The great and lasting result of her labors is how punishingly she demolishes shoddy claims and biased inferences that have distorted our understanding of Shakespeare's life....it reads like a detective story in which a skilled investigator returns to a cold case...detailed and dazzling...[an] impressive and valuable book, a biography that will lead many to revise their classroom lectures.
Lena Cowen Orlin is Professor of English at Georgetown University, former Executive Director of the Folger Institute at the Folger Shakespeare Library, and past Executive Director of the Shakespeare Association of America. She is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, a Trustee of the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, Chair of the Board of Governors of the New Variorum Shakespeare, a general editor of the Oxford Shakespeare Topics series and the Arden Shakespeare
State of Play series, and member of the editorial boards of Shakespeare Studies and Shakespeare Survey. Among her many publications are Locating Privacy in Tudor London and The Bedford Shakespeare.