Bard, outside the box

GIVEN the recent spate of books on Shakespeare, one question is unavoidable: Was there really any reason for the prolific British writer Peter Ackroyd to perpetrate another?

One can imagine Ackroyd responding to this ungracious line of inquiry with Lear’s imperious “reason not the need” thunderclap to his bean-counting daughter, who wants to downsize his train of men. Yet “Shakespeare: The Biography” adds a whopping 500-plus pages to the cottage industry engulfing the Bard. And without any breakthrough discoveries, couldn’t we all have made do with Stephen Greenblatt’s surprising bestseller, “Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare” -- with maybe Frank Kermode’s laudably concise “The Age of Shakespeare” and Michael Wood’s engaging TV documentary “In Search of Shakespeare” thrown in for good measure?

“They’re all perfectly good as far as they went,” Ackroyd said dutifully of the competition during a brief visit to New York last month. “I suppose what they essentially lacked and what I find lacking in nearly all biographies is a sense of aliveness, of excitement, of drama.”

The problem, in his view, is that while there’s plenty of historical scholarship, there’s too little “historical imagination.” Dogged research into baptismal records and land deeds (or at least others’ accounts of them) may be a necessary first step, but then it’s up to the writer to spin from these wan facts a rollicking tale enriched by the sights, smells and sighs of actual life.

“Shakespeare: The Biography” attempts to convey a vivid sensory impression of what it was like to live in Shakespeare’s time. In addition to offering the traditional saga of the young man from Stratford setting out to make his mark in London as an actor and playwright, Ackroyd colors in what it must have been like for this country boy to travel to the big city back then: the thrill of crowds, the explosion of new construction, the pageantry of class-revealing costume, the hawking of merchants and prostitutes, and the stenches that were so ubiquitous it was commonplace to make love fully clothed.

It is, in fact, the fashion these days to focus more on the time and place than on the life. Greenblatt, a Harvard English professor, has become the face of New Historicism, the ongoing lit-crit craze of parsing an author’s sociocultural context to gain insight into his work. His book magisterially connects the gritty particulars of Shakespeare’s era to the seemingly infinite scope of his poetic imagination. Ackroyd’s book, by comparison, offers surprisingly little critical discussion of the plays. Yet neither Greenblatt nor his less theory-driven cohorts have given the old black-and-white Elizabethan footage this kind of Technicolor blast.

British critics have been respectfully divided over Ackroyd’s achievement. Writing in the Independent, Colin MacCabe, a professor of English at Exeter, raved that “our greatest biographer has once more put the academics to shame.” Yet Shakespeare expert Stanley Wells faulted the book in the Guardian for its “excessive tendency to accept speculation as fact.”

Indeed, both responses are valid. Ackroyd undeniably lends an old yarn a startling immediacy. On the other hand, his overstuffed, under-edited biography (written as a series of discrete essays on virtually every thinkable topic) doesn’t always bother to substantiate its assertions and tends, in slightly hagiographic fashion, to give Shakespeare the benefit of the doubt in questions of personal character and authorship.

Wide array of subjects

A round-faced, slightly effete literary gentleman with an omnivorous appetite for books and an indefatigable approach to producing them, Ackroyd has written biographies of T.S. Eliot, Charles Dickens, William Blake, the city of London and Thomas More, as well as shorter ones of Chaucer and J.M.W. Turner for the newly instituted series Ackroyd’s Brief Lives. His productivity is positively Joyce Carol Oates-like when you consider that he’s also one of the foremost practitioners of the historical novel today, as “The Great Fire of London,” “The Last Testament of Oscar Wilde,” “Hawksmoor” and “English Music” attest.

Curiously, Ackroyd doesn’t recognize any division in his literary identity. “As far as I’m concerned, being a novelist and being a biographer is the same thing,” he says. “The difference is, in fiction you have to tell the truth. Paradoxical as that sounds, it’s actually true. In fiction, you have to hew to your imaginary vision, whereas in biography, on the whole, you’re allowed to skip and slide and digress.

“Of course you have to make sure everything’s correct,” he adds when pressed on the point. “Given that exactitude, it doesn’t mean that I can’t at the same time re-create the interior life of 16th century London, or re-create the life of the stage and conditions of performance -- all those things you can do without in any way injuring the accuracy of the details.”

