At their best, Shakespearean biographers are like great jazz musicians, able to take a few notes of an old standard and spin them into dizzying riffs of conjecture. At their worst they reshuffle old ...

Is Prince William, the current heir to the British throne, a direct descendant of William Shakespeare? Prince William’s mother is the late Diana Spencer, whose family can be traced to Baron William ...

How do you tell the story of the world’s greatest literary career when the literary part is a gaping hole, “a jigsaw puzzle for which most of the pieces are missing,” as one scholar put it? You get ...