2 - Shakespeare’s Life and Times

Summary

The period under review has been made notable by the appearance of Sir Edmund Chambers’s Sources for a Biography of Shakespeare. This short book “records the substance and often preserves the language of a course of lectures given to students working for the Bachelorship of Letters at Oxford during 1929 to 1938”. The aim is to treat Shakespeare as a typical subject for biographical research in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and Chambers briefly surveys the variety of historical records (Tenurial, Ecclesiastical, Municipal, Occupational, Court, National and Personal) and other, less reliable, sources of information. There is, of course, no intention of bringing together here the sum-total of knowledge and conjecture that the exploration of Shakespeare’s life has produced, but rather to indicate how biographers of his contemporaries may apply to their tasks the methods which have been found useful in Shakespearian research. The less professional reader, however, might find the book’s usefulness increased if references to Chambers’s longer works were given: these would indicate what results had been achieved through the use of the sources here surveyed, and would bring out the typical character of the facts and speculations concerning Shakespeare’s life which find a place in the present volume.