The Facts About Shakespeare

Written by two American Shakespeare scholars, William Allan Neilson and Ashley Horace Thorndike, this 1913 handbook separates what is genuinely documented about the playwright from centuries of legend. The authors survey Elizabethan England and London, Shakespeare’s life and career in the theatre, his reading, the chronology of the plays, and how the texts reached print. A closing chapter weighs which works are authentically his and dismantles the Baconian claim that someone else wrote them. One useful feature is a table of metrical tests, charting how his verse shifted across his career: heavy rhyme in the early plays giving way to freer blank verse in the late ones. Compiled as a companion to the Tudor Shakespeare edition, it offers a compact, evidence-first starting point for readers who want fact over romantic myth.