ABSTRACT
For the first three-quarters of the twentieth century, study of William Shakespeare life and times remained comparatively neglected among scholars. Academics attached to University English Departments remained New Critics, concerned mainly with close analysis of texts. Samuel Schoenbaum's monumental review of Shakespeare's Lives published in 1970, fostered interest in the historical William Shakespeare, even though its conclusion was pessimistic about the possibility of writing a life of Shakespeare. Schoenbaum was particularly disparaging of biographies in the twentieth century – by reputable scholars and by popular writers – for being too speculative. Schoenbaum rightly devotes a large section of Shakespeare's Lives to a detailed consideration of Sidney Lee's Life of Shakespeare. He explains that Sir Sidney Lee assembled "much useful information in a unified and readable narrative" and, perhaps most importantly for Schoenbaum, he demonstrated "the feasibility of Shakespearean biography on the large scale."
