Shakespeare’s body of work displays a tremendous creative personality, yet the man remains an enigma. This has prompted generations of his admirers to ask: what was Shakespeare like?

‘He was a very dark, confused man,’ says David Suchet, a fine actor who has performed in many of Shakespeare’s plays.

It’s an interesting comment and ties in well with one of the presumed portraits of the poet—the so-called Chandos painting, which depicts a rather swarthy, wild-haired but melancholy buccaneer with a gold earring. Nevertheless the features are reasonably similar to the better-authenticated likeness, the engraving in the First Folio by Martin Droeshout. It’s generally agreed that whether or not the Droeshout ikeness is a good one, the engraving itself is somewhat inept. It was not made during Shakespeare’s lifetime so is presumably based on an earlier portrait which has since been lost. It has also been suggested that it depicts Shakespeare in one of his many acting roles. What expression there is suggests an alert mind and a sly sense of humour.

All the surviving accounts of his personality (apart from Robert Greene’s bilious attack) describe an amicable, modest, temperate and disciplined artist—‘gentle Shakespeare’, ‘Sweet Mr Shakespeare’, ‘he would not be debauched’, ‘he was of an honest, free and open nature’, etc. But in the light of David Suchet’s comment, does the above estimation seem too bland, too unruffled, for a mind that could conceive and express such volcanic emotions, such despair, black cynicism, heart-rending jealousy and vituperative sexual disgust?

It is true that some geniuses seem to have led fairly uneventful, pedestrian lives: Johann Sebastian Bach, father of a large family, plodding off to work each day and at the end of every week delivering yet another mighty cantata; the urbane, patient, hen-pecked Josef Haydn; the handsome, successful diplomat, Peter Paul Rubens . . . But more often works of great genius are accompanied by stormy temperaments, bouts of self-doubt, fiery altercations, moodiness and introspection. From where inside himself did Shakespeare dredge up the envy and malignity of Iago, the insane jealousy of Leontes, the sexual revulsion of Lear?

Even in his earliest plays there is a grim humour in his acknowledgment that the heavens are empty, that we inhabit a meaningless universe. To redeem the lives of his two sons, the old Titus Andronicus has just had his hand chopped off. He prays:

O here I lift this one hand up to heaven,

And bow this feeble ruin to the earth;

If any power pity wretched tears,

To that I call . . .

Almost immediately his severed hand is returned in mockery, along with the heads of his sons. His reaction:

If there were reason for these miseries,

Then into limits could I bind my woes.

This bleak vision of the cosmos is echoed in Gloucester’s:

As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods,

They kill us for their sport.

It finds its ultimate expression in the most nihilistic statement in all of Shakespeare, spoken by Macbeth:

Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player

That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,

And then is heard no more. It is a tale

Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,

Signifying nothing.

So, is that what Shakespeare believed? You’d be tempted to think so, given the finality and relish of the language.

But against it you have to weigh Hamlet, facing death, who informs us that ‘there is providence in the fall of a sparrow’ and that ‘there is a Divinity that shapes our ends, rough-hew them how we will’.

Did Shakespeare, at various times, subscribe to both of these philosophical points of view? Or should we simply fall back on the reality that before he was a dramatist, Shakespeare was first and foremost and always an actor—if not a great one, certainly one with the most extreme sensibility and such empathy that he was able to imagine himself a fourteen-year-old girl, a crazy old man, a malignant Machiavel or an anguished mass-murderer? I am convinced that only a consummate actor could have written the roles of Hamlet and Richard III.

He didn’t have to believe anything—all he had to know was what his characters believed and his imagination would take him there. I think that the best actors are the ones who are most open to suggestion, who allow themselves to be vulnerable, who are willing to access all their emotions without fear, shame or embarrassment, who are prepared to tell the truth about themselves, are non-judgmental and are able to empathise so fully and easily with others that they can take on characters’ emotional situations as their own. This is what we strive for; and as you get older, more confident, and learn to let go of inhibitions, affectations, mannerisms and things to hide behind, you become more of an actor, or rather a re-actor, listening to what’s happening and letting it carry you where it will. The readiness is all.

