Historical Biography PDF EPUB

The Facts About Shakespeare

by Ashley Horace Thorndike, William Allan Neilson

First published: 1913
Pages: 194

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About this book

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.

About the author

Ashley Horace Thorndike

William Allan Neilson (1869–1946) was a Scottish-born American scholar of English literature who taught at Harvard and served as president of Smith College from 1917 to 1939. He edited Shakespeare and Elizabethan drama and was editor in chief of the second edition of Webster's New International Dictionary.

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