This paper investigates a long line of bio-fictional texts that portray Shakespeare as a comical character. The paper is grounded in the observation that the two earliest historical documents that seem to give some personal insight into Shakespeare's life and character are jokes. Robert Greene satirizes Shakespeare as a preposterous ‘vp=start Crow’ with a ‘Tygers hart wrapt in a Players hyde’ (1592); John Manningham's anecdote about Shakespeare's affair with a fan in which Shakespeare impersonates William the Conqueror (1602), meanwhile, makes Shakespeare the protagonist of a mini-comedy that ends in a one-night-stand. Both texts already exhibit the comingling of fact and fiction that would come to characterize all later Shakespeare biofiction, and indeed all Shakespeare biography. Equally remarkably, the two different modes of humour employed by the two anecdotes, the satirical and the romantic, both closely reflect how humour operates in Shakespeare's comedies and foreshadows the use of humour in later biofictional comedic visions of Shakespeare.

Building on this perspective, this paper analyzes Alexandre Duval’s Shakespeare Amoureux (1804), George Bernard Shaw’s The Dark Lady of the Sonnets (1910), Marc Norman and Tom Stoppard’s Shakespeare in Love (1998) and Ben Elton’s Greene-inspired television sitcom Upstart Crow (BBC Two, 2-16-2020). The comedic biofictional engagements with Shakespeares discussed in this paper open up unique routes of engagement with historical facts as well as popular and academic conceptions of Shakespeare.

Reto Winckler is Assistant Professor at the Department of English at City University of Hong Kong. He received his PhD from the Chinese University of Hong Kong. His research focuses on Shakespeare, adaptation studies (particularly in television series, digital media and AI) and contemporary popular culture. His articles have been published in Adaptation, The Journal of Popular Culture, Shakespeare, The Journal of Adaptation in Film and Performance, Texas Studies in Literature and Language, and Cahiers Élisabéthains, among others. He is the co-editor of Television Series as Literature (Palgrave, 2022) and the forthcoming “This America, Man:” The Literary and Cultural Origins of 21st-Century American Television Series (Brill, 2026)," and the editor of the forthcoming special issue of Adaptation, "Adaptation Machines/Machine Adaptation: Adaptation Studies and Generative AI" (2026). He is a member of the editorial boards of Shakespeare and Adaptation.