This is the acting talent that Shakespeare undoubtedly possessed. The rest is all research. We know that Shakespeare was a prodigious reader. Titus Andronicus is a show-off display of his acquaintance with Ovid and classical references. He devoured the histories of Plutarch, Holinshed and Hall, the Geneva Bible, of course, and research material as diverse as A Geographical History of Africa for Othello and A Discovery of the Bermudas—Otherwise called the Isle of Divels for The Tempest.

These were the keys that unlocked his imagination. I know from my own experience as an actor how necessary research is to get the motor ticking over. I’ve played Macbeth twice and Richard III three times and on each occasion have scoured book and film libraries for material on Hitler, Stalin and other murderous psychopaths. For the Bell Shakespeare 1994 production of Macbeth my wife and I, who were playing the unholy couple, explored the murky depths of thrill killers and child killers like Ian Brady and Myra Hindley—a very unpleasant experience, but rewarding. I sought expert advice from psychiatrists for both Richard III and Leontes. And I undertook extensive research for Shylock—visiting the homes of various Jewish families, attending religious services, observing and listening to Jewish businessmen, and studying the history of European Jewry.

All of this just helps you feel closer to the character, gives you the confidence to claim some sense of ownership of the role. To this research you add the other ingredients that make up your performance—observations of behaviour from real-life role models or (let’s face it) from other performers, and all the emotional memories you can muster plus a very large dollop of imagining what it would be like to be that character in that situation. Obviously, the more research you’ve done, and the closer you are in age, temperament and life experience to your role, the easier the transformation will be.

So, given we know a fair bit about what research Shakespeare did, and given we know he had an extraordinary imagination and capacity for emotional empathy, that leaves the question: ‘What did he actually feel?’ Let’s hazard a few guesses . . .

It’s a fair guess that he was well acquainted with sexual desire. If you enter into marriage at the age of eighteen with a woman who is six years your senior, and she is pregnant, that smacks of sexual impetuosity.

His plays and poems consistently convey a robust sexuality, frequently bordering on the erotic, as in Venus and Adonis, for instance. His sexuality is frank, joyful and ninety per cent heterosexual. It has caused previous generations to blush and excise passages from stage presentations and school textbooks. The sex is frequently bawdy, sometimes downright obscene (some of the brothel scenes in Measure for Measure and Pericles spring to mind). So it seems pretty clear that Shakespeare enjoyed dirty jokes, that he knew his way around the brothels and enjoyed an active sex life. His wife Anne bore him three children but he was away in London or touring the provinces for a very large percentage of his married life. Scuttlebutt such as John Manningham’s anecdote about Shakespeare and Burbage both pursuing the same damsel in the name of Richard III was widely accepted, as was the Poet Laureate William Davenant’s claim that he was Shakespeare’s bastard. Other women’s names were linked with his: the various claimants to be the Dark Lady of the sonnets (including Emilia Bassano, Lucy Negro and Mary Mountjoy, the wife of his landlord in Silver Street, Cripplegate).

Many of the Comedies, poems and songs trumpet the joy of sex, as in this song from As You Like It:

And therefore take the present time

With a hey and a ho and a hey-nonny-no

For love is crowned with the prime

In spring time, in spring time

The only pretty ring time

When birds do sing, hey ding-a-ding ding

Sweet lovers love the spring.

But Shakespeare also has a remarkable facility for expressing sexual disgust. The sonnets run the gamut of desire from flirtation to bawdry to a repudiation of lust:

The expense of spirit in a waste of shame

Is lust in action . . .

All this the world well knows, yet none knows well

To avoid the heaven that leads men to this hell.

There are also, in the sonnets, expressions of regret for infidelities:

Alas ’tis true, I have gone here and there,

And made myself a motley to the view,

Gored my own thoughts, sold cheap what is most dear,

Made old offences of affections new . . .

Nowhere is sexual revulsion more graphically depicted than in the mad Lear’s raving against women:

But to the girdle do the gods inherit,

The rest is all the fiends’.

