Product Description

Peter Ackroyd's marvellous biography is a living attempt to reach into the heart of Shakespeare.He creates an intimate and immediate connection with his subject, so that the book reads like the work of a contemporary - meeting Shakespeare afresh on his own ground.Written with intuition and imagination unique to Peter Ackroyd, this is a book by a writer about a writer, and a fascinating and detailed depiction of the world Shakespeare inhabited.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #109078 in Books
• Published on: 2006-09-07
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 560 pages

Review
Ackroyd (Chaucer, Jan. 2005, etc.) continues his exploration of his native country's imaginative landscape with a portrait of the life and times of the quintessential English artist. Given the enormous amount of attention devoted to the life of William Shakespeare (1564-1616) in the four centuries since his death, it's hard to offer something truly new about either the man or his plays. Ackroyd doesn't, but his discursive biography capably synthesizes current knowledge with just enough of a point of view to make it interesting. He's solid on Shakespeare's origins in a family of recusant Catholics-a fairly new but now generally conceded point-and on the Bard's rise in dynamic, rapidly changing Elizabethan society: "a young man's world in which ambition and aspiration might lead anywhere and everywhere." But the author sometimes gets perilously near radical oversimplification when he suggests that the writer merely threw hordes of great characters onto the stage in plots whose plundered sources he barely bothered to alter. The extensive historical background ranges from marvelously atmospheric material on Elizabethan theater, which illuminates the network of rivalries and camaraderie within which Shakespeare operated, to tedious references to academic disagreements about which the general reader will care naught. We get a wonderful sense of Shakespeare's personality: educated but not particularly intellectual, ambitious, shrewd about money, eager to reassert his family's genteel origins, something of a philanderer, suspicious of all dogma. Ackroyd offers less compelling material, stressing Shakespeare's fluency and fertility, his ability to cannibalize others' work and shape it to his own ends, without being very specific as to what exactly those ends were. Newcomers to Shakespearean studies will find this a good place to start. Those more familiar with the field will find that it palls in comparison to Stephen Greenblatt's Will in the World (2004). (Kirkus Reviews)

Independent
"melding recent scholarship into a fluent and balanced
tale…another total pro"

Synopsis
Peter Ackroyd's marvellous biography is a living attempt to reach into the heart of Shakespeare.He creates an intimate and immediate connection with his subject, so that the book reads like the work of a contemporary - meeting Shakespeare afresh on his own ground.Written with intuition and imagination unique to Peter Ackroyd, this is a book by a writer about a writer, and a fascinating and detailed depiction of the world Shakespeare inhabited.

Customer Reviews

definitive but so very long
I'm a great fan of Peter Ackroyd, whose technique is outstanding, but I nearly gave up on this book, somewhere around ch 57 which is entitled 'No more words, we beseech you'. A book of about 300 pp. as opposed to 500 would have been much more enjoyable.
The historical evidence about WS consists of two types of source: (1) a group of primarily legal texts about his investments, property purchases, his will and a few encounters with the law; and (2) comments by contemporaries, both favourable and hostile. There are more of (1) than I thought and many more of (2), so many in fact that I'm amazed that the 'Who really wrote Shakespeare?' theorists persist. The picture that emerges is of an exceptionally professional, hard-working, pragmatic, well thought-of, reasonably convivial man, respected and admired by most of his contemporaries. Of Shakespeare's opinions, beliefs and convictions we know, as Ackroyd says time and time again, absolutely nothing. Stretching that picture to 500 pp. requires a vast amount of conjecture (Shakespeare would have done this, Shakespeare would have known that ... ) coupled with a huge amount of admiring comment about the plays, some of it pretty banal.
I agree with reviewers that this is as close to WS as we can hope to get, given that he left no clues at all about himself. It's definitive, certainly the last book I want to read about the man as opposed to the works. But it's too long.

Flawed
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?

No holes Bard
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 is 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) and given, also, the unlikelihood of very many more contemporary documents cropping up, 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 crude 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 provides a good example of his presentation 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 connections and affinities with Catholicism, the fact that Suzanna, his favourite daughter, married the Puritan Dr Hall, suggests that tolerance prevailed above all. 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.