When you purchase an independently reviewed book through our site, we earn an affiliate commission. By James Shapiro THE PRIVATE LIFE OF WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE By Lena Cowen Orlin Much of the evidence ...

TimesMachine is an exclusive benefit for home delivery and digital subscribers. About the Archive This is a digitized version of an article from The Times’s print archive, before the start of online ...

How do you tell the story of the world’s greatest literary career when the literary part is a gaping hole, “a jigsaw puzzle for which most of the pieces are missing,” as one scholar put it? You get ...

Who was William Shakespeare, really? What was he like as a person? George Bernard Shaw once quipped that “everything we know about Shakespeare can be got into a half-hour sketch,” but if you limit ...

At their best, Shakespearean biographers are like great jazz musicians, able to take a few notes of an old standard and spin them into dizzying riffs of conjecture. At their worst they reshuffle old ...

This article begins by reviewing recent arguments that Shakespeare biographers simply do not know enough to write a true life and, thus, tend to make “bricks without straw”. This sense of incompletion ...

On a spring night in 2018, I stood on a Manhattan sidewalk with friends, reading Shakespeare aloud. We were in line to see an adaptation of Macbeth and had decided to pass the time refreshing our ...

A 400-year-old Shakespeare mystery has gotten a major shake-up. In a paper published in the journal Shakespeare on April 24 — the day after the Bard’s 461st birthday, if you happened to have candles ...

Cinema's fascination with The Bard falls into a couple of composite lanes: reverent biopic, speculative, and outright fantasy. The best examples don't try to solve mysteries or answer historical ...

Is Prince William, the current heir to the British throne, a direct descendant of William Shakespeare? Prince William’s mother is the late Diana Spencer, whose family can be traced to Baron William ...