Between Two Worlds: Shakespeare the Ordinary Man and Artist

Abstract

Jude Morgan’s novel, The Secret Life of William Shakespeare, is a work of biofiction that deals with the playwright’s life from shortly before he met Anne Hathaway up to the year 1603, highlighting private aspects such as the relationships with his family and friends – and even his rivals. At the same time, the novel offers an insight into the Elizabethan world in which William Shakespeare lived and rose to fame, actually a pretext to bring to the foreground timeless issues which characterise today’s world as well. The portrayal offered by Morgan is, therefore, one that aims to reconcile the two personas of the Bard – the family man and the poet and playwright. The present paper aims to analyse how those aspects are put forward by the novel, relying on features of postmodernism and the biographical novel, as the author attempts to fill in the gaps in Shakespeare’s life narrative. What is more, emphasis is laid on the relative concept of ‘truth’ and how it is deconstructed in the shaping of this particular version of Shakespeare’s story.

Keywords

• biofiction
• biopic
• shakespeare