It would be instructive to relate the history of Shakespearian biography to that of biography in general, from its beginnings in Ben Jonson’s Conversations or the prefatory verses of the First Folio, on to the first formal Life prefaced by Rowe to his edition of 1709, and so to the foundations of modern documented study in Malone’s Life and History of the Stage in their latest form in the Variorum of 1821. Certain main trends of development are plainly observable.

The collection of oral evidence or of tradition is superseded by the collection of facts resting upon documents, and the man Shakespeare is recorded in the setting of the London theatre world with which in his life he was mostly concerned. From the history of the stage it was a short step to the study of the Elizabethan world in which Shakespeare lived, in London or in Stratford-upon-Avon, to complete the setting for the picture of his life.