The five are: Shakespeare the Biography by Peter Ackroyd; Soul of the Age the Life, Mind and World of William Shakespeare by Jonathan Bate; The Lodger Shakespeare on Silver Street by Charles Nicholl; 1599 A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare, and 1606 Shakespeare and the Year of Lear by James Shapiro.
Shakespeare the Biography by Peter Ackroyd
Published in 2005. Among the selection here, this is the most traditional and conventional. If you haven’t read any biography of Shakespeare and want to know the key facts in a chronological order from his birth to his death, this is the one I’d recommend. The audiobook if you have access is narrated by Simon Callow.
The book is divided in nine parts. Here’s the title of each so you can get a sense of the focus of the book: Stratford upon Avon, The Queen’s Men, Lord Strange’s Men, The Earl of Pembroke’s Men, The Lord Chamberlain’s Men, New Place, The Globe, The King’s Men, Blackfriars. These are the locations and places of his home and work, as well as the theatre companies that his name is associated with. They are matter-of-fact and straightforward. That’s the vibe of the book.
Take the first section ‘Stratford upon Avon’ as an example. The section is divided into short chapters, each a few pages long, touching the facts of geography, landscape and history of the town, his ancestry, family background of his mother and father, his neighbours, the religious environment, the local dialect, the shows and plays Shakespeare watched as a kid, his schooling, his wife and marriage—everything to do with the place of his birth and early years.
The strength is that it’s very informative, very knowledgeable, full of facts and figures, observations, interpretations and analysis. The weakness is it can feel a bit like a textbook or a glorious Wikipedia page. That sounds a bit harsh. I confess I couldn’t fully digest it—I thought I would never be able to finish it! The book is long, the font is small, it covers so much ground. The tone is mostly neutral and detached especially compared with the second biography.
Soul of the Age The Life, Mind and World of William Shakespeare by Jonathan Bate
Published in 2008. The second biography also covers the whole life of Shakespeare from his birth to death. This, in contrast, is lacking a great deal in facts and figures. It’s as if the author either presumes you know the rough outline of S’ life already, or he doesn’t think it matters much if you know or not. It’s a series of essays on Shakespeare’s life, works and England during his lifetime as the themes. It does not follow chronological order, especially when it talks about the plays.
It is divided into seven sections using the framework of the Seven Ages of Men in As You Like It: Infant, School Boy, Lover, Soldier, Justice, Pantaloon and Oblivion. Each section usually starts with a certain stage of Shakespeare’s life, goes on to comment on the wider social background and ends with literary criticism of his works.
I’ll compare the section on Shakespeare’s childhood in the two biographies in more detail, especially his schooling and education. Both start with the basic facts that he went to the local grammar school. Ackroyd’s biography gives the chapter 9 pages. It starts with a description of the location of the school and the architecture and interior of the rooms – which you can still visit today! Then a run-through of requirements for entry, what would have happened on the first day of school, how much the registration costs, what’s in his school bag, the schedule for a school day, and curriculum. After that, it talks about the role of drama in the grammar schools, and lastly introduces Shakespeare’s school masters.
Ackroyd gives the curriculum more space on the pages among all the subjects. He mentions William Lily and his Short Introduction of Grammar, which was the nationwide Latin grammar textbook and gives a sketch of what Shakespeare would have learnt each year. He also quickly points out the allusions to early schooling and classroom scenes in Shakespeare plays like The Merry Wives of Windsor, in three sentences.
Jonathan Bate’s biography gives the equivalent chapter a grand total of 78 pages. It begins with the same scene in The Merry Wives, expands on William Lily’s Latin Grammar curriculum with many more details. It goes from form to form, explaining not only what kind of authors were laid on his desk and what kind of exercises were drilled into him, but also how those authors and language skills were made use of in his works many years later, with fascinating examples on every page.
It’s obvious from reading the biography that the grammar school education formed Shakespeare’s young mind, impacted his use of language and poetry, and its curses and blessings stayed with him his entire life: the allusions to his early learning are scattered everywhere. Another thing that’s obvious from reading the biography is that the author Jonathan Bate is passionate about latin grammar. He gives it a lot more weight in his book, explaining how much it mattered to Shakespeare’s command of language, its power and its beauty. My guess is the author studied it himself when he was a school boy in his local grammar school. Knowing Latin as a language, and knowing the pain and joy of learning Latin as a school boy gives him the affinity to Shakespeare that other biographers do not have.
