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Shakespeare’s Biography: Subverting the Traditional Discourse

Abstract: The traditional discourse in Shakespeare biography has undergone subversion for the recent two decades. Since the release of the film Shakespeare in Love, the debate on who is the genuine author of Shakespeare’s plays has grown heated. The claim that Edward de Vere is the real playwright is popular and has a large place in both the academic community and the mainstream media. This film stimulates Stephen Greenblatt’s Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare, in which the author selected materials from Shakespeare’s dramas and poems mingled with his own conjectures and imagination to fill the gaps in records and construct the playwright’s life. The success of Greenblatt’s Will has boosted the popularity of Shakespeare Studies and furthered the understanding of Shakespeare’s dramas, though the “non-fiction” feature of biography has been subverted as an austere challenge to the biographical principle of “truth-telling”.


Keywords: Shakespeare in Love, Edward de Vere, Stephen Greenblatt, Will in the World,imagination, non-fiction  


Yang Zhengrun is Visiting Distinguished Professor and Director of Center for Life Writing, Shanghai Jiao Tong University. He is the editor-in-chief of Journal of Modern Life-Writing Studies, and the chief expert of the State-Sponsored Major Project “Compilation and Research of Overseas Life-Writing on Modern Chinese People” (IN:11&ZD138). His publications include Biography: A Historical Survey (1994), Poetics of Modern Biography(2009) and The Rock and the Rainbow: Selected Essays on Life Writing by Yang Zhengrun(2016).E-mail: zryang3004@163.com.