Abstract: Since the twentieth century, the writing and study of Shakespeare's life has been relatively active. How to interpret Shakespeare's achievements has been attracting many scholars and biographers. Peter Ackroyd's Shakespeare: The Biography is persuasive in explaining the reasons for Shakespeare's achievements. In the biography, Ackroyd placed Shakespeare in different natural, urban, historical-cultural, and individual spaces, and gave an imaginative description of Shakespeare's life track, explaining the roots of Shakespeare's achievements. In the different spaces, Ackroyd creatively crafts, exploits, and interprets the complex historical materials he has collected, and makes the fact be mingled with his imagination, thus presenting the readers a colorful world of Shakespeare.

Keywords: Shakespeare, natural space, urban space, historical-cultural space, individual space

Xu Qinchao is Associate Professor at Qingdao University of Science and Technology. He is Ph.D. in Literature, and director of Shandong Society of Foreign Literature. He is mainly engaged in the study of British literature and comparative literature. Email: xuqinchao@163.com.