Peter Ackroyd: Seeing Shakespeare before you

Peter Ackroyd, prolific novelist and biographer, includes among his previous subjects Charles Dickens, Thomas More and William Blake. In approaching Shakespeare, he draws on biographical records that are notoriously threadbare, but he has placed our greatest writer in the context of a vividly recreated Elizabethan and Jacobean world.

"I approached this in the way I have done all my other biographies: by reading everything available on the life and career, and trying to make sense of it. Not by looking at it academically, but by imagining the life in as sympathetic manner as I could.

"The way I work is to examine not only the facts about the individual life, but also the circumstances surrounding it--in the case of Shakespeare, such details as the life of the theatre, the place of actors and the way they lived, the lives of London publishers and printers.

"Very little is known personally about Thomas More either. It never struck me as a problem. By an act of sympathetic or imaginative identification, I think it's possible to enter the lives of people in more interesting ways than are normally envisaged.

"I suppose that there must be some affiliation that attracts me to all my subjects, but I don't know exactly what it is--except that they're all paramount figures in literature. But the English imagination is one element that's important. I wrote a book called Albion, which had a chapter on Shakespeare, so it seems that my exploration of Englishness had led me to him.

"I try to explain in the book that Shakespeare was probably above beliefs or convictions of any particular kind. He was not partisan; as far as one can tell, he was not engaged in the battles of public life.

"As to the vexed question of religion, it remains profoundly ambiguous. It's probable that he had no religion at all. There seems little doubt--though some scholars question it--that his parents were Roman Catholic, and that his immediate sympathies were with the old faith.

Whether that means he was a Catholic is another question. It's quite likely that he didn't take his religion into his adulthood with him--he certainly didn't take it into his writing.

"My novels and non-fiction must feed off each other. For me, there's no distinction to be made between the activities, and the books are complementary. In fiction, you can represent that collision between past and present. In the biographies, I and the reader, I hope, find that the past and present come together in a kind of imaginative unity, so that it's possible for the reader to understand the world of Shakespeare as if he or she were, in a sense, present within it.

"When you're writing, your subject is very vivid: you think that you see him in front of you. Immediately after you've finished the book, there's always a slight sense of disappointment that it's over; and then, in retrospect, the book and subject leave you.

It's like reading a book by another person. You think you know the person you're describing; but, when the writing is done, you're not so sure.

"I've been reading and rereading Shakespeare's plays for a long time. When I wrote Albion I read and reread them again, and of course I read and reread them again for this biography. I suppose it's a common thing for biographers to say about their subjects, but in the case of Shakespeare it's undoubtedly true: he doesn't stale."

Nicholas Clee

Peter Ackroyd

Shakespeare (Chatto&Windus, 1st September, £25, 1856197263)