There’s hell, there’s darkness,

There is the sulphurous pit, burning, scalding, stench, consumption.

Fie, fie, fie! pah, pah!

But we find an earlier echo of this in Hamlet’s repudiation of women in general:

I have heard of your paintings well enough.

God hath given you one face, and you make yourselves another.

You jig, and you amble and you lisp,

And nickname God’s creatures,

And make your wantonness your ignorance.

Both passages are remarkable not just for their vehemence but for their excess in the given circumstances. Poor Ophelia hardly deserves to be lambasted with this tirade; all she has done is return Hamlet’s love letters according to her father’s instruction. Hamlet’s real target is his mother and her o’er-hasty marriage. He feels jealousy and revulsion (and maybe a touch of envy?) at the thought of her ‘seamed sheets’, of her ‘making love over the nasty sty’ and of her lover ‘paddling with his damned fingers in thy neck’ and calling her ‘his mouse’.

Lear’s rage at his daughters’ ingratitude is aimed not at their hard hearts but their sexual appetites (or, rather, his fantastical imaginings of the same) and their reproductive organs:

Hear, Nature, hear dear goddess, hear:

Suspend thy purpose, if thou didst intend

To make this creature fruitful.

Into her womb convey sterility . . .

So I think it’s fair enough to say that Shakespeare must have personally known something of regret and sexual disgust to tap into such an extremity of feeling.

Given these polarities of sexual delight and revulsion, how about the middle ground of constancy, and contented married life? What does Shakespeare have to say about ‘true love’?

I don’t think any other writer has written more extensively about love, in all its manifestations, or represented it so iconically. Ask the man in the street to name the world’s greatest lovers, and if he doesn’t say ‘Romeo and Juliet’ he will tell you ‘Antony and Cleopatra’ (via Shakespeare, not Plutarch).

Romeo and Juliet represent sexual romantic love in its rapturous adolescence, virginal (on her part, at least) yet with an instinctive knowingness:

. . . Come, civil night, thou sober-suited matron, all in black,

And learn me how to lose a winning match play’d for a pair of stainless maidenhoods.

Hood my unmann’d blood, bating in my cheeks,

With thy black mantle, till strange love grow bold,

Think true love acted simple modesty.

Teenage love dares all and knows no bounds:

I am no pilot, yet wert thou as far

As that vast shore wash’d with the farthest sea,

I should adventure for such merchandise.

The rapture of love in middle age is just as excessive, reckless and careless of consequence, as demonstrated by Antony and Cleopatra:

Let Rome in Tiber melt, and the wide arch

Of the ranged empire fall! Here is my space.

Kingdoms are clay; our dungy earth alike

Feeds beast as man: the nobleness of life

Is to do thus [embracing].

But as well as this robust heterosexual love in youth and middle age, there are many more shades of love in Shakespeare: we see in Twelfth Night the foppish self-indulgence of Orsino, who imagines himself a ‘true lover’, contrasted with the dumb, pining adoration of Viola, who cannot declare her genuine love for her master. But in her male disguise she is able to comment on Orsino’s shallowness:

We men may say more, swear more, but indeed

Our shows are more than will: for still we prove

Much in our vows, but little in our love.

And in the same play, that mad carousel of passion, we have the nerdy, smitten Aguecheek and lonely sexual fantasist Malvolio, the devoted homosexual Antonio pursuing the boy Sebastian, the Sapphic overtones of Olivia’s lust for ‘Cesario’ and Orsino’s entanglement with his boy/girl page set against the domesticity of Maria’s patient devotion to the reprobate Sir Toby. All of these are observed by the caustic clown Feste, who has seen it all before:

But when, alas, I came to wive . . .

By swaggering could I never thrive.

Twelfth Night is something of a compendium of Shakespeare’s commentaries on love and in it we find echoes of his narrative poems, his sonnets and pretty well all his plays.

