SOURCE: "The Man and the Myth," in His Exits and His Entrances: The Story of Shakespeare 's Reputation, J. B. Lippincott Company, 1963, pp. 156-88.

In the following essay, Marder reviews the arguments against Shakespeare and—after disputing the cases of Bacon, Marlowe, and Oxford as authors—argues that "there is nothing in the plays that was beyond the powers of an alert Elizabethan intimately connected with the stage, a reader of books, a friend to gentleman and travelers. . . . "

It is one of the ironies attendant on the growth of Shakespeare's reputation that even the most diligent scholarship has been able to uncover very little of the background of the poet's personal or public life. However, the poverty of detail has merely spurred his biographers to increased scholarly, inferential, and imaginative activity.

Although some minor biographical accounts were published in the seventeenth century, the first regular life of Shakespeare...