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Shakespeare the Biography
By Peter Ackroyd
546 pages
Published by Chatto and Windus at £25
Dateline: 3rd October, 2005
Peter Ackroyd's new biography of William Shakespeare has a gaping hole
at its centre. It has become highly unlikely that we will ever be able
to know definitively how Shakespeare lived rather than what he wrote
and therefore any biographer is fighting a losing battle.
Indeed, the point about what he actually wrote is also moot in some
people's eyes with suggestions that Christopher Marlowe or Francis Bacon
were the progenitors of the works more commonly attributed to the man
from Stratford.
Peter Ackroyd has behind him a distinguished career as both novelist
and historian and he uses all of his skills in both fields to write
this weighty tome. In some ways, it might have been a far better book
had he written it as a novel rather than the biographical history of
a time and a life.
Ackroyd has done a tremendous job of researching everything that is
known about William Shakespeare and his milieu. He is able to
recreate Stratford in the 1560s and London thereafter so that one really
gains an understanding of the world in which Shakespeare lived and moved.
One problem with history is that the facts that are most easily obtained
are those with regard to finance, the law and property. While it is
fascinating to learn how much Shakespeare spent on this and that, where
he lived and whom he sued, this can leave something of an imbalance
when there is so little recorded data relating to other aspects of his
life.
This author is not afraid to make assumptions based on any information
that he can get hold of. For example, he makes a cogent argument for
his proposition that Shakespeare was a major actor of his day who played
the field with the ladies during the long absences from his family.
He must also have toured on a constant basis, primarily because the
theatres of London were closed remarkably regularly as the plague took
its hold on the city, wiping out thousands of people, including whole
families at a time.
Similarly, gaps in the lives of both William Shakespeare and his father
John suggest that there is a possibility that they were closet recusant
Catholics at a time when to admit an adherence to that faith could lead
to a period in the Tower of London or execution. This though is unproven.
The other major piece of guesswork is with regard to Shakespeare's
writing and early career. If Ackroyd is correct, then rather than writing
the current 37 recognised works with a share in a handful more, he may
have written literally hundreds. Who these days, has heard of The
Taming of a Shrew, Edmund Ironside, The First Part of
the Contention of the Two Famous Houses of York and Lancaster or
The True Tragedy of Richard Duke of York? There are also early
versions of Hamlet and King Lear or Leir in which
he might have had a hand.
It is for the reader to decide how much credence he places on these
suppositions. The suggestion that towards the end of his career, Shakespeare
was a kind of eminence grise who would help to improve the plays
of younger writers seems to be considerably more likely.
In his time, the playwright saw, and was partially responsible for,
an increase in the popularity of theatre that manifested itself in the
building of major playhouses both outdoors and in at which thousands
would attend performances.
In particular, after the accession of King James, who was more tolerant
than his predecessor, the powers that be looked far less critically
at actors who only a generation before had been regarded as little better
than criminals. Indeed, Shakespeare finished his career with The King's
Men a company supported and sponsored by his Majesty.
By the end of his time as an actor and writer, Shakespeare had become
practically one of the landed gentry. In some ways, that might be the
finest contemporary measure of his achievement. Without a university
education, he had almost unprecedentedly risen to the peak where he
could mix with the richest and most famous of his time.
It could be argued at one extreme that Ackroyd has gone too far with
his creativity, or, from the other end of the scale, that he presents
the closest picture of Shakespeare that we are ever likely to see. In
either case, he will engender further debate about the Bard which is
never a bad thing. Throughout the book, the magnificence of Shakespeare
as a writer shines through. Quite what he was like as a man will regrettably
remain forever uncertain.
Philip Fisher
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