Will Power

William Shakespeare

His Life and Work

Anthony Holden

(Abacus, 2016)

Just now William Shakespeare is everywhere, hardly surprising in the year
marking the four hundredth anniversary of his death. The result is
something like a tsunami of hagiography with everything from
scholarly appraisals to the most fatuously opportunistic of cash ins
pouring from the presses.

Amidst all the noise and pageantry it is, surprisingly, possible to lose
sight of how little we know about Shakespeare the man. Thankfully
this reissue of Anthony Holden's 1999 biography brings together what
little we do know in a single concise volume.

He walks with the skill of a high-wire artiste the fine line between
academic rigour and introducing people to Shakespeare who may only
ever have previously encountered him through the dry rote learning
of a school syllabus, an experience that deliberately or not builds
up preconceptions and reader resistance.

He fixes Shakespeare firmly in his time, a period when the theatres
springing up on the banks of the Thames represented a step change in
how human beings understood their existence and expressed their
creativity to match any experiment being carried out in Silicon
Valley today. Only here the intelligence was anything but artificial
and was, mostly, focussed in the mind of one remarkable man with an
ability to cut to the heart of what it is to be human seldom seen
since.

Holden tells concisely the story of how the young William, born to
illiterate but ambitious parents in Stratford upon Avon rose from
provincial obscurity to become the first great English playwright. He
deals with issues such as his possible early Catholicism and the
'lost' years at the start of his career in a way that recognises the
controversies, without getting hung up on tired conspiracy theories.

Throughout he applies an admirably close reading of the thing that matters most,
Shakespeare's remarkable body of work, from the early rough comedies
through the history plays to the tragic masterpieces of his late
career. In the process he reveals and communicates scholarly insights
without ever talking down to his readers from the lofty heights of
literary criticism.

This is both a well written single volume biography and a splendid
introduction to the plays of one of the world's greatest writers.