Description:An original account of the development of the 'idea' of Shakespeare, by one of the world's leading ShakespeariansBased on the Oxford Shakespeare Wells Lectures seriesStimulates a rethinking of the role of biography in Shakespeare studiesExplores the different ways in which Shakespeare's works were understood and valued by readers and writers until the nineteenth century, without the biography of Shakespeare we now regard as indispensableOffers a new way of reading the Shakespearean anecdotes as literary criticism rather than proto-biography, with a focus not on what he did, but how he wroteExamines Shakespeare's Sonnets in manuscript and print before their canonization