I said earlier that this reads like a collection of essays instead of a conventional biography. Let me explain why. The section of ‘School Boy’, starts from an introduction of Shakespeare’s own early schooling, and ends with a tour of his Small Library. In the middle, the climax is a chapter called ‘The School of Prospero’, which is a reflection on Shakespeare’s views on the value and limitations of reading and education. It’s a piece of literary criticism on Renaissance humanism through dissecting Prospero in The Tempest. One of the best things I ever read.
The Lodger by Charles Nicholl
Shakespeare was involved in a lawsuit towards the end of his life. He gave evidence by speaking in court, his words were taken down by a clerk with ink and pen on a piece of paper, and Shakespeare signed his name. This is one of the six signatures of Shakespeare that we have today.
The lawsuit was the Mountjoy Case in 1612. To put it simply, one Frenchman, Christopher Mountjoy was accused by his son-in-law, another Frenchman, Stephen Belott of not paying up the promised dowry when he married Mountjoy’s daughter Mary. Why does it involve Shakespeare? He was a lodger in the Mountjoy House on Silver Street in London. Hence the title. What’s more, it was he who persuaded Belott into the marriage and it was he who personally performed ‘hand fasting’, a semi-official engagement ceremony, for the young couple.
This is where our story begins in The Lodger Shakespeare on Silver Street by Charles Nicholl published in 2007. A curious mind can ask so many questions about that brief description of the lawsuit. Who is Christopher Mountjoy? What brings him from France to England? What kind of household does he have? Who are his wife and daughter? What kind of person is he? Why does he refuse to pay the dowry? What does he do for a living in London? What kind of people does he deal with in his trade and business? Then who is Stephen Belott? Why does he need persuading to get married? What kind of street is Silver Street? What kind of neighbours do they have? Are they friendly to immigrants? The book touches on all of it and much more, investigating every possible subject and going off the most surprising tangents.
Reading the book is like following a detective peaking around street corners and reading his investigation reports and conclusions, sometimes based on solid ample evidence, sometimes based on educated guesses or mere imagination. Unlike the portrait we know so well at the front of the First Folio, S is not at all the main and sole subject of the painting this biography paints. He’s in the shadow of the candlelight, in the background of someone else’s living room and workshop, some footsteps above the ceiling, glimpses through the doorway.
It starts with conventional biography stuff: facts and figures around the time he takes up tenancy on Silver Street, which is on and off roughly from 1602 to 1604: his life and career, the plays he wrote during that time, the geography and cityscape of Silver Street as well as its neighbourhood. It then introduces Shakespeare’s landlords, Christopher and Marie Mountjoy. This was when I started to prick up my ears. They were French and they were fashion designers! They were more specifically ‘tire-makers’, who designed and created decorative headwear for ladies, known as ‘head-tires’ or ‘attires’.
One thing that I got from this book, I’m very impressed with the record keeping of the Elizabethans and how much and how well the fragile ink and paper documents are preserved to this day. If you have the time and patience to sift through them, there are endless treasures. We can see the Queen’s accounts for her wardrobe in 1604. You can trace people’s movement of residences especially if they have a unique enough surname. You can find out how much tax a person was required to pay in a specific year living in a specific street: his name and the tax were recorded because he failed to pay. You can then deduce how much income he roughly had because the tax was proportional. And if this failed-to-pay-tax notes appear in several places, what does that say about a man’s wealth and personality? You might notice that most of the dead children had their father named as the parent in burial records. Mothers’ names were not mentioned, unless they were labelled as widows. Then there was one ‘Mrs’ glaring at you among the list of men. What happened to the father of that child? Was he unknown? Or was he known?
These two aspects of the book attract me the most and they are what make this biography unique. The historical records that are set in stone, black ink on yellowing parchment, most tedious and boring, and the author’s imagination, his detective works, his ability to assemble seemingly unrelated evidence, mix A and B and C together, and voila, a vivid, flesh and blood, Elizabethan England.
The biography reads very scholarly, with the extensive use of primary historical records and archives, the academic but accessible language, almost 30 pages of the original lawsuit papers and about 40 pages of endnotes. He makes fascinating interpretations of those, to my eyes, indecipherable historical records, and then feels completely comfortable and confident to make bold conclusions. He would say things like ‘I have the feeling that’ such and such is the case. I quote the author, “We are in search of facts but we listen also to the whispers… (p117)” So, though scholarly and thoroughly brain-y, at the same time, it feels like reading gossip.
