They provide a humorous and irreverent portrait of Shakespeare as a man of failings and rotten teeth, while their vibrant celebration of his language and the evocation of the sights and sounds of his time contribute to the circulation and visibility of his words in contemporary culture. These two novels participate in the demystification of Shakespeare the man generally found in contemporary fictional recreations of his life that react against the reverential idealisation of the Bard in nineteenth-century fictional biographies. Both novels were published in the nineties, the decade of the Shakespeare film boom that popularised his work in the mass media and produced the most widely popular recreation of his life to date, the Hollywood success Shakespeare in Love (1998). The present article analyses the recreation of the Bard in Robert Nye’s Mrs Shakespeare: The Complete Works (1993) and The Late Mr Shakespeare (1998), two novels that articulate in fiction the renewed fascination with Shakespeare’s life at the turn of the millennium that has roduced several new scholarly biographies. William Shakespeare has been present as a character in works of fiction since the eighteenth century and his life as a Renaissance playwright has been re-imagined in fictional biographies since the nineteenth century.

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