Excerpt: "Shakespeare without a Life" by Margreta de Grazia

Folger Shakespeare Library: Did Shakespeare give much thought to how his works would survive after his death? Margreta de Grazia argues that, judging from his poetry, he did. “Posterity looms large in the Sonnets from their onset,” she writes in Shakespeare without a Life, a new book published in April by Oxford University Press. De Grazia’s account of the development of the “idea” of Shakespeare is based on the 2018 Oxford Wells Shakespeare Lectures. Read the full excerpt below.