Who was William Shakespeare, really? What was he like as a person? George Bernard Shaw once quipped that “everything we know about Shakespeare can be got into a half-hour sketch,” but if you limit ...

At their best, Shakespearean biographers are like great jazz musicians, able to take a few notes of an old standard and spin them into dizzying riffs of conjecture. At their worst they reshuffle old ...

Gwyneth Paltrow didn’t have to do them quite so swiftly in the film version of “Shakespeare in Love.” But Chiara (pronounced Kee-ara) Motley has to make near-instant costume changes, character ...