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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 ...

Any biography of Shakespeare has to be based on supposition. As Rodney Bolt demonstrates (quoting Mark Twain), the facts of the playwright’s life can be set out in about four pages. The most recent ...

The Bard churned out King Lear, Macbeth, and Antony and Cleopatra as London reeled from the foiled Gunpowder Plot of 1605 and an outbreak of the bubonic plague the following year.

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

The historical drama starring Paul Mescal and Jessie Buckley blends facts about the Bard with plenty of fiction.

The film “Hamnet” — an adaptation of Maggie O’Farrell’s historical fiction novel of the same name — presents a grief-driven ...

Jack Lynch’s argument in “Becoming Shakespeare: The Unlikely Afterlife That Turned a Provincial Playwright Into the Bard” (Walker, 320 pages, $24.95) is reminiscent of Walter Pater’s idea that the ...