Shakespeare and Biography

OXFORD SHAKESPEARE TOPICSGeneral Editors: Peter Holland and Stanley WellsOxford Shakespeare Topics provide students and teachers with short books on important aspects of Shakespeare criticism and scholarship. Each book is written by an authority in its field, and combines accessible style with original discussion of its subject. Shakespeare and Biography is not a new biography of Shakespeare. Instead, it is a study of what biographers have said about Shakespeare, from the first formal biography in the early 18th century by Nicholas Rowe to Stephen Greenblatt, James Shapiro, Jonathan Bate, Germaine Greer, Katherine Duncan-Jones, Park Honan, Ren Weis, and others who have written recent biographical accounts of England's greatest writer. The emphasis is on what sort of issues these biographers have foundespecially interesting in relation to sex and gender, politics, religion, pessimism, misanthropy, jealousy, aging, family relationships, the end of a career, the end of life. How has Shakespeare's contemplation of these issues changed and grown, and in what ways do those changes reflect new cultural developments inour world as it continues to reinterpret Shakespeare?