Lena Cowen Orlin: The Private Life of William Shakespeare. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021.

“Perhaps we should despair of ever bridging the vertiginous expanse between the sublimity of the subject and the mundane inconsequence of the documentary record.” 1 With these words Samuel Schoenbaum concluded his famous Shakespeare’s Lives ([1970] 1991). Indeed, the resources for a Life of Shakespeare are agonizingly limited. The absence of any kind of personal writings – there are no diaries or letters of any kind – makes the patching together of a biography extremely difficult, if not impossible. Even basic information about Shakespeare’s life, including the exact date of birth, is often lacking. Although Schoenbaum despaired of the possibility of a full literary biography, he did recognize that “each generation must reinterpret the documentary record by its own light.” 2 Lena Cowen Orlin’s Shakespeare’s Private Life is a reinterpretation in this sense.