William Shakespeare

"Like The Outline of the Life of Shakespeare , the title bespeaks a failure to write the biography that Chambers wanted to write. In other words, these two scholars, who knew a spectacular amount about Shakespeare, realised that they still didn’t know enough to write a traditional cradle-to-grave biography. So these titles are a concession to reality. They could not write it because they did not know enough about the lost years, about Shakespeare’s personal life, and his return years. They were able to document a great deal about his professional life and about his real-estate holdings, baptism and family records. But there wasn’t enough of the kind of information that would fit a post-romantic, traditional biography. So Chambers is a wonderful and spectacular and clear and unsurpassed source of information for anybody interested in documents about Shakespeare, and what was said about Shakespeare in his day and shortly after his death. It is really fantastic and a book I look at once or twice a week, to check facts and just to reassure myself that what I thought was true was in fact true! He was the most scrupulous of scholars and probably the most influential Shakespeare scholar to have ever lived, although he may not be a household name."