What has this to do with Shakespeare? At the least, it gives the context to his life and works. For one example, the wires that support the collars that he wore on the portrait of the First Folio, were likely to be made by the Mountjoys. There are a lot of overlaps between fashion design and costume making for the theatre. There are references to and metaphors of silk in Shakespeare plays. There’s the shadow of a reluctant young man who is pressed into a marriage in All’s Well that Ends Well, which was written while Shakespeare lived upstairs to the Mountjoys.
But what I liked most was Part Five called ‘Among Strangers’. There was resentment, hostility and violence towards immigrants in London then as well as it is now. Shakespeare not only was able to blend in with his contemporary dramatists and make fun of the stereotypes of the French in The Merchant of Venice and various other plays, he was also able to stand out and make the ultimate outsider, Shylock, a three-dimensional human being, rather than a cardboard villain. Living with a French family, he saw real people in their flaws—Christopher Mountjoy was not a likeable character—but he also saw their fear and anxiety with empathy when riots threatened their lives from the London streets.
1606 and 1599 by James Shapiro
We’ve sampled two biographies that cover Shakespeare’s entire life and one that focuses on just a few years of his life around a single location. Now let’s move on to two biographies that zero in on just one year of his life, 1599 A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare, and 1606 Shakespeare and the Year of Lear.
1599
I read 1599 first, because you might have found out by now that I like doing things in order. The book won Baillie Gifford’s 25th anniversary Winner of Winners Award in 2023. The special one-off award crowned the best work of non-fiction from the last 25 years of the prize. And the best of all, when the book arrived, I found an endorsement from Jonathan Bate on the cover, saying this is ‘one of the few genuinely original biographies of Shakespeare’. I had very high expectations and I was not disappointed.
Shakespeare is a fish that is too slippery to catch a glimpse of, let alone to catch at all, so the author examines the water in which he swims.
When I read this in 2023, his plays were like vases in a museum, sitting on pedestals in glass cases under the spotlight, against a black unknown background. I saw Shakespeare’s works as things lifted out of time and space. It was an eye-opening experience to realise that that wasn’t the case. This is the first book that pointed me to the historical aspects of Shakespeare’s works.
In this single year, Shakespeare worked on four plays: Henry V, Julius Caesar, As You Like It and Hamlet. But he didn’t sit in his room with closed windows. A lot happened in England, in the world and in his head. As Elizabeth’s representatives marched onto Ireland for war, a sermon was preached and its arguments made their way into Henry V. A brutal and senseless murder of a poet in Julius Caesar commented on state censorship. It was a daring move to bring Plutarch’s Caesar on stage when assassinations of the Queen was an extremely sensitive topic, but clever, because the Queen was a fan of Plutarch’s writing. The brutal changes of the countryside and poverty are reflected in the Forest of Arden. The emerging new literary form, Montaigne’s personal essay, made Hamlet Hamlet. And much much more.
1606
1606 Shakespeare and the Year of Lear does the same kinds of things with King Lear, Macbeth and Antony and Cleopatra. By this time, James the First had succeeded Elizabeth, Shakespeare and his company had become the King’s Men. Once again the plays mirror the national mood. King Lear explores themes of division and succession, echoing debates about unifying Britain. Macbeth channels fears of tyranny and supernatural evil, resonating with King James’s obsession with witchcraft and the occult. The Gunpowder Plot and its Catholic roots influenced Shakespeare’s portrayal of evil. Both plays borrow language and imagery from contemporary records on cases of demon possession.
1599 was published in 2006 and 1606 in 2015, about ten years in between. And it’s 2024 now. In the epilogue of 1606, Shapiro mentions two more creative bursts of Shakespeare, when twice more in his life, he wrote three plays in the space of one year or so. I really hope Shapiro is working on one of those!
Conclusion
If this historical approach sounds appealing to you, I highly recommend a BBC 4 Radio podcast series called ‘Shakespeare’s Restless World’. It was hosted by Neil MacGregor, the author of A History of the World in 100 Objects. Each episode is centred around an object, either from the British Museum or collections across the UK. Some are more unexpected than others. The 20 episodes use the selection of 20 objects as the starting point and tell the events and stories of the time.
Which of these biographies do you like the sound of? What other biographies would you recommend? Let me know.
A Day of Small Things 