Overview

A fascinating account of how Shakespeare's works were understood and valued by readers and writers from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century, before Shakespeare's biography came to dominate readings of his plays and poetry. For almost two centuries after his death, Shakespeare had no biography. The makings of one were not available. No chronology had been devised by which to coordinate the events in his life with the writing of his works. Nor was there an archive of primary materials on which to base a life. And the only work by Shakespeare written in the first person, the Sonnets, had yet to be critically edited and incorporated into the canon. Without a biography, how could Shakespeare have been valued and understood? In Shakespeare without a Life, Margreta de Grazia looks at aspects of Shakespeare's reception between 1600 and 1800 that have been all but lost to the now still prevailing biographical impulse. It recovers the anecdote as a form of literary criticism, retrieves the ancient category of genre as the canon's organizing rubric, demonstrates how the quest for authentic documents invalidated other forms of literary record, and reveals how the desire to forge connections between Shakespeare's life and the Sonnets occluded his self-presentation as the 'deceasèd I' of a posthumous poet.

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9780198812548

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Reviews

[A] significant new contribution ...that push[es] the parameters of how we engage with the most revered writer in the English language...timely and erudite. * Lubaaba Al-Azami, History Today * As de Grazia's study demonstrates so compellingly, when life writing shifted from the anecdotal to the documentary, we lost something of our appreciation of Shakespeare as critics tried to force square pegs into round holes. * David McInnis, Australian Book Review *

"This is a thorough study that questions the authenticity of ""Shakespeare"" biographies...The research is detailed and extensive for a pretty short book by Oxford standards. This is a book designed for ""Shakespeare"" scholars who are already closely familiar with this corpus, and who are interested in digging beyond the common surface readings. * Anna Faktorovich, Pennsylvania Literary Journal *"

Author Information

Margreta de Grazia is Emerita Sheli Z. and Burton X. Rosenberg Professor of the Humanities at the University of Pennsylvania. She is the author of Shakespeare Verbatim (Oxford University Press, 1991), 'Hamlet' without Hamlet (Cambridge University Press, 2007) and Four Shakespearean Period Pieces (University of Chicago Press, 2021).

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