Shakespeare is often treated as if he were unique, but he lived in communities and was surrounded by contemporaries. This collection of new essays shines a spotlight on some of these and also foregrounds considerations of what kinds of material and approaches are pertinent and profitable in writing the lives of those involved in literary production in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. 

Some chapters are unashamedly speculative, but conjecture is offered only when certainty is impossible, is always clearly badged as such, and remains within the realm of the possible or even probable.  Other chapters focus on the institutions, traditions, and some of the commercial factors which conditioned the experience of literary creators rather than on the personal lives of individual figures. Some focus on figures directly connected to Shakespeare such as his wife, his collaborator John Fletcher and his colleague Will Kemp (who was representative of a very different approach to theatre), while others invite readers to put him in dialogue with people living in very different places (his exact contemporary Cervantes, storytellers in Ottoman Türkiye); some are on other contemporary playwrights (Jonson, Marlowe, Gager, Heywood, Lady Rachel Fane); some consider people whose lives may seem very different from his (Prince Henry, the Caroline dramatist Thomas May) but whose careers pose similar challenges of biographical lacunae (in the case of May) or inscrutability (in the case of Prince Henry). All shed new light on ways in which we might present and understand the lives of Shakespeare and his contemporaries and communities.      

Lisa Hopkins is Professor Emerita of English at Sheffield Hallam University, UK.  She is a co-editor of the Journal of Marlowe Studies and of Shakespeare, the journal of the British Shakespeare Association. Her most recent publications are an edition of John Ford’s The Queen (2025), Reading the River in Shakespeare’s Britain (2024) and A Companion to the Cavendishes, with Tom Rutter (2020). She also writes about detective fiction and 'her book Ocular Proof and the Spectacled Detective in British Crime Fiction was published by Palgrave in 2023', could be replaced by 'her book Stolen Goods in British Detective Fiction was published by Palgrave in 2025.