Ackroyd quite plausibly portrays Shakespeare as the supreme product of his age, an upwardly mobile, highly competitive literary artist, with keen business acumen and a surprising litigious side. The word “ruthless” crops up more than once in our conversation about a writer he sees as hell-bent on fame. Yet he also senses that Shakespeare must have been sufficiently reserved and self-protective to survive (unlike his playwriting contemporaries Christopher Marlowe and Thomas Kyd) the dangerous whirligig of Elizabethan London, a metropolis teeming with disease, violent crime, early mortality and terror related to fierce religious conflicts.

In keeping with the trend of recent scholarship, Ackroyd assumes that Shakespeare’s family had old-faith leanings. “Stratford, the place of his birth, was dominated by Catholic families,” he says. “The street where he lived was Catholic. His family married Catholics. You come to the unavoidable conclusion that, even if he wasn’t Catholic himself, he was most at home with Catholics -- and at the time they were persecuted and often killed. So that would have had an abiding influence on his life. I don’t in any sense think that he was an active or even a professing Catholic, but he would have known people who had been killed, imprisoned, fined.”

Taking his portrait an imaginative step further, Ackroyd ponders the mystery of Shakespeare’s sexuality. “I think he was, in our anachronistic term, slightly ‘camp,’ ” he says with a subtle grin. “Noblemen were of course slightly camp, with the value of ‘platonic friendship’ and all, but I get the impression that he might have been like so many actors we know today -- not screaming, but a little funny. I get the impression that he was highly sexed but also diverted to either sex. I think he was probably a flirt with other men. There’s no way I could ever prove it. I don’t think I even put it in the book. I’m trying to write a play about it now.”

Obviously when you’re dealing with a past as distant as the English Renaissance, the line between hard truth and embellishment can be dodgy. According to James Shapiro’s “A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare: 1599,” the other major new Shakespeare hardcover to come out this fall, conventional biographies are fueled by our “fantasies of who we want Shakespeare to be.” To avoid what he calls the form’s endemic fictional “excesses,” Shapiro sticks to a watershed year in the playwright’s artistic development, “focusing on what can be known with greater confidence: the ‘form and pressure’ of the time that shaped Shakespeare’s writing when he was thirty-five years old.”

Ackroyd, by contrast, feels the sources are there to back up his cradle-to-grave dramatization. “There are certain dark areas of his past which you cannot decipher, but the plot of his life is pretty clear,” he contends. “You can more or less make a coherent narrative out of it.”

Work, work, work

TWO research assistants, acknowledged in the book, helped out with the grunt work. Still, that left an enormous amount of reading and writing for Ackroyd. His description of a typical London workday suggests a monastic rigor: “I get up at 8, start working about 8:30, writing my fiction in longhand at home,” he says. “Then I go to my office in Bloomsbury, which is about five miles away, where I’ll begin writing on the computer the nonfiction. Then after that, reading for the next book, finishing about 6:30, walking home, having dinner and going to bed.”

Social life doesn’t interest him, not even the prospect of taking in a Shakespeare play. “I did see a rather good performance of Kevin Spacey in ‘Richard II’ recently at the Old Vic,” he says. “But on the whole I’ve discovered that when you go to a Shakespearean performance in England, half the audience doesn’t know what’s going on. They can’t follow it, especially the comedies. The language is too difficult, too witty, too elusive. People speak too fast and the plot is almost completely incomprehensible. I think the best way these days to try to understand Shakespeare is to read him.”

Where does Ackroyd place his Shakespeare book in his own voluminous oeuvre? “I suppose looking retrospectively, it was the obvious final goal,” he says. “I certainly wouldn’t be writing any long biographies after this one, because this is just the end. What is that phrase, the immovable object meeting the irresistible force? Well, I’d hardly call myself irresistible; but it was in the nature of things that this would happen, a sort of subsequent collision -- everything went up in the air and came back to earth, and poof.”

Would it perhaps have been more accurate to call the book “Shakespeare: Another Biography”?

The grandiose subtitle, Ackroyd explains, was simply a “borrowing” from his earlier work “London: The Biography,” and wasn’t intended as a statement of definitiveness. He stresses repeatedly that he has no interest in establishing himself as an expert. “I come to the subject of my books from a position of almost ignorance,” he says. “I come to them fresh, because I want to learn about them.”