Kevin Gilvary clearly has a problem with the art of Shakespearean biography. His thorough and properly sourced study presents itself as a critique of all attempts to write a life of William Shakespeare. His approach is thematic and begins with a consideration of what biography is and what it might try to do. But it quickly becomes apparent that Gilvary wants biography to be more like history and is disparaging when he finds it not to be so.

He considers the sources available to a biographer of Shakespeare, dismisses oral tradition as myth, and takes, along with Samuel Johnson and others since, a dim view of Nicholas Rowe's account of Shakespeare's life (59–64). Instead, he claims that Shakespearean biography started in 1843 with Charles Knight's William Shakespeare: A Biography, which Gilvary sees as “highly fictionalised” (92). Two substantial chapters criticize the influential 1970s studies of S. Schoenbaum. The final chapters dismiss any personal or professional connections between Henry Wriothesley, the third Earl of Southampton, or, even more astonishingly, between Shakespeare and Ben Jonson. By the end of the book Gilvary refers to all Shakespearean biography as “biografiction” (205), collapsing any distinction between biography and fiction. But Gilvary's study never really succeeds in defining the distinctions and relationships between the genres of biography and fiction, biography and history, or indeed between fiction and history. What, for instance, should a historical account of a life look like, and how is this different from a biographical one?

Many readers will share Gilvary's disappointment about the absence of personal papers, accounts of Shakespeare's character, a reliable chronology for the works, a full performance list, and precise details about how he worked (6). But these kinds of gaps and problems are to a greater or lesser extent common to all biographical and historical accounts. The project of a Shakespearean biography then becomes how to cope with the gaps in the record, how far to rely on a wider understanding of social and cultural context, and how to relate the life story to the artistic output.

Gilvary's thesis—that there are special problems with Shakespearian biography—intermittently betrays his own biased, sometimes disingenuous, agenda. He occasionally mentions gaps that seem especially important to him: that there was no mention of an inventory “presumed to include manuscripts and books” when Shakespeare's will was probated (37); that “his place of birth is a fiction” (38); and that “he did not remember the King's School in his will” (39). “So what?” would be a valid scholarly response: no inventories survive for Shakespeare; we do not know the actual place of most births, especially at a time when birth certificates did not exist; and a person's place of education is not usually mentioned among bequests. Gilvary's interest in this kind of absent evidence is often shared by those who want to believe that Shakespeare is not the author of the works attributed to him. Absence of evidence, of course, is never the same as evidence of absence.

In his chapter about Ben Jonson and Shakespeare, he supports the view that Jonson's comments to William Drummond are based on a form of literary commonplace sourced in Seneca (197–98), and then deduces that there was no personal or professional relationship between Jonson and Shakespeare. But Gilvary pays no attention to Jonson's words: “I loved the man, and do honour his memory on this side idolatry, as much as any” (197), words to which Jonson himself gives special emphasis, beyond the context of any classical allusions, “to justify my own candour.”

Though presented as careful scholarship (including endnotes to each chapter, a modestly entitled “Select Bibliography” of around four hundred books, and four appendixes), one feels, by the time one arrives at Gilvary's “Conclusions and Inconclusions,” that one has been watching the bad fairy at the christening feast, waving a wand in order to try and make the other guests (all of them distinguished Shakespeare scholars from the eighteenth century onward) disappear.