The myth behind ‘The Shakespeare Myth’

Abstract

This article seeks to recover the original ‘Shakespeare Myth’, which emerges in three waves. In the first, early critics used a biographical method to reconstruct the man, whose plays form the highest authority for value in a national imperial culture. In the second, theorists used ‘cultural materialism’ to debunk this myth. In the third, critics now are using a bibliographical method to challenge the revisionist model by transposing the conversation from ‘the man of the theater’ to ‘the literary author’. This third wave receives support from contemporary reports (1592–1640). They present The Shakespeare Myth as a myth of authorial fame.