You don’t have to be a parent to feel tenderness towards children, but Shakespeare’s work is outstanding for its delight in children and the pathos that often attends their young lives. There is nothing to suggest he was anything other than a loving father to his daughters Susanna and Judith and his son Hamnet, who died at the age of eleven. King John, written around this time, would seem to reflect the father’s grief. Philip the Bastard watches Hubert pick up the body of young Prince Arthur and exclaims:

How easy dost thou take all England up!

From forth this morsel of dead royalty,

The life, the right and truth of all this realm

Is fled to heaven . . .

Constance, the prince’s mother, laments in words that are so graphic, so particular, it’s hard to believe they do not stem from personal experience:

Grief fills the room up of my absent child,

Lies in his bed, walks up and down with me,

Puts on his pretty looks, repeats his words,

Remembers me of all his gracious parts,

Stuffs out his vacant garments with his form;

Then have I reason to be fond of grief . . .

O Lord, my boy, my Arthur, my fair son,

My life, my joy, my food, my all the world.

My widow-comfort, and my sorrow’s cure!

The children in Shakespeare are usually precocious, which gives him great delight. To modern ears they often seem too precocious and need to be played with a deal of charm to offset their smarts. I’m thinking of the younger of the two princes in Richard III, little Mamillius in The Winter’s Tale, Moth in Love’s Labour’s Lost and the young Macduff in Macbeth.

The horror of infanticide is a card that Shakespeare plays again and again. If we have any admiration for Richard III or Macbeth, it is extinguished by their murders of children. And in the midst of the battle of Agincourt in Henry V, with knights and soldiers being slaughtered in their thousands, the action is brought to a halt while Gower and Fluellen lament the killing of the baggage boys—the ultimate war crime.

Shakespeare’s apparent soft-heartedness extends from children to animals, again to an unusual degree. Hunting was a universal pastime in Shakespeare’s England, ranging from the courtly sport of coursing deer, boar and all forms of bird life to the peasants’ more needy foraging for fish and conies. Shakespeare, as a country man, was well acquainted with all forms of hunting and trapping wildlife, but he shows no relish for it, nor for the cruel sports of bear- and bull-baiting, which were acted out within earshot of the Globe.

There is a rather remarkable speech by one of the foresters in As You Like It, describing a stricken deer:

Under an oak, whose antique root peeps out

Upon the brook that brawls along this wood,

To the which place a poor sequest’red stag

That from the hunter’s aim had ta’en a hurt

Did come to languish; and indeed, my lord,

The wretched animal heaved forth such groans

That their discharge did stretch his leathern coat

Almost to bursting, and the big round tears

Coursed one another down his innocent nose

In piteous chase . . .

As a child Shakespeare must have taken an intense interest in the animals, birds, flowers and plants of his native Warwickshire.

In Venus and Adonis, the goddess promises the boy that if he gives her just one kiss, she will stop pestering him:

Upon this promise did he raise his chin,

Like a divedapper peering through a wave

Who, being looked on, ducks as quickly in—

So offers he to give what she did crave.

But when her lips were ready for his pay,

He winks, and turns his lips another way.

Of this passage, René Weis remarks in his book Shakespeare Revealed:

It is one thing to read about the dive-dapper ‘peering through a wave,’ and ducking in when ‘being looked on’—in Venus and Adonis—but to spot a little grebe or dive-dapper on a pond or in a still corner of the Avon enhances the imaginative life of the image. The only way Shakespeare could have learnt to keep ducks apart from grebes, to know that one of the dive-dapper’s characteristics was its extreme shyness, was through patient bird-watching on the river, through living close to nature in a way that is increasingly rare today (p. 17).

Peter Ackroyd, in his excellent Shakespeare: The Biography, expands further on this theme:

No poet besides Chaucer has celebrated with such sweetness the enchantment of birds, whether it be the lark ascending or the little grebe diving, the plucky wren or the serene swan. He mentions some sixty species in total. He knows, for example, that the martlet builds its nest on exposed walls. Of the singing birds he notices the thrush and the ousel or blackbird. More ominous are the owl and raven, the crow and maggot-pie. He knows them all and has observed their course across the sky. The spectacle of birds in flight entrances him. He cannot bear the thought of their being trapped, or caught, or snared. He loves free energy and movement, as if they were in some instinctive sympathy with his own nature (p. 31).

