Shakespeare: The Biography [Hardcover]

Peter Ackroyd (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 25, 2005

In a magnificent feat of re-creating sixteenth-century London and Stratford, bestselling biographer and novelist Peter Ackroyd brings William Shakespeare to life in the manner of a contemporary rather than a biographer. Following his magisterial and ingenious re-creations of the lives of Chaucer, Dickens, T. S. Eliot, William Blake, and Sir Thomas More, Ackroyd delivers his crowning achievement with this definitive and imaginative biographical masterpiece.

Thousands of books have been written about the playwright, but none has borne Ackroyd’s unique and accessible stamp. His method is to position the playwright in the context of his world, exploring everything from Stratford’s humble town to its fields of wildflowers; discerning influences on the plays from unexpected quarters; and entering London with the playwright as modern theatre, as we know it, is just beginning to emerge.

Writing as though we are observing Shakespeare and his circle of friends, patrons, managers, and fellow actors and writers, Ackroyd is able to see Shakespeare's genius from within, so we feel that Ackroyd the writer merges with Shakespeare the writer, the poet, the man; and thus with great sympathy and clarity we experience the way in which Shakespeare worked.

Shakespeare: The Biography is quite unlike other more analytic biographies that have been written. Rather, Peter Ackroyd has used his skill, his extraordinary knowledge, and his historical intuition to craft this major full-scale book on one of the most towering figures of the English language.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

[Signature]Reviewed by Ron RosenbaumAt their best, Shakespearean biographers are like great jazz musicians, able to take a few notes of an old standard and spin them into dizzying riffs of conjecture. At their worst they reshuffle old wives' tales, piling supposition upon conjecture into a rickety house of cards. Peter Ackroyd can riff with the best, and he brings to the task of making the old facts fresh some themes and variations of his own that deserve a hearing. He is particularly good, in fact, on the question of sound: the way the language Shakespeare wrote, his players spoke and his audiences heard differed from the Shakespeare we hear and read today. Demonstrating the courage of his convictions, he does something daring for a book aimed at a general reader: he renders all of his citations from Shakespeare "in the original." Thus a phrase from Timon of Athens is printed: "Our Poesie is as a Goume which ouses" (rather than "gum which oozes"), an effect that can defamiliarize, often in an illuminating way.An accomplished literary biographer, Ackroyd doesn't offer a new explanation of how the glover's son of provincial Stratford became the sophisticated poetic genius of London. Instead he gives us intelligent, often elegant, variations on the old ones. Like many of his fellow biographers he warns us that a particular "tradition" has no corroboration and then plays it out anyway. So with such recent, hotly debated questions as whether Shakespeare spent time in his youth in the household of subversive secret Catholics, Ackroyd spins it out for all it's worth.But the great strength of Ackroyd's book is the depth of his immersion in the culture of Shakespeare's age and the sense he gives of Shakespeare as a product of that extraordinary moment in time. His feeling for the role of the theater in Elizabethan London, "a city where dramatic spectacles became the primary means of understanding reality," seems to come from an impressively wide reading of Shakespeare's dramatic and poetic contemporaries. His judgments about the work itself are sometimes ingenious, occasionally eccentric, as when he tells us, "All the evidence suggests, too, that the speech, 'To be or not to be' is an interpolation," an unnecessary addition to Hamlet, possibly "from another play altogether." While location of "To be or not to be" is different in an early quarto of Hamlet, to say "All the evidence suggests" interpolation is an overstatement. Still, immersion in Ackroyd's biography cumulatively gives one a feeling that one has lived for a brief time in Shakespeare's world. Ackroyd constructs a an intricate mosaic of Elizabethan context, which brings us closer to the shadowy figure, whose most renowned character, Hamlet, tells us: "I have that within which passes show."
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From School Library Journal

Adult/High School–Describing himself as a Shakespeare enthusiast instead of an expert, Ackroyd focuses on the bard as an extraordinarily talented theater professional rather than rhapsodizing about the intricacies of the man's genius. He interweaves Shakespeare's life story with England's dramatic history and the fascinating world of the emerging Elizabethan theater. Apocryphal stories are identified and plausible explanations for what occurred during the missing years are offered. Shakespeare emerges as a thoroughly engaging, almost modern man, brimming with humor, eager for social advancement, and carefully tracking the popular trends in entertainment. Students who want to discover whether Shakespeare really was the author of the famous plays will find compelling evidence that only the man from Stratford could have hidden so many ingenious clues in his work. Sixteen pages of color illustrations include portraits of Shakespeare's famous contemporaries, photographs of the interiors of Elizabethan buildings, and illustrated title pages. Those daunted by the length of this book will find it a good reference source. Students looking for information on the building of the Globe, the meanings of the sonnets, the differences in the various editions and revisions of the plays, and other typical academic questions will find useful, well-organized information. A rich, vivid account.–Kathy Tewell, Fairfax County Public Library, VA
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 592 pages
• Publisher: Nan A. Talese; First American Edition edition (October 25, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0385511396
• ISBN-13: 978-0385511391
• Product Dimensions: 9.6 x 6.7 x 2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (31 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #648,764 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

