Shakespeare: The Biography [Hardcover]

Peter Ackroyd's biography of Shakespeare maintains the high standards he sets for himself and displays his ability to make historical analysis accessible to a wide public. The concrete facts known about Shakespeare are few and far between - there is plenty of room to speculate on the events of his life, his character, his outlook, even his authorship of plays and poems. Ackroyd's account is both compelling and convincing.

Much of the evidence for Shakespeare's life is open to interpretation, and this has led other biographers, like Anthony Holden, to rely heavily on textual analysis and deconstruction of his writing to provide clues or to verify conclusions. Ackroyd also looks to textual analysis, providing literary examples and references to the plays and sonnets to evidence the bard's likely lifestyle and experiences.

Ackroyd, however, is quite circumspect in this. He doesn't leap to conclusions, but provides what appears to be a very balanced and well reasoned biography. He parallels textual analysis with historical analysis, looking to the social, religious, and cultural history of Shakespeare's England, and trying to present the playwright as a creature of his times.

Ackroyd handles claims about Shakespeare's Catholicism with considerable skill. This was an era of great religious tension and religious change. It would be highly surprising if everyone had happily resigned their allegiance to the old religion and joyfully embraced the new, English Church. The Shakespeares had plenty of Catholic connections and William's father seems to have been reluctant to renounce the old faith. Whether the playwright lost much sleep over his own religious beliefs is another question.

Ackroyd's Shakespeare is a man of his times, a man who grows up in rural England, who understands the natural world, who understands the crafts and lifestyles of a large village, who understands the fields and the forests, who understands his own Warwickshire dialect, but whose father is affluent enough and influential enough to secure him a decent schooling and fire his enthusiasm for the written word and storytelling.

This is a Shakespeare who absorbs stories from the Classical past and the European tradition, who hears tales of local life, who grows into a keen observer of human life. This is a man who takes popular tales or themes and weaves them into greater fantasies, elevating them yet further by his magical use of language and presentation of the human condition.

Ackroyd's Shakespeare is a man who grows with his age, who moves from village life to city life, becoming a celebrity in London, a man who can converse with the lowest and the highest classes and win their hearts.

Yet it's a fraught world, a world where it is not a good idea to court the enmity of the monarch or the court. It's a world of censorship, of careful regulation of literature and suspicion of the newly emergent theatre. It's a world in which a man on the make must tread carefully.

This is an excellent, very readable, authoritative account. Ackroyd delivers a very believable picture of the Elizabethan world and delivers a very human actor at the centre of his biography. Literary references do not become intrusive - it doesn't degenerate into long passages of literary criticism; rather the analysis is kept dynamic and influential.

An excellent work, to be welcomed by Shakespearean enthusiasts, but also to be enjoyed by the fan of biography and popular history. Highly recommended.

With shelves already creaking under the weight of so many Shakespeare biographies, what need another one? With its definite article, Ackroyd's title seems to imply that this could be the definitive account and, given his previous success in the field of literary biography (Dickens, Chaucer, Blake, Pound, Eliot, the Lambs, More), who can deny that his Shakespeare: The Biography isn't at least worth investigating?

For all its array of footnotes, this is not a work of scholarship (the notes are references to other works, not primary sources). It is, however, a work of insight and empathy of the kind that we might expect from one author writing about another. Given the relative paucity of valuable 'artistic' raw materials (as opposed to legal documents) these qualities are all-important.

Some of the insights provided by Ackroyd seem invaluable - if obvious, in retrospect. It's the first time here, for instance, that I've met the idea that early plays bearing similar titles to Shakespearean works (eg The Troublesome Raigne of King John and The Taming of A Shrew) are not so much source materials for Shakespeare, as early drafts by the selfsame playwright. Ackroyd suggests that by 1589 Shakespeare had written early versions of at least Titus Andronicus, The Taming of the Shrew, King John, Hamlet and, quite possibly, the apocryphal Edmund Ironside and Edward III as well. This is a very early date, of course, and doesn't reflect scholarly consensus. The beauty of the idea lies in the fact that it does a great deal to fill in much of the gaping hole of the 'missing years' problem. Furthermore, it explains why his rivals - like the embittered malcontents Robert Greene and Thomas Nashe - should have spent so much energy attacking the young playwright who, even by 1589, must have achieved some prominence. (Certainly so by 1592, when Shakespeare is attacked overtly by Greene.) The traditional account, that Shakespeare by this date might merely have written a couple of apprentice pieces, like Two Gentlemen of Verona and Titus Andronicus, begins to sound quite unconvincing all of a sudden.

Ackroyd is persuasive in his presentation of a dramatist being shaped by the (theatrical) company working around him. He suggests that the sudden departure or arrival of an important actor significantly changed the character of his plays. A notable example of this process being the replacement of the ad-libbing, dancing clown, Will Kempe, with the 'intellectual fool', Robert Armin, whose arrival heralded roles, from Touchstone on, of 'fools' who regularly break out into song and who are now more 'philosophical'.

