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Shakespeare: The Biography

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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.

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.

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!

Scholars and critics can agree on a number of select dates: Shakespeare was born in late April 1564; he died on April 23, 1616 - perhaps exactly on his fifty-third birthday; Anne Hathaway and Shakespeare married on December 1, 1582. Much of the rest, however, remains mere conjecture. Yet, as witnessed even by Ackroyd's immediate contemporaries - Stephen Greenblatt's "Will in the World" (2004), Marjorie Garber's "Shakespeare After All" (2004), and Harold Bloom's "Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human" (1999) come to mind, for example - the centrality of Shakespearean studies and commentary has retained a place in literary criticism and biography since the "rediscovery" of Shakespeare's work in the late eighteenth century. Opening a book entitled "Shakespeare: The Biography", the reader comes to Ackroyd's work with some fundamental questions: Has Ackroyd uncovered obscure significant documents and evidence overlooked by previous scholars, perhaps the dramatist's personal diary? How will he synthesize over 200 years of scholarship and writing in 592 pages, thus justifying the unapologetic and somewhat hubristic subtitle of "The Biography"?

Quite simply, Ackroyd subverts such expectations with his commitment to a certain style of biographical writing, following a formula that has proven successful in his other wide-canvas studies including "London: The Biography" (2001) and "Albion: The Origins of the English Imagination" (2002) - provide enough of the smells, flavors and brutality of historical context and the subject emerges at pace. And, on this score, Ackroyd displays an enviable talent in rendering Elizabethan England for a contemporary audience, upstaged only by his subtle but probing discussions of the role theatre played in Elizabethan society, how it both influenced and was influenced by princes, players and paymasters alike. Though Ackroyd never loses sight of how his subject would have navigated this complex and uncertain historical milieu, more often than not Shakespeare himself remains largely in the background, a bit-player in a much larger drama. For all of Ackroyd's unqualified discussions of the dramatist's "genius," the subject of his study (the life of the "bio"-graphy) comes through mostly muted.

While the reader will recognize the paucity of attention to both the plays and sonnets on an interpretive level, Ackroyd consciously places the art in conversation with the anecdotal, never allowing the art to somehow eclipse the exceedingly pragmatic and ambitious artist. This has two immediate consequences for the book: 1) Shakespeare is not the Shakespeare of Greenblatt or Bloom, a Shakespeare of the popular imagination inseparable from his posthumous reputation; and 2) Ackroyd's Shakespeare remains a thoroughly historical being, about whom the historical record is almost prohibitively void of fact and detail. Thus Ackroyd has to hedge as a matter of course, as each interesting discussion or vignette is either introduced or followed by disclaimers such as, "It is at least suggestive. And a pretty story does no harm" or "The biographer can thus explore a number of possible Shakespearian identities without traducing the essential nature of the man." While the reader appreciates such qualifications, they do have the effect of highlighting the impossibility of writing a singular work to serve as the authoritative statement on Shakespeare, who will remain as much myth as man when attempting to account for his unmatched influence upon English literature and culture.

No doubt Ackroyd is a deft stylist and he has a strong sense of the biographical form, as both aspects of his writing come forth in "Shakespeare: The Biography." This, along with its accessible and engaging discussions of Early Modern English life, make Ackroyd's work deserving of a place on the shelf of Shakespearean biography and criticism, though it more appropriately supplements, not supplants, a much wider breadth of work attempting to account for the phenomenon of Shakespeare.

Currently, I'm doing research for a paper on the Fools and Buffoons in Shakespeare's Comedies. I turned to this book as a basic biography of Shakespeare's life, for background reading for my paper topic. I was not disappointed. Peter Ackrod brings to life not only the playwright himself, but London and Elizabethan theatre. He uses exquisite detail to render a satisfactory portrait of his subjects.

Although Shakespeare is perhaps the best-known author in the English language, it is surprising how little is known about his life. Many authors have conjectured about his life based upon the material that appears in his plays. Shakespeare was born in the town of Stratford to John and Mary Shakespeare. In the town grammar school, he learned Greek, Latin, and all the other subjects that school children of the 16th century would have studied. At the age of 18 he married Anne Hathaway, who was already pregnant with their first child, Sussannah. Later on, the couple would have two more children, twins: Hamnet, who would die as a child, and Judith.

Not long after the marriage, however, Shakespeare set out to London to find his fortune there. He started off his career in the theatre by holding horses for gentlemen as they went inside. Later, Shakespeare would serve in varying roles such as prompter, actor, and of course playwright. It is during his time as an actor that Shakespeare began to write.