48 of 50 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Amazing, December 23, 2005

By 

Kat Bakhu (Albuquerque, NM United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Shakespeare: The Biography (Hardcover)

I felt a genuine amazement as I dipped into this wonderful biography of Shakespeare. I started sceptically, wondering how a satisfying biography could be written of a figure that many have doubted even wrote the works for which his name has become known. Ackroyd handles this dillema beautifully by sometimes ignoring and otherwise illustrating that such speculations are poppycock. Little question remains that Shakespeare was a real man who wrote the works for which he is credited.

In this biography, there is a real warm blooded man living and creating in a real time in history. What most amazed and fascinated me by this work is how completely Ackroyd created the minutiae of William's world while building up the structure of William's life.

By minutiae, I do not mean dull plodding lists of details. Not at all. I mean the vital details that provide the fertile ground out of which a person's life grows, takes shape, and becomes what it becomes. You learn effortlessly about the wealth of his parents and relatives and how such wealth was acquired, and what it meant to acquire or not acquire wealth in those days. You learn what London was like when Shakespeare first went there. What role acting groups and theaters had in those days. And how William came to create his own theater. Most importantly, you learn the events that stimulated his writing plays in addition to being an actor in those (and others) plays. This type of information and more is woven together to create a picture of the world that Shakespeare lived in while creating a breathing portrait of the man himself.

There are a number of other books out this year on Shakespeare. Having read Ackroyd's bio, it's hard to imagine any of them replacing it or being more satisfying.

40 of 45 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Read this instead of "Will in the World", November 28, 2005

By 

lola12 "quiet girl" (northern, nj) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Shakespeare: The Biography (Hardcover)

I picked up this book after being seriously disappointed in the bestseller "Will in the World". In that book, there were so many "Shakespeare may haves" or "Surely he would haves" that it distracted from the meat of the subject: Shakespeare's genius. In Ackroyd's biography we are no more sure of the facts of Shakespeare's life(which are cobbled together from the clues left to the world in the history of the time as well as Shakespeare's works themselves no matter where you read about them) but we are invited into the Elizabethan world that Shakespeare inhabited, given the "facts" about his life as they are presented by the various sides of the debate, and then given Ackroyd's insight into what is the most likely scenario. While you are still left feeling the "might haves" and "would haves", you leave the book feeling that you better understand Shakepeare's life and times. Unlike "Will in the World", which you leave unsure if what you just read was a historical romance based on the life of Shakepseare or an examination of that life. For my money, Ackroyd's is the book to read. Itis accessible, and it entertains and informs, leaving you in awe of what Shakespeare accomplished. Further, it engaged me so much on the topics of Elizabathan society and theatre, that I (not a scholar or a student) went out of my way to find other books on the topic. A must read for the Shakespeare lover.

33 of 37 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Shakespeare's life is brilliantly explored by Peter Ackroyd, January 3, 2006

By 

C. M Mills "Michael Mills" (Knoxville Tennessee) - See all my reviews
(TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Shakespeare: The Biography (Hardcover)

William Shakespeare (1564-1616)is the greatest dramatist and English poet in history. All aspects of human life-the muck and
moil, toil and tragedy, gaiety, romantic love, glory, honor,
kingship, prejudice and those thousand natural shocks that make us human are exposed in all their reality by the master from
Stratford on Avon in Warwackshire.
In the countless books on Shakespeare this one by Peter Ackroyd stands out like a Mt. Everest among lesser peaks.
The book is outstanding because:
1. Ackroyd goes to the sources reporting what we can know about Shakespeare based on family, church and court records which survive the long centuries.
2. He briefly explores the genesis of the plays.
3. He shows us how Shakespeare worked as a dramatist with player companies in the rough and tumble London literary scene. He wrote for plays to be produced in a time of plagues, riots, threats against the government, fires and countless difficulties in getting plays published and perfomed.
4. He looks at Shakespeare's rivalries with other eminent men of the theatre such as Ben Jonson and most notably Christopher Marlow. We seek Shakespeare learning stagecraft and honing his
incomparable pen to produce such immortal works as Hamlet, Macbeth, the history plays and such sparkling comedies as Much
Ado about Nothing and Twelfth Night.
6. Ackroyd takes us to the teeming streets of London. We smell,
taste, touch, dress and think like Elizabethians would do in their colorful, violent world of a brutal age.
7. Shakespeare is an enigma. We will never know the real man behind the glory of his written words. Ackroyd, though, brings us as close as we are likely to get to what it was like to be
William Shakespeare making a living as a playwright and actor.
The book is essential reading for anyone wanting to know more
about the bard of Avon. It is written in a popular style grounded in fantastic scholarship.
A fascinating and important book!