Foreword

      A FEW YEARS AGO, a kindly New York publisher named James Atlas approached me out of the blue and asked me if I would like to write a biography for a series of books he was launching, to be called Eminent Lives.

      Each book in the series was to be about forty thousand words, considerably less than half the length of a conventional biography. The idea was that each book would be long enough to have some substance while yet remaining concise.

      James sent me a list of the subjects that had already been assigned. I was disappointed to find that nearly all the figures that jumped to my mind as candidates had already been taken. It was only when I went through the list a second time that I realized that no one had selected William Shakespeare, and impetuously I offered to take him on. To my surprise, and slight subsequent panic, James readily assented.

      I hardly need point out that I am not a Shakespearean authority, but luckily Britain is full of people who are, and prudently I turned to them. The book that follows has almost nothing to do with what I think of William Shakespeare (though I admire him very much, of course), but is instead about what I learned of William Shakespeare from people who have spent lifetimes studying and thinking about him. I remain immensely grateful to them all, in particular to the great and scholarly Stanley Wells, now retired as chairman of the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust.

      What is perhaps most extraordinary about William Shakespeare, bearing in mind that he has been dead for four hundred years, is how lively his world remains. Hardly a month goes by that there isn’t some fairly momentous claim or discovery relating to his life or work – never more so perhaps than in 2015 when a South African academic named Francis Thackeray suggested that Shakespeare may have filled the bowl of his little clay pipe with marijuana and possibly even cocaine. The assertion is based on an analysis of pipe remains found in the garden of New Place, Shakespeare’s last home in Stratford-upon-Avon. Never mind that nobody knows whether Shakespeare ever actually smoked a pipe or whether the pipe fragments belonged to him or his gardener or someone who owned the property later. Still, if it turns out that anybody in Elizabethan England was smoking cannabis and cocaine, that would be arresting news indeed, and it has to be said that no one would have examined the pipe fragments so fastidiously had there not been a Shakespeare connection.

      Three other rather more notable events have bounced into the world of Shakespearean scholarship since this volume was first published and should perhaps be mentioned here. The most exciting – not to say incendiary – was the announcement in 2009 by the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust that it had acquired a new and definitive portrait of William Shakespeare.

      Called the Cobbe portrait, it is the work of an unknown artist, and shows a youthful, rather dashing man of healthy complexion, dapper attire and a keen air of intelligence