A major strength of this biography is that it is part 'life' and part lit crit. Ackroyd the biographer observes, for instance, that in writing Hamlet, Shakespeare draws upon a reservoir of personal experience, including the recent death of his son Hamnet (in 1596) and the even more recent death of his father (1601). Ackroyd the critic then goes on to suggest that the resulting play represents a movement towards greater introspection, of 'interiority' and a refinement of his use of soliloquy, which is now 'the index of an evolving consciousness in which 'this is what I am' gives way to 'this is what I am becoming' '. A yet further layer is provided by Ackroyd the visionary, who divines that the Hamlet of 1601 is a re-working of an earlier play, and that this earlier play was published as the 'bad quarto' of 1594. The Hamlet discussion illustrates the idea of Shakespeare as an evolving artist - one who was capable of writing hurried and imperfect work which was later moulded into the form in which we now know it, via the Folio of 1623. In Ackroyd's words, 'His was always a work in progress.'

But what kind of picture of Shakespeare the man does this biography paint? Ackroyd presents Shakespeare as a detached individual (although loyal to colleagues and friends). One who, both personally and artistically, mistrusted dogma. In religion, his father and his daughter Suzanna were recusants. Although the whole family seems to have had strong Catholicism sympathies, the fact that Suzanna, his favourite daughter, married the Puritan Dr Hall, suggests that tolerance prevailed. Of Shakespeare's learning, Ackroyd tells us that he read solely for his work. He was emphatically not interested in books or in learning for their own sakes. On aesthetics: 'Shakespeare did not have an aesthetic view of the drama at all, but a practical and empirical one.' And philosophy? According to Ackroyd, Shakespeare's whole cast of mind was entirely concrete, and more interested in character and event than in anything abstract. He is portrayed, therefore, as a man motivated by the thing that mattered most to him - success.

This is a very full account of Shakespeare's life that, above all, does much to suggest how some of the 'holes' in his subject's early career can be accounted for. While not being the definitive Shakespearean biography to end all such biographies, perhaps, it is always thought-provoking. Such as when Ackroyd advances the ideas that Shakespeare may have written a lot more than is acknowledged in the 'canon', and (as paradoxical a notion as anything in Romeo and Juliet) the thought that 'In the early years he may not even have been particularly Shakespearian'. Paradoxically again, while not relying on original research, Ackroyd manages to present a highly original take on the dramatist's life.

My experience with Peter Ackroyd has been rather mixed. I enjoyed several of his novels: "Chatterton", "First Light", "Dan Leno And The Limehouse Golem" with its clever twist, the weird and wonderful "Hawksmoor" especially... but I found I only enjoyed dipping into "London: The Biography", and I totally failed to engage with "Albion: The Origins Of The English Imagination".

While writing a "biography" of London was a sufficiently original approach to justify the use of the definite article, it was perhaps just a teeny-weeny bit presumptuous, in such a heavily populated area of scholarship, to entitle this work "Shakespeare/The Biography". After all, Ackroyd's biographies of Dickens and Blake are just called "Dickens" and "Blake". And, at the beginning of his hefty bibliography, the author himself confesses to his lack of particular expertise in matters Shakespearean:

"I came to this study as a Shakespearian [sic] enthusiast rather than expert, and my debt to previous scholarship is as obvious as it is profound."

It would be interesting to know what the specialists have made of this. I certainly found it as readable as most biographies (not my own specialist area, or my preferred one, by a long way...), but it ironically confirmed for me what I have always thought, in other words that Shakespeare's works are such that any information about his life simply does not stand comparison. And I concluded, once again, that Shakespeare is so much in a quasi-mythical class of his own that any attempt at writing about the man is perilous at best, and perhaps even irrelevant...

Having said all that, I found a lot to ponder here, and had no difficulty at all in keeping reading. But time and time again I found myself saying "Yes, must read that bit in "Hamlet"/"Twelfth Night"/whatever... again." (And it also made me want to read the plays I confess to never having read: "Pericles"/"Coriolanus"/"All's Well That Ends Well"/whatever... )

Ackroyd clearly knows the complete oeuvre extremely well indeed. His observations about the plays are often extremely interesting, if occasionally rather idiosyncratic, not to say debatable... On the other hand, he is not always convincing in what he imagines about the period:

"When Shakespeare includes the famous stage-direction in "The Winter's Tale", 'Exit, pursued by a bear', the audience would have been able to picture the scene quite precisely."

Except, of course, that the audience wouldn't have been reading the stage-direction, given that they'd have been watching the play, and consequently wouldn't have needed to actually picture anything...

There are bits of information that are given twice in different parts of the book, such as the one about Shakespeare rewriting the character of Emilia in "Othello" to make her more sympathetic to the audience.

There are disappointments (in my view) too, such as Ackroyd having much more to say about the history plays than about the tragedies.

To his credit, Ackroyd gives an extremely vivid picture of London life in Elizabethan England. But then he'd already "done" London in another book. In fact several others...

So... good, if occasionally controversial, on the plays. Very good on London. And on Shakespeare the man... well, so-so. And does anybody really care?