Paul Franssen has taught British at the English Department of Utrecht University since 1979, where he obtained his PhD in 1987. He has published numerous articles on English literature, mainly of the early-modern period, and edits Folio, the journal of the Shakespeare Society of the Low Countries. He co-edited The Author as Character: Representing Historical Writers in Western Literature (Fairleigh Dickinson U. P, 1999), Shakespeare and European Politics (University of Delaware Press, 2008), and Shakespeare and War (Palgrave/Macmillan, 2008).

List of Illustrations
Acknowledgements

Introduction
Paul Franssen and Paul Edmondson

Chapter 1. Shakespeare's Afterlives: Raising and Laying the Ghost of Authority
Paul Franssen

Biography

Chapter 2. The Debate about Shakespeare's Character, Morals, and Religion in Nineteenth-Century Germany
Wolfgang Weiss

Chapter 3. 'Talk to Him': Wilde, His Friends, and Shakespeare's Sonnets
Reiko Oya

Chapter 4. Fighting over Shakespeare: Commemorating the 1916 Tercentenary in Wartime
Clara Calvo

Chapter 5. The Shakespeare Courtship in the Millennium
Katherine Scheil

Chapter 6. Biographical Aftershocks: Shakespeare and Marlowe in the Wake of 9/11
Robert Sawyer

Fiction

Chapter 7. Performance and Life Analogies in Shakespeare Novels for Young Readers
Marga Munkelt

Chapter 8. Shakespeare as Character in Two Works by José Carlos Somoza
Ángel-Luis Pujante and Noemí Vera

Chapter 9. The Bard-Baiting Model in Upstart Crow and Something Rotten
Richard O'Brien

Select Bibliography
Index

New Shakespeare biographies are published every year, though very little new documentary evidence has come to light. Inevitably speculative, these biographies straddle the line between fact and fiction. Shakespeare and His Biographical Afterlives explores the relationship between fiction and non-fiction within Shakespeare's biography, across a range of subjects including feminism, class politics, wartime propaganda, children's fiction, and religion, expanding beyond the Anglophone world to include countries such as Germany and Spain, from the seventeenth century to present day.