Shakespeare:  The Biography, by Peter Ackroyd

William Shakespeare is one of the greatest writers in the history of the English language, and certainly the most compelling English playwright ever.  Now, the fundamental problem with William Shakespeare, native of Stratford-upon-Avon, is that the verifiable facts about his life can be written in a relatively short blog entry.  This book is more than 500 pages long before it gets to the notes at the end.  Obviously, when you write a book this long about someone whose life is as sketchy as the subject’s is, one has to add a lot of information that is not really biographical in nature but is more textual analysis or speculative.  And to be sure, this book has a lot in it that is not really about Shakespeare himself, or at least is not something that we know about the playwright.  That doesn’t make this book bad, but it does make for a fascinating read when you separate what the author actually knows about William Shakespeare from the documentary record and what is guessed or assumed to be the case.  There is a lot of speculation here and a lot of supposition, and if you appreciate that, this book has a lot to enjoy, certainly a lot of bulk.  If you want your biographies based on firm historiography, this book is not it.

This book is more than 90 chapters long and is divided into chapters based on Shakespeare’s supposed location as a writer.  So, we begin with seventeen chapters where the author makes all kinds of assumptions about Shakespeare’s background and  childhood from whatever documentary evidence can be gathered about Shakespeare’s family and neighbors because there isn’t much about him.  After that there are two chapters about Shakespeare’s supposed time in the Queen’s men before it fell apart, and then twelve chapters on his time in Lord Strange’s men that is filled with discussion of the group itself but not so much Shakespeare.  There are five chapters about the Earl of Pembroke’s men, and ten eighteen about Lord Chamberlain’s men, most of which is also about the plays that were supposedly written during this time period and the context of what is known about that acting troop.  From this point the author dramatically shifts his tone and starts writing about the places associated with the late career Shakespeare, with four chapters on Stratford’s New Place, fifteen chapters on the Globe, eight chapters on his time in the King’s men, and then ten chapters on Blackfriars theater and some of the drama there.  This is more a biography of Shakespeare’s plays and the worlds of London and Stratford-upon-Avon and the theatrical community of Shakespeare than it is about the man himself, but how much choice does the author have?

Do I fault the author for having written a contextual book that is part social history of late 16th and early 17th century England, part history of the theater of England during that period, and part textual analysis of the Shakespeare plays (and, to a lesser extent, poems)?  Not entirely.  To be sure, the author does a lot of eisegesis here about the plays and poems, reading into them frequently, and it was a bit sad to see the author driven to this extreme by the fact that almost nothing is known about Shakespeare.  Yet this is by no means an isolated phenomenon, as just about every book I have ever read about Shakespeare (and there have been plenty) as a person has either tried to convince me that he was just a middle-class arriviste who profited as a frontman for some aristocrat who really wrote the poems and plays or engaged in all kinds of speculation about his religion or sexuality or whatever else because all they had were his writings to base their judgments on, faced with the difficulty of a very unknown life and an amazing collection of writings.  I certainly pity a biographer of Shakespeare, but it doesn’t make it any more enjoyable to read such speculations.