A secret parchment has resurfaced, rewriting the Bard’s sketchy family history.

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 ...

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 ...

THE biography of Shakespeare, if we merely look at the bulk of the books which assume to record it, is both minute and extensive ; but when we subject the octavo or quarto to examination, we find a ...