Shakespeare got many of his stories from other writers. It was not plagiarism as we think of it today; it was true then that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. He borrowed not only from classical writers, but comtemporary ones such as Christopher Marlowe as well. In this book the reader gets an excellent sense of the theatrical world as it existed in 16th century England. The writers were all rivals, but they were collaborators who admired the others' work as well.

The book takes us through the writing of many of his different plays. Ackroyd does not give us plot synopses, or analysis; rather, he gives the history of each play itself. As I have mentioned before, not much is known about Shakespeare's life in London; but the author puts the peices together carefully, basing surmises upon actual facts. It is impressive scholarship.

Ackroyd, not a Shakespeare scholar himself, but an enthusiast, documents his sources well. He does mention Will in the World, by Stephen Greenblatt, in his bibliography, but does not cite him in the body of the text. All of Ackroyd's sources are certifiably excellent scholarship, showing that this particular author takes his work very seriously. I reccommend reading this book instead of Will in the World; there is more substance to Shakespeare: A Biography.

For a person of so much fame, we know surprisingly little about the details of the life of Shakespeare. Even this latest biography is filled with 'it is believed,' Shakespeare 'may have,' and other suppositions based on at best educated guess work.

Mr. Ackroyd gets around this by presenting a story of Shakespeare's life but with what is known about the people around him and the times themselves. The stench, the sounds, the political intrigues of the time are better known and provide a background in the world in which Shakespeare lived. I kept finding myself thinking of the movie 'Shakespeare in Love,' not for the story, but for the background.

Left to my wondering is similar to that of other geniuses like say Einstein. How did Shakespeare, apparently of modest background, average education become such a consumate master of his art that his plays are still being read, studied and produced three centuries later. And consider how well they have stood translation into more modern English.

Even if you've never read one line of Shakespeare, you know something about his work. Many of his lines are still quoted, or misquoted. (The line from Merchant of Venice is all that glistens, not glitters.) Authors have used lines as titles of books. Don't forget West Side Story. I don't claim to be an expert on the Bard myself. But there have been various encounters. In high school, I played Friar Laurence in a condensed version of Romeo and Juliet. Those productions can turn a tragedy into a comedy, or vice versa! We did a good job. There was later Julius Caesar and Macbeth. I'd like to make a recommendation regarding high school English courses. Don't just teach the tragedies! Also use the comedies and histories. This man was quite versatile. Shakespeare: The Biography's not the first book about Shakespeare I've read. But it's definitely one of the best. Talk about doing your homework! The author deals with what went into these plays. We not only learn about their source material. But what events in Shakespeare's personal life may have found their way into these plays? The First Folio, published after his death, featured 36 plays. 2 more have since been accepted into the canon. We learn about Shakespeare's early upbringing. Did he really have the necessary education to write these incredible plays? What occupations did he hold before becoming a successful actor and playwright? Don't forget the poems and sonnets. There's also talk about Shakespeare's family life. He was quite a businessman too. What about his religious preference? The author deals with the evidence that Shakespeare's father may have been a closet Roman Catholic. Did the son adhere to these beliefs? I took two courses on Shakespeare in college. Too bad we didn't have this book back then. It would have helped a lot. There are also many illustrations. You get information on English history. Many people have read no more than three of his plays. A few of us have read them all, at least once. This book will give much insight into those plays. Still, don't just read the plays. Rent some videos. Better yet, go see some in person. Maybe another freshman class is offering one.

Writing about the life of William Shakespeare is a bit like trying to catch an echo with your hands. Public records verify the existence of a William Shakespeare who was born and raised in Stratford and then became a resident of London. However, there is no direct proof that this man, the son of a modestly affluent glover, was responsible for the plays and poems that have immortalized his name. In spite of, or perhaps because of, this uncertainty, Shakespearean biography has proved a fertile scholarly enterprise since the publication of Edward Dowden's 1875 book, SHAKESPEARE: A CRITICAL STUDY OF HIS MIND AND ART. Among the thousands of biographies that have ensued, two groundbreaking analytical studies, released in recent years by Stephen Greenblatt and Margery Garber, raise the question of authorship. (Christopher Marlowe, Francis Bacon and the Earl of Oxford de Vere are among those suggested as possible authors for this substantial body of work.) Peter Ackroyd's SHAKESPEARE: A BIOGRAPHY appears, then, at a time when matters of attribution are a source of contention.

Well-known for his spirited biographies of Sir Thomas More, Blake, Dickens and T. S. Eliot, Ackroyd assumes that the Shakespeare of public record is indeed the man who wrote the plays and poems. This approach is neither naïve nor uninformative; his aim throughout is to illustrate how the works themselves illuminate the writer's lived experience as a confident, enterprising man of his day. Thus, the book jacket accurately boasts, "[Ackroyd's] 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."

