James Shapiro's Contested Will concentrates on the lunatic fringe of Shakespeare authorship theories – a fascinating topic, to be sure, if you admire snobbery, philistinism and ignorance. But as it ...

Learn all the basics about the life of Warwickshire's most famous and loved playwright, from his birth right through to his death. Shakespeare literally invented 1,700 words in the English language.

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 ...

Getting your Trinity Audio player ready... Chapter One There Was a Starre Daunst, and Under That Was I Borne William Shakespeare is popularly supposed to have been born on 23 April 1564, or St. George ...

There’s no play attributed to Shakespeare about a Puritan woman who whipped her cat for catching mice on Sunday. The lack doesn’t prevent Bill Bryson’s biography of the poet, “Shakespeare/The ...

Academic was asked to be available at short notice ‘when Johnson found space in his diary’, but turned the project down One of the UK’s most eminent Shakespeare scholars has revealed that they were ...

Were this the product of a lifetime of scholarship one would still be astonished by the reach of its historical knowledge and the depth of its literary understanding. But Ackroyd has not spent his ...

Shakespeare: The Biography, by Peter Ackroyd, is published in hardback by Chatto & Windus, priced £25. Available now. WILLIAM Shakespeare and Posh Spice may not have a great deal in common. But Peter ...