Shakespeare: The Biography is a book by Peter Ackroyd.
Peter Ackroyd CBE is an English biographer, novelist and critic with a particular interest in the history and culture of London. For his novels about English history and culture and his biographies of, among others, Charles Dickens, T. S. Eliot and Sir Thomas More he won the Somerset Maugham Award... and two Whitbread Awards. He was awarded a Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 2003. Ackroyd grew up on a council estate and was raised in a "strict" Roman Catholic household. He first knew that he was gay when he was seven. He was educated at St. Benedict's, Ealing and at Clare College, Cambridge, from which he graduated with a double first in English literature. In 1972, he was a Mellon Fellow at Yale University. The result of this fellowship was Notes for a New Culture, written when Ackroyd was only 22 and eventually published in 1976. The title, an echo of T. S. Eliot's Notes Towards the Definition of Culture , was an early indication of Ackroyd's penchant for exploring and reexamining the works of other London-based writers.more
A biography is a detailed description or account of someone's life. It entails more than basic facts , a biography also portrays a subject's... experience of these events. Unlike a profile or curriculum vitae , a biography presents a subject's life story, highlighting various aspects of his or her life, including intimate details of experience, and may include an analysis of a subject's personality. Biographical works are usually non-fiction, but fiction can also be used to portray a person's life. One in-depth form of biographical coverage is called legacy writing. Biographical works in diverse media—from literature to film—form the genre known as a biography. An authorized biography is written with the permission, cooperation, and, at times, participation of a subject or a subject's heirs. An autobiography is about a life of a subject, written by that subject or sometimes with a collaborator. The Early Middle Ages saw a decline in awareness of the classical culture in Europe. During this time, the only repositories of knowledge and records of the early history in Europe were those of the Roman Catholic Church.more