One of SHAKESPEARE's many virtues is its consideration of the rich and varied contexts of village and city life in sixteenth-century England. We learn, for example, that the flora and fauna of Stratford-upon-Avon (a street along the river) is conversant with the extensive references to weeds and wildflowers in Shakespeare's plays; his lifelong proximity to water made him especially attentive to its tides and occasional floods --- images also prevalent in his work; and his father's trade as a glover probably informed the writer's intimate and complex metaphors about gloves.

This approach is interesting in itself. But Ackroyd further suggests that the playwright's social, cultural and religious views were symptomatic of his time. If the preservation of Shakespeare's childhood home reveals a situation that allowed little privacy, this indicates the lack of privacy afforded to most people of that time; if Shakespeare's father occasionally violated a strict regulation in village law and was fined, his struggle to balance individual expression with social responsibility was a challenge for others, too; and if Shakespeare's ambiguous sexuality is suggested strongly in plays and sonnets, this reveals a world in which labels regarding sexual identity were not as fixed as they are today. In short, the history of one man becomes a history of a nation --- and an age.

Handsomely printed and carefully constructed from a staggering breadth of sources, SHAKESPEARE is an effective synthesis of first-hand observations and astute paraphrase. Whereas Ackroyd is clearly conversant with Shakespeare's work, he is comparatively less intimate with primary source documents. Almost nowhere does he cite original public records but instead relies on the well-documented research of other scholars. This tendency should not impair novices or armchair historians, but will prove undoubtedly troublesome for scholars of this subject and period. Occasionally, too, Ackroyd's language is disturbingly evasive. Consider the following passage:

"The writer of the sonnets seems to have been touched by the fear and horror of venereal disease, and some biographers have even suggested that Shakespeare himself died from a related venereal condition. Nothing in Shakespeare's life or character would exclude the possibility."

As relevant as this point may be, Ackroyd does not indicate how such fear and horror are evident in the sonnets; nor does he provide a footnote for at least a partial list of biographers who suggest the writer died of venereal disease. Finally, the last sentence in the passage is at once tantalizing and aggravating --- it hints more than it reveals.

Notwithstanding these complaints, SHAKESPEARE: A BIOGRAPHY is a worthy addition to the mountain heap of other Shakespeare biographies. Ackroyd's lively, elegant prose is wonderfully readable, and his knowledge of the plays and poems is consistent and illuminating. Anyone eager to get acquainted with the life of Shakespeare and, by extension, with England as it straddled the end of the middle ages and the dawn of the Renaissance, will find in these pages a warm, trustworthy voice.


--- Reviewed by Tony Leuzzi

This is a wonderful recreation of Shakespeare's time and place. As an evocation of England, it is much superior to Ackroyd's overly diffuse _Albion: Origins of the English Imagination_.

Ackroyd's Shakespeare is an actor and poet first and a storyteller second, if at all. Ackroyd cautions us to view theater as the Elizabethans did, as a highly-stylized and rhetoric-festooned spectacle, and not as we do now, as an attempt to create a naturalistic world in miniature. Ackroyd also does a great job of portraying Shakespeare as he must have seemed to his contemporaries. He was all the rage for a while, undeniably talented, a fast worker, but also a frequent borrower from other writers, even using verbatim passages from sources for his history plays. In this he was not unique to his contemporaries, just moreso. The magnitude of his achievement would not become fully apparent for another three-quarters of a century.

Shakespeare here is very much the Unseen Seer, able to take on all guises and never disclose his own true self. Since all we really have are the plays and a few legal documents, the temptation to infer Shakespeare's personality out of his writings is strong. Ackroyd handles this pitfall-dotted terrain masterfully, the reader never feels that the author is climbing on rainbows.

A neat surprise in the oft-parsed biographical material Ackroyd assembles is the record of a lawsuit in which Shakespeare was called as a witness. Ackroyd points out that this is the only surviving transcript of Shakespeare's actual spoken words. Perhaps typically, he is noncomittal in his testimony.

The latter fourth of the book is only slightly less fascinating, as the plays are finished and the biographical trail winds through miscellaneous legal materials and contemporary allusions. But the whole work is great. Ackroyd makes a great tie-in with the end of Shakespeare's life and the lines of his last play:

Let us be thankful
For that which is, and with you leave dispute
That are above our question. Let's go off
And bear us like the time.

Do you think little is known about Shakespeare? I was under that impression until I read Peter Ackroyd's brilliant study. I will go back to reading my Shakespeare with greater perception and enjoyment. As in "Sir Thomas More" the author takes you right into the streets of Shakespeare's London and gives you the sights and smells of Elizabethan
playhouses. A wonderful, delightful, informative book. Highly recommended.