Will in the World

A YEAR IN THE LIFE OF WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE: 1599

By James Shapiro

Bust of William Shakespeare taken from two angles (Holy Trinity Church, Stratford-on-avon) Who's Blogging? Read what bloggers are saying about this article. .: Read, explore, imagine, create! :. Every Author - the literary community for writers and readers Full List of Blogs (1 links) » Most Blogged About Articles On washingtonpost.com | On the web

HarperCollins. 394 pp. $27.95

SHAKESPEARE: The Biography

By Peter Ackroyd

Nan A. Talese/Doubleday. 572 pp. $32.50

In "Comedy of Errors," a stage direction tells actors to "Runne all out, as fast as may be." The words were probably Shakespeare's and might have served as an exhortation to the world's greatest playwright himself. In the half-dozen or so new Shakespeare biographies in as many years, the idea of the playwright as an effortless genius, a literary Mozart, never altering a line, has been permanently junked. And now two more works add their own retouchings to the Bard's shifting image -- and the shifting image of his times.

Shakespeare was a man in a hurry, the ultimate team-player who "tinkered obsessively," according to James Shapiro in A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare , a sharp and innovative postholing study examining a single pivotal year -- 1599 -- in the playwright's life. Shapiro speculates that his labor involved "a healthy share of blotting, a rush of thoughts trying to force their way through at once, and a ruthless insistence on getting it right." Shakespeare was known for his lonesome habits; he was "not a company-keeper," according to an early account, and he avoided parties with pleas of ill health. No surprise, given his workload.

Peter Ackroyd's whimsical, wide-ranging and sometimes waterlogged Shakespeare describes Elizabethan playwriting as "the literary equivalent of factory farming." Plays were churned out in an assembly-line fervor, hammered out by committee in an era when authorship meant much less than it does today. (Shakespeare may have had a hand in far more plays than we know, Ackroyd suggests.) Shakespeare retooled rather than invented stories, and then reworked his reworkings -- leaving in his wake a confusing tangle of versions, adapted and revised as players scarpered, venues changed, authors rewrote, political landscapes shifted or the court censor demanded.

We have been obsessed with Shakespeare ever since -- his language, his wordplays, his vision, his world, his life. Both the new books are peppered with provocative observations and sage mini-essays, such as Shapiro's delightful digression on Shakespeare's hendiadys, the odd verbal trick of pairing nouns. Each book mirrors its authors range, passions and proclivities. The award-winning Ackroyd is a poet whose productivity approaches Shakespeare's; the tireless Englishman has written biographies of T.S. Eliot, William Blake, Charles Dickens, Ezra Pound, Geoffrey Chaucer and Thomas More, as well as nearly a dozen novels. Shapiro, author of Shakespeare and the Jews , is a postholer by profession, a New York intellectual whose sympathies are engaged by the underdog (his passages on Queen Elizabeth's attempt to crush an Irish rebellion are devastating).

Both have much to paw over. It's common to cluck that we know so little about Shakespeare's life. What surprises one, then, in both these accounts, is the wealth of material that has survived for constructing and deconstructing our hero. Contemporary letters and diaries mention him, critics attack him, legal records name him, and petitions are signed by him -- not to mention the oft-repeated truism that his poems and plays are the best biography.

Yet why are we so . . . dissatisfied? Why do our stomachs still grumble for more? Why are we still hungry after scarfing the dishes prepared by scores of scholars over the years? The problem is, all this doesn't quite add up to a story. Certainly not the story we sense behind the plays and poems. Was the Bard a bore? Ackroyd intimates a sort of blankness -- a businessman who stood outside any particular point of view, who wrote about crowds clamoring for bread in "Coriolanus" while coolly hoarding malt back home in Stratford. Other scholars suggest that blankness might be a mask for a man who had something to hide, the kind of studied blankness once cultivated among the Soviet citizenry. That's where some of the newest scholarship comes onstage, for Elizabeth's incredible public-relations machine has finally run out of steam. We are in the midst of a radical reexamination of the era in which Shakespeare lived. The myth of Gloriana is giving way to a portrait of a police state with a treacherous spy network. And Shakespeare was in the middle of it.

During her reign, poverty deepened, and traveling was curtailed, says Ackroyd. The Church of England was imposed upon a resisting public while, as modern scholarship suggests, most Englishmen retained strong loyalties to the "Old Faith." Strangely, then, both Ackroyd's and Shapiro's accounts overlook some of the obvious conclusions. One small example: If Shakespeare was reared as a Catholic, as is now commonly supposed, he would have been barred from getting the Oxford or Cambridge degree that gave his rival Christopher Marlowe, the son of a shoemaker, such a professional edge. It mattered: The "university wits" jeered at Shakespeare for his lack of learning. Both Shapiro and Ackroyd poke around the usual issues about his father's pocketbook -- though it now appears that Shakespeare Sr. was feigning poverty to protect his property from hefty fines levied for refusing to attend government-approved church services.

Clearly, the times were nervous. Many of the era's playwrights -- including Marlowe, snuffed out by government thugs, probably at Elizabeth's command -- combined some form of government intelligence with writing. Shakespeare appears to have been an enigmatic exception; his characters were not. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern doublecross Hamlet, Ophelia hands over her love letters to the authorities, and Polonius eavesdrops behind an arras. In an atmosphere of surveillance, England became a land of secrets. The inwardness Shapiro describes in the plays was a kind of security; private thoughts were safe thoughts, communicated, when they must be, through coded language. The chronic threat of Spanish invasion added to the country's unease. Shapiro shows British panic and defense preparations in London following the rumors of a new attack -- the "invisible armada" of 1599. He links this with Shakespeare's next play, which opens with "jittery soldiers, at night, standing guard" in the midst of frenzied military preparations against an unseen foe, when they see the ghost of Hamlet's father from purgatory -- incidentally, a banned concept under the new religion.

Such insights enliven both books, embedding their hero in the elaborate tapestry of the times. Ackroyd's forte is his willingness to plunge into the sights, sounds and smells of an era, even if he sometimes seems to write in a rush, substituting intuition and fence-sitting for measured, data-driven insight. Shapiro's surgical incisions into a single year, coupled with a poignant sense of social tension and injustices, show that context is all. With over a thousand pages between them, one would think nothing more needs to be said -- at least not for a few years. Don't bet on it.

Cynthia Haven writes for the San Francisco Chronicle, the Los Angeles Times and the Times Literary Supplement of London. "Peter Dale in Conversation with Cynthia Haven" was published this year in London.