Shakespeare: The Biography

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Peter Ackroyd's biographies of Blake, Chaucer, Dickens, and Sir Thomas More have established him as an acknowledged master of the genre. With a biography of Shakespeare, however, no reputation is secure: Stratford specialists generally regard all outsiders as poachers. Fortunately, Ackroyd's Shakespeare: The Biography lives up to our expectations, displaying an abundant mix of careful research and lively speculation. Too learned and wise to conjure up a definitive Shakespeare, he attempts instead to present his subject in winning multiplicity. "Ackroyd," as one reviewer said, "can riff with the best... He brings to the task of making the old facts fresh some themes and variations of his own."

John Simon

Ackroyd, though not a professional Shakespeare scholar, is a novelist, poet, critic and, above all, prolific biographer, with books on Chaucer, Thomas More, Blake, Dickens, Pound and T. S. Eliot, some of whom he aptly brings in here. Comparisons with Dickens, who was, in a way, the Shakespeare of the novel, are particularly suggestive; but Ackroyd, fruitfully, quotes many foreign opinions, old and new, as well. Especially effective is the brevity of his chapters, each dealing with a specific matter, and with a title slyly drawn from Shakespeare's words. That the endnotes are purely bibliographical, and everything else is right in the text, is also laudable.
— The New York Times

Publishers Weekly

At their best, Shakespearean biographers are like great jazz musicians, able to take a few notes of an old standard and spin them into dizzying riffs of conjecture. At their worst they reshuffle old wives' tales, piling supposition upon conjecture into a rickety house of cards. Peter Ackroyd can riff with the best, and he brings to the task of making the old facts fresh some themes and variations of his own that deserve a hearing. He is particularly good, in fact, on the question of sound: the way the language Shakespeare wrote, his players spoke and his audiences heard differed from the Shakespeare we hear and read today. Demonstrating the courage of his convictions, he does something daring for a book aimed at a general reader: he renders all of his citations from Shakespeare "in the original." Thus a phrase from Timon of Athens is printed: "Our Poesie is as a Goume which ouses" (rather than "gum which oozes"), an effect that can defamiliarize, often in an illuminating way. An accomplished literary biographer, Ackroyd doesn't offer a new explanation of how the glover's son of provincial Stratford became the sophisticated poetic genius of London. Instead he gives us intelligent, often elegant, variations on the old ones. Like many of his fellow biographers he warns us that a particular "tradition" has no corroboration and then plays it out anyway. So with such recent, hotly debated questions as whether Shakespeare spent time in his youth in the household of subversive secret Catholics, Ackroyd spins it out for all it's worth. But the great strength of Ackroyd's book is the depth of his immersion in the culture of Shakespeare's age and the sense he gives of Shakespeare as a product of that extraordinary moment in time. His feeling for the role of the theater in Elizabethan London, "a city where dramatic spectacles became the primary means of understanding reality," seems to come from an impressively wide reading of Shakespeare's dramatic and poetic contemporaries. His judgments about the work itself are sometimes ingenious, occasionally eccentric, as when he tells us, "All the evidence suggests, too, that the speech, `To be or not to be' is an interpolation," an unnecessary addition to Hamlet, possibly "from another play altogether." While location of "To be or not to be" is different in an early quarto of Hamlet, to say "All the evidence suggests" interpolation is an overstatement. Still, immersion in Ackroyd's biography cumulatively gives one a feeling that one has lived for a brief time in Shakespeare's world. Ackroyd constructs a an intricate mosaic of Elizabethan context, which brings us closer to the shadowy figure, whose most renowned character, Hamlet, tells us: "I have that within which passes show." Agent, Geri Thoma. (On sale Oct. 18) Rosenbaum is writing a book about controverises among Shakespearean scholars and directors (Random, fall 2006). Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal

This biography is distinguished from other contemporary Shakespeare studies by the author's ability to mesh the facts of Shakespeare's life with social, economic, literary, and political details of the 16th century. A novelist and biographer whose subjects include Charles Dickens, Thomas More, and William Blake, Ackroyd interweaves historical information with events in Shakespeare's life, revealing how the playwright was affected and inspired by contemporary events. In Ackroyd's hands, an event like Shakespeare's moving from Southwark to a more affluent area near the booksellers at St. Paul's is a springboard to report on related issues like British bookselling, publishing, and copyright. This in turn leads to a discussion of how these activities would have affected the publication of Shakespeare's works. This book is distinctly different from Stephen Greenblatt's Will in the World and Michael Wood's Shakespeare; though all three biographies use the same basic information, Ackroyd transforms the black-and-white sketch of Shakespeare into a richly colored portrait. Highly recommended for all public and academic libraries. [See Prepub Alert, LJ 6/1/05.]-Shana C. Fair, Ohio Univ. Lib., Zanesville Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.

School Library Journal

Adult/High School-Describing himself as a Shakespeare enthusiast instead of an expert, Ackroyd focuses on the bard as an extraordinarily talented theater professional rather than rhapsodizing about the intricacies of the man's genius. He interweaves Shakespeare's life story with England's dramatic history and the fascinating world of the emerging Elizabethan theater. Apocryphal stories are identified and plausible explanations for what occurred during the "missing" years are offered. Shakespeare emerges as a thoroughly engaging, almost modern man, brimming with humor, eager for social advancement, and carefully tracking the popular trends in entertainment. Students who want to discover whether Shakespeare really was the author of the famous plays will find compelling evidence that only the man from Stratford could have hidden so many ingenious clues in his work. Sixteen pages of color illustrations include portraits of Shakespeare's famous contemporaries, photographs of the interiors of Elizabethan buildings, and illustrated title pages. Those daunted by the length of this book will find it a good reference source. Students looking for information on the building of the Globe, the meanings of the sonnets, the differences in the various editions and revisions of the plays, and other typical academic questions will find useful, well-organized information. A rich, vivid account.-Kathy Tewell, Fairfax County Public Library, VA Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

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 ownends, 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).