The Logical Gymnastics of Shakespeare Biography

Editor’s Note: This article is one in a series of responses to Elizabeth Winkler’s article, “Was Shakespeare a Woman?,” in the June issue of the magazine.

It’s a hard life for biographers of Shakespeare, softened only by their royalties. Very little is known about the man himself, and what is known has been in the public domain for a long time.The most recent discovery with any significant relation to his private life (a deposition in a lawsuit contained in ) dates back to 1909. Given that no letters surviveand very few documents of a nonofficial nature do either, it is perhaps not surprising that speculation about the bard runswild. What does at first seem puzzling is why this should so often extend to questioning not so much the verifiable facts of his life (such as his origins in Stratford-upon-Avon and his membership in a leading London theater company) but the authorship of his work. The plays modern readers know as Shakespeare’s were regularly attributed to him not only after his death, but also by a large number of his contemporaries. Since some of these contemporaries—including the cantankerous Ben Jonson—had close connections with the theater, the “anti-Stratfordians,” as those who dispute Shakespeare’s true identity are called, have to imagine some kind of conspiracy of silence for which the motives are not at all clear.