![]() That Shakespeare wrote the long poems Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece for his patron the Earl of Southampton at a time when the theatres were closed because of the plague is certain. It is not always easy to draw the line between such conjectures and fiction. Conscience compelled him to end one speculatively ‘onomastic’ paragraph, in which he fools around with the names of Shakespeare’s children, with the words: ‘The whole of this paragraph is very unsound.’ Here is an example of candour rarely matched by Shakespeare’s biographers.Īny biography of Shakespeare has to mix conjecture with established fact since there must be a measure of continuity in the narrative that the known facts cannot themselves provide. ![]() Though ‘eschewing invention’, he confessed to an element of ‘conjecture’, adding that the reader should spot his venial departures from fact and excuse them as inevitable in the work of a fiction-writer, his hand subdued to what it had hitherto worked in. ![]() ![]() Arguing – redundantly? disingenuously? – that ‘every Shakespeare-lover’ has the right ‘to paint his own portrait of the man’, Anthony Burgess published his version in 1970. ![]()
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