Abstract

It is often assumed that literary biography is a middlebrow pursuit, something of interest but not of the highest critical significance. This essay asks the question of what happens if you do not, cannot, or will not establish a biography of a writer. While this may not matter if there are no biographies of any writers from the period, it is a serious problem if a writer’s life is neglected in comparison to other writers. This was my experience when writing a biography of Edmund Spenser who had been made to seem a colorless figure beside his more lively contemporaries—Sir Philip Sidney, Sir Walter Ralegh, Ben Jonson, Christopher Marlowe, and so on. It matters that we have an understanding of Shakespeare’s life and how it relates to other lives in the period or we can distort our historical understanding of his works. Establishing details of the lives in question is difficult and often relies on reading the works as well as documents in the archives, which is why good biographers have to be good cultural and literary critics as well as historians. We neglect such problematic and difficult enterprises at our peril.

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