© Columbia University Press
The Truth About William Shakespeare: Fact, Fiction, and Modern Biographies
Paper, 192 pages,
ISBN: 978-0-7486-4667-8
$32.50
May, 2012
Cloth, 192 pages,
ISBN: 978-0-7486-4666-1
Edinburgh University Press
$95.00
How can biographies of Shakespeare continue to appear when so little is known about him? And when what is known has been in the public domain for so long? Why have the majority of the biographies published in the last decade been written by distinguished Shakespeareans who ought to know better? To solve this puzzle, David Ellis looks at the methods that Shakespeare's biographers have used to hide their lack of knowledge. At the same time, by exploring efforts to write a life of Shakespeare along traditional lines, it asks what kind of animal 'biography' really is and how it should be written.
• An exposé of the Shakespeare biography industry showing that books that are marketed as biographies of Shakespeare are nothing of the kind
• From this book, the reader can learn all that is directly known about Shakespeare
• Asks the reader to think about how we acquire our knowledge of other people and what we ought therefore to expect of biographies