The Picture of Nobody: Shakespeare’s anti-authorship

Abstract

"The Picture of Nobody" posits that Shakespeare's birth as an author in print was “aborted” by strategies of absence that avoided institutionalized forms of authorial representation. Wilson argues that these possibly deliberate acts of evasion and self-concealment are linked to early modern problems of social class and to Shakespeare's ambition to become "a subject without an identity".

Keywords

• Richard Wilson
• Authorship
• Shakespeare
• biography
• law
• desconstruction
• literary celebrity