ABSTRACT
This chapter considers the background to biographers, some academic, others professional, as well as publishers whose main concern is good business. The tendency to reveal the subject's character had a moralising element, which remained a strong element of biography until the early part of the twentieth century. After the Roman Empire became Christian, biography became divided between panegyrics in praising emperors and hagiographic in the description of the holy man. William Shakespeare is given an increasingly important entry in these but more from a sense of nationalistic appreciation rather than for any contribution to the biographical material. The first biographical dictionaries in English, compiled by Edward Phillips in 1675 and Gerard Langbaine in 1691, combined literary appreciation with some biographical content, which was often derivative, undocumented, and anecdotal. Coherence is a central feature of biography because of the human need to find coherence in each individual, even though few lives demonstrate coherence.
