Abstract: In the theory expounded by Yang Zhengrun in his Modern Poetics of Biography, the paper compares three Chinese-version Shakespeare’s biographies, The Complete Biographies of Great People - Shakespeare (1980) by Liang Shiqiu, Shakespeare: The Biographical Criticism (1991) by Zhao Li and The Swan on the River Avon (1999) by Liu Lixia. The study finds that the three texts, while bringing the great Shakespeare’s mottled figure in front of us, bear their own characteristics in the aspects of the reconstructing mode, ways of interpreting the subject’s works and the generic discourse in the biography.

Key words: Shakespeare’s biography; reconstructing mode; ways of interpretation; biography

Gong Like, a teacher inCollegeofForeign LanguagesatGuizhou University,China, is a PhD candidate inSchoolofHumanitiesatZhejiang University,China.