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Shakespeare's Unorthodox Biography
Diana Price
New Evidence of an Authorship Problem (Contributions in Drama and Theatre Studies)
Greenwood Press
October 2000
On Sale: October 30, 2000
376 pages
ISBN: 0313312028
EAN: 9780313312021
Hardcover
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Non-Fiction Biography
As the world's greatest author, Shakespeare has attracted
attention from scholars and laypersons alike. But more and
more people have questioned whether the historical
Shakespeare wrote the plays popularly attributed to him.
While other books on the subject have argued that some
other particular person, such as the Earl of Oxford, wrote
the plays, this is the first book in over 80 years to
comprehensively revisit the authorship question without an
ideological bias, the first to introduce new evidence, and
the first to undertake a systematic comparative analysis
with other literary biographies. It successfully argues
that "William Shakespeare" was the pen name of an
aristocrat, and that William Shakespeare of Stratford was a
shrewd entrepreneur, not a dramatist. Price exposes
numerous logical fallacies, contradictions, and sins of
omission in the traditional accounts of Shakespeare's
whereabouts; his professional activities; his personality
profile; the play chronology; autobiographical echoes in
the plays; the dramatist's education and cultural
sophistication; circumstances of publication of the plays
and poetry; and the testimony of his supposed literary
colleagues, such as Ben Jonson. New or previously ignored
documentation is used to reconstruct Shakespeare's career
as a businessman, investor, theater shareholder, real
estate tycoon, commodity trader, money-lender, and actor,
but not a writer. In fact, Shakespeare is the only alleged
writer from his time for whom no contemporaneous literary
paper trail survives.
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