Lucille la verne biography of william shakespeare

In this brief article, I want to trace the acceptance of fictional elements in Shakespeare biography. That said, I am not claiming that Shakespeare was not Shakespeare; merely that life and story perhaps inevitably engage both fact and fiction. Read enough Shakespeare biographies and it becomes clear that reconstructing the playwright’s life is a bit like playing chess: the rules of the game, the number of pieces and squares on the board are set, or so readers are often led to believe. But from the biographer’s perspective, the game is played the way it is because many of the pieces are missing. In the words of Samuel Schoenbaum, once the unverifiable details are set aside, a Shakespeare biographer is left with only the briefest outline of a literary life: “a man born in Stratford who married and begot children, left for a career as actor and playwright in London, and returned to his place of origin, where he drew up his will, died, and was buried” (Schoenbaum, 1993: 277). Germaine Greer, in her own novelistic biography, Shakespeare’s Wife, similarly argues that “all biographies of Shakespeare are houses built of straw” (Greer, 2007: 9); Ellis (2012) likewise argues that Shakespeare’s biographers simply do not know enough to

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