The Wall Street Journal-20080216-WEEKEND JOURNAL- Books- Shakespeare- Center Stage- What-s in a name- The catalyst for speculation and even some advice

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WEEKEND JOURNAL; Books: Shakespeare, Center Stage; What's in a name? The catalyst for speculation and even some advice

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OF MAKING BOOKS about Shakespeare, there is no end. As Macbeth cried in other circumstances, "What, will the line stretch out to th' crack of doom?" There will always be critics and editors and literary historians, all busily panning for the least glint of gold to make their fortune, but the wonder of the Shakespeare industry is that still so little is known for sure about the man himself. Recent works by Peter Ackroyd ("Shakespeare: The Biography"), Stephen Greenblatt ("Will in the World") and James Shapiro ("A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare") have confidently portrayed the richness of the Elizabethan and Jacobean context but have varied in their guesses about what Will was actually doing. To write about Shakespeare the man is to hypothesize and extrapolate.

And Charles Nicholl's "The Lodger Shakespeare" (Viking, 378 pages, $26.95) is a triumph of extrapolation. The facts are these: In 1909, a dogged researcher at the Public Record Office in London found documents relating to a 1612 lawsuit in which Shakespeare was a witness; he signed a brief deposition attesting that a fellow lodger at the Mountjoy house in Silver Street, in London, had been promised a dowry that was never paid. In another deposition, a maidservant refers to "one Mr Shakespeare that laye in the house." This is about as close as verifiable history brings us to the elusive one; slender as it is, it's much less equivocal evidence than, say, the line in Shakespeare's will that bequeaths to his wife his "second best bed."

From this prosaic material, Mr. Nicholl moves "into the little world of Silver Street, and to Shakespeare's living presence within it," even to Shakespeare's possible state of mind and the plays it engendered in his two or three Silver Street years. Those plays quite likely included "Measure for Measure," one of the group of "awkward, paradoxical, noirish works" that are known as the "problem plays." Mr. Nicholl finds in it a certain bleakness of outlook with regard to sexual innocence and fidelity. Perhaps it was something about the louche Silver Street establishment that caused the "blurred, faintly unwholesome" tone of this play -- and even of "Othello," which may also have been composed there.

But then, the Mountjoys, Shakespeare's landlords, were not only French -- and therefore suspicious aliens -- but also "tiremakers," artisans who created headdresses and periwigs for the theater and for people of fashion. On both counts, the Mountjoys were on the outskirts of respectability -- a bit too close to low life and the theatrical subculture, "the great growth-industries of leisure and pleasure which give Jacobean London its rackety boom-town aura." No wonder Mr. Nicholl descants on the "dodgy glamour [of] the Mountjoys' shop, above which Shakespeare sits writing his mirthless comedy [i.e., "Measure for Measure"] about a city obsessed and corrupted with sex -- a city he calls 'Vienna' but which is really London."

Though Mr. Nicholl's leaps of conjecture can strain credulity, he knows a thing or two about literary sleuthing, where nothing ventured is nothing gained. (He is the author of the acclaimed "The Reckoning: The Murder of Christopher Marlowe.") Like detective work itself, "The Lodger Shakespeare" is sometimes tiresome but often rewarding.

In "Shakespeare: The World as Stage" (Atlas/Harper, 199 pages, $19.95), Bill Bryson meets the obvious question with disarming frankness. Why another book on Shakespeare? "Not so much because the world needs another . . . as because this series does" -- the Eminent Lives series of brief biographies for the general reader. The challenge here: "to see how much of Shakespeare we can know, really know, from the record. Which is one reason, of course," Mr. Bryson adds, that his book is "so slender."

This nimble biography addresses all the evidence and most of the questions that every Shakespeare biographer must account for. We still don't know with any certainty about Shakespeare's religion or the nature of his marriage or how he spent the "lost years" before his presence in London can be firmly documented. What we have of him is "little more than a series of occasional sightings" and a few portraits of questionable authenticity. "We all recognize a likeness of Shakespeare the instant we see one, and yet we don't really know what he looked like."

We do know quite a lot about Elizabethan and Jacobean theater. Mr. Bryson is a versatile journalist with an eye for detail; especially colorful is his description of the "insanely busy" modus operandi of the acting companies. "To prosper, a theater in London needed to draw as many as two thousand spectators a day. . . . To keep customers coming back . . . most companies performed at least five different plays in a week, sometimes six," and playwrights scrambled to supply material. Forget artistic transcendence: In a profession conducted at top speed, "reliability was paramount." This is a useful measure when Mr. Bryson considers Shakespeare and Marlowe as rivals for Best Poet. The intemperate Marlowe, who died at 29 in a tavern fight, was unlikely to reach "a wise and productive middle age. Shakespeare had a disposition built for the long haul."

To the extent that they mention the problem of authorship, Messrs. Nicholl and Bryson are both "Stratfordians" -- that is, they assume that "Shakespeare" was the man from Stratford and not Francis Bacon or the Earl of Oxford or the queen herself. For most of us ordinary folk, the authorship wars are irrelevant, "skimble-skamble stuff" (in Hotspur's phrase), and "Shakespeare" means interchangeably the man and his works. In this conviction, one might consult the Royal Shakespeare Company edition of the "Complete Works" (Modern Library, 2,485 pages, $65) published last year. This princely volume weighs four pounds, 12.8 ounces, according to the post-office scales. The excellent general introduction by Jonathan Bate and the essays and notes on each play are not only a feast of literary and historical information. They're also a reminder that Shakespeare was an actor, writing for actors; the plays are, above all, scripts.

"Where There's a Will There's a Way" (Perigee, 214 pages, $12.95) is an odd little book. Laurie Maguire, the author, teaches English literature at Oxford, where perhaps her colleagues are rolling their eyes: She describes it as both "a self-help book that draws its illustrative material from Shakespeare" and "an introduction to Shakespeare in the guise of a genre we all understand: self-help." Once you've got past Ms. Maguire's view of Shakespeare as "my very own life coach," once you've set aside the narcissism of its premise ("the entire Shakespeare canon is a course in Finding Oneself 101"), the book offers sensible thoughts about relationships with family, friends, colleagues and lovers. The central text is Kent's injunction to King Lear: "See better." In practice, this means imagining yourself in the other person's position, an exercise that it is hard to find fault with.

The plays abound in illustrative material, whether you're coping with unrequited love (Helen in "All's Well") or mourning (Hamlet) or anger (Hotspur and Iago). Troilus is a glib, self-absorbed Mr. Wrong. Coriolanus has a memorable identity problem, being "to Rome what tofu is to recipes," assuming different political flavors as needed. Ms. Maguire finds the Shakespeare canon unequivocally clear about the importance of family ties. "Family tensions needn't create a dysfunctional family. Shakespeare says: go home tonight and tell your family that you love them" -- presumably not in quite the way the Lear family went about it.

Some readers will be put off by Ms. Maguire's chummy, gee-whiz tone ("'Ontology' is the science of being. It is a science we all pursue every day!"). But if you've read very little Shakespeare, "Where There's a Will" is a good literary introduction. It might even bring you to see Will as a poet and playwright rather than a life coach. Thus fortified, you'll be ready for next year's crop of books about Shakespeare -- whoever he was.

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Ms. Taliaferro is a writer in New York.