Peter Ackroyd: Shakespeare - The Biography

It's been a big year for the Bard. Harvard Professor Stephen Greenblatt's Will In The World and James Shapiro's 1599: A Year In the Life of William Shakespeare are the most recent additions to the crowded field Ackroyd enters here.

By virtue of his prolific past alone, he is probably entitled to claim the pre-eminence implied by the "the" in his title. Having already written lives of Chaucer, Blake, Dickens and Eliot, as well as London: The Biography which informs much of this volume, he has displayed an almost indecent productivity: this book appears to be the work of barely two years.

The expert reader will probably find no revelation in its 488 pages which are served up as 91 chapters, headed with quotes from the plays. This process of subdivision is presumably intended to make the book less intimidating but it creates a juddering rhythm and sometimes makes it seem like a series of discrete essays rather than a coherent narrative. This sense of alienation is exacerbated by Ackroyd's decision to make all references to the Oxford University Press 1986 original-spelling edition. He calls it "easily the best modern edition of [the] plays" — without explaining why — but it's odd that a man who describes himself as "enthusiast rather than expert" should expect enthusiastic, non-expert readers to digest "sallad dayes" and "loyall, iust and vpright".

In essence, Ackroyd has inhaled a lot of other books — the bibliography contains more than 400 titles — in order to exhale this one. His motives and intentions differ from Greenblatt's but, like the Harvard man, the Londoner seeks always to return to the texts to construct a portrait, preferring, as he puts it, "the testimony of the dramatist to the speculations of the sociologist".

This approach is fruitful given that Shakespeare's pre-adult life is a virtual blank — even his birth date is only an inference, from the christening date —but the line is thin between reasonable speculation and outright fancy. To suggest that Shakespeare stayed at an inn because he mentions it in Twelfth Night is a stretch; it's hard to discern the usefulness of the observation that "it is not inconceivable that he actually became rather fat" in later life.

For all that, Ackroyd fluently and plausibly evokes the writer at work and the city in which he lived. This biography does not displace those that have come before but it is a valuable addition to them.

* Peter Calder is an Auckland writer
*Chatto and Windus, $65