Revealing Shakespeare’s hidden history

In the year of the World Shakespeare Festival a new biography of Shakespeare has hit the bookstands. It’s done so with little fanfare, perhaps appropriately since it has the title Hidden Shakespeare. It sometimes seems that every author feels obliged … Continue reading

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Shakespeare’s many lives

It’s said we know next to nothing about Shakespeare’s life, yet new biographies are published every year. Is this because new facts are always being discovered? Sadly not, although every now and then an extra piece is added to the … Continue reading

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