Is the 2025 film ‘Hamnet’ a true story? What history reveals about Hamnet Shakespeare, his tragic death at 11, and how he may have shaped the play ‘Hamlet’.

Hamnet’ is a family drama about William Shakespeare, his wife Agnes, and their children. Learn how the movie blends fact and ...

When you purchase an independently reviewed book through our site, we earn an affiliate commission. By James Shapiro THE PRIVATE LIFE OF WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE By Lena Cowen Orlin Much of the evidence ...

Who was William Shakespeare, really? What was he like as a person? George Bernard Shaw once quipped that “everything we know about Shakespeare can be got into a half-hour sketch,” but if you limit ...

TimesMachine is an exclusive benefit for home delivery and digital subscribers. About the Archive This is a digitized version of an article from The Times’s print archive, before the start of online ...

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 ...

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 ...

This article begins by reviewing recent arguments that Shakespeare biographers simply do not know enough to write a true life and, thus, tend to make “bricks without straw”. This sense of incompletion ...

Remarkably few movies have taken a look at the life of the Bard. With the release of 'Hamnet,' we look back on three past depictions — and how they did when it came to the Oscars.

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 ...