The Life of the One and Only Shakespeare

Anthony Holden’s “William Shakespeare: The Man Behind the Genius” is a well-crafted valentine for anyone who still believes that Shakespeare authored all of the works bearing his name. Some critics argue that the plays’ uneven quality suggests that they are the work of many hands, but Holden steadfastly maintains that inconsistencies are the sign of a poet growing into his dramatic skills. What’s more, Holden says, “we know more about the life of Shakespeare than that of any of his literary contemporaries bar Ben Jonson. And the rest is there for all to see, in and between every line he wrote. . . .”

Generations of biographers have been tempted by the challenges that Shakespeare’s life presents. He left no diaries or letters, and there are few written records. Old town and church documents show that he married a woman eight years his senior, Anne Hathaway, and had two daughters and a son. He was a member of the royal acting troupe, the Queen’s Men, and shrewdly bought shares in the troupe and ownership of the Globe. He also bought property and died reasonably wealthy at 52, leaving a will that mentions none of his plays nor anything literary.

Holden applies his considerable abilities as a biographer and scholar to dress this meager frame of facts with sensible restrained speculations. He describes how the young bard-to-be was born in Stratford-on-Avon in 1564 to the illiterate John and Mary Shakespeare and enrolled in “a Free-School.” He accepts a current theory that John hid his Catholicism from the Protestant authorities and proposes an interesting theory that the teenage William spent much of “the lost years”--for which there are few records--as a tutor in the families of local Catholic nobles, thanks to his father’s connections as town alderman.

Holden couches all of his speculations in cautious terms. He finds it plausible that a 1582 incident, when friends of the late Farmer Hathaway “strong-armed young William” to marry pregnant Anne “before he could flee his obligations” to her, was a source of dramatic inspiration. He notes the many plots involving feminine “entrapment” and shotgun marriages, from “Venus and Adonis” to “Othello,” and suggests that personal feelings are indeed discernible.

Holden also offers an intriguing solution as to how a poor Stratford youth, whose father’s fortunes suddenly plummeted, entered London’s theatrical scene. In 1587, the Queen’s Men visited Stratford. Perhaps, Holden surmises, the troupe found “a willing volunteer in 23-year-old William Shakespeare, indigent father-of-three” to take the place of an actor killed in a fight. Holden follows him to London, where he spent several years as a servant-cum-actor before the first part of “Henry VI” appeared around 1592.

Holden’s results are often as satisfying as a master detective’s explanation of a crime. How, for example, could Shakespeare compose such light fare as “Love’s Labour’s Lost” while people suffered in the plague-ridden 1590s? Shakespeare may have been living away from London, he deduces, on the country estate of his patron, the earl of Southampton, observing salon life (not to mention a violent feud between two neighboring families that anticipates “Romeo and Juliet”).

At other times, Holden strains to connect the bard’s life to the texts. “Is it entirely idle,” he writes, thinking of Macbeth and Lady Macbeth’s guilt-ridden insomnia, “to wonder if Shakespeare himself was suffering sleepless nights while writing ‘Macbeth’?” He is better at evoking the frenzied theatrical world in which playwrights were often “joining forces as much as blazing their own trails in churning out box-office fodder as fast as the acting troupes could stage it.”

That Shakespeare stood alone in this atmosphere may be a sign of genius or something extremely curious. It’s strange that the only sample of Shakespeare’s handwriting--aside from some disputed signatures--is a fragment (also disputed) from the unfinished “Sir Thomas More,” a work which Holden acknowledges was a collaboration. A few years before he died in 1616, Shakespeare “stooped to collaboration” with John Fletcher for “Henry VIII” and the rarely performed “The Two Noble Kinsmen.” Lacking more evidence, who can say that collaboration didn’t start earlier?

Holden notes that Shakespeare, after his investments started paying dividends, registered for a family coat of arms (his father had been denied one). It turned out to be an empty gesture, “signifying nothing,” Macbeth would say, because there would be no heirs born to his children. But Holden’s absorbing book reminds us that what Shakespeare lacked in personal family, he gained in the many scholars and admirers lured by the mystery of his life and work.