In Shakespeare’s Life Story, Not All Is True. In Fact, Much Is Invented.

How do you tell the story of the world’s greatest literary career when the literary part is a gaping hole, “a jigsaw puzzle for which most of the pieces are missing,” as one scholar ? You get inventive, to put it charitably. , a new film directed by and starring Kenneth Branagh, is the latest installment in a long line of highly creative Shakespeare portraiture. In his novel (which Harold Bloom, the Yale critic, judged the most astute biography of Shakespeare), Anthony Burgess portrays the bard as a bisexual engaged in affairs with the Earl of Southampton and a black female prostitute, his poetic powers entwined with his immense virility., one of the highest-grossing films of 1998 and the Academy Award winner for Best Picture, envisions him as a besotted heterosexual with writer’s block. Literary scholars, too, join He proceeds to conjure Shakespeare the schoolboy falling in love with language, and Shakespeare watching his first play— that earned the book