Life of William Shakespeare is a biography of William Shakespeare by the eminent critic Sidney Lee. This book, first published in 1898, was an immediate popular success and was regarded for much of the twentieth century as the most reliable account of Shakespeare's life then available.
Sir Sidney Lee (1859 – 1926) was an English biographer and critic. He was a lifelong scholar and enthusiast of Shakespeare. His article on Shakespeare in the fifty-first volume of the Dictionary of National Biography formed the basis of his Life of William Shakespeare. This full-length life is often credited as the first modern biography of the poet.