Shakespeare expresses a great appreciation and knowledge of horses, dogs and flowers. At the end of Love’s Labour’s Lost, the country folk sing of the changing seasons. As the cuckoo and the owl swap roles, spring meadows are decked with daisies, violets, lady smocks and cuckoo-buds. He knows about grafting and pruning, digging and dunging, in ways that would be foreign to an urban writer or aristocrat. He names over one hundred different plants, most of them the local Warwickshire varieties—the primrose, wallflower, daffodil and cowslip. And he gives them their Warwickshire names: Ophelia’s ‘crow-flowers’ and Lear’s ‘cuckoo-flowers’; he calls the pansy ‘love-in-idleness’, the whortleberry ‘bilberry’ and clover ‘honey-stalks’.

Anyone who has puzzled over the following lines from Cymbeline:

Golden Lads and Girls all must,

As Chimney-Sweepers, come to dust . . .

must understand that in Stratford the dandelion is called a ‘Golden Lad’ when it is in bloom. You blow on it, the fluff all flies away and you’re left with a bare stalk that resembles a chimney sweep’s broom. That’s life for you—one moment you’re a Golden Lad in full bloom; one breath and you’re a dead stalk.

An observant and sensitive country boy, Shakespeare understood the significance of weather in all its diverse aspects—the swift or slow succession of rain, wind and sun, fog and ice, the endless cycle of the seasons—and he translated all of this into a metaphor for the human life cycle and a spiritually charged universe of signs and omens.

Local names and references continually pop up in the plays. In the induction to The Taming of the Shrew Sly exclaims:

Am I not Christopher Sly, old Sly’s son of Burtonheath . . . Ask Marion Hacket, the fat ale-wife of Wincot, if she know me not.

Wincot is a tiny village south of Stratford and there was a Hacket family there in 1591. Burtonheath is Burton-on-the-Heath, where Shakespeare’s relatives lived.

Peto, Bardolph and Fluellen are all names that appear alongside John Shakespeare in a lawsuit, while Shakespeare’s school friend and subsequent publisher, Richard Field, gets a special mention. An expert in foreign-language books, Field would often put his own name on the title page in the corresponding language. For instance, he called himself ‘Richardo del Campo’ in his publication of several Spanish books. Making a joke of this, Shakespeare invents a name in Cymbeline for ‘a very valiant Briton’ who has fought the Roman invaders (Field had printed many books of anti-Catholic propaganda). He calls him ‘Richard Du Champ’.

Shakespeare never forgot his country origins. He never attempted to write a ‘city comedy’ like his contemporaries Ben Jonson, Thomas Dekker, Thomas Middleton or Philip Massinger. The closest he comes to that genre is The Merry Wives of Windsor, which is set, significantly, not in London but in a small country town not unlike Stratford-upon-Avon.

There is no doubt he was driven by a considerable personal ambition. His being snubbed by the likes of Greene and other ‘University Wits’ reminded him that he was considered a rustic who spoke and spelled with a Warwickshire twang. This may help explain his empathy with the outsiders, the marginalised ones: Othello, Caliban, Shylock. Just as Hamlet is more at ease with common soldiers, gravediggers and actors than he is with foppish courtiers like Osric, Shakespeare delights in the warmth and humanity of commoners and country folk who expose the shallowness of their social superiors. We side with the honest artisans attempting to perform Pyramus and Thisbe and resent the sarcastic comments of their aristocratic audience. The exercise is repeated at the end of Love’s Labour’s Lost, when the rustic folk put on a show of The Nine Worthies for the ladies and gentlemen of the court and have to endure their sneers and jibes. How much of this had Shakespeare the player endured when performing for Their Majesties? You can’t help feeling he would much prefer to be in the pub with Falstaff than in the cold and cheerless court of Westminster.

Determined to restore his family’s name and fortunes after his father’s fall from grace, he worked indefatigably, refusing to mix it with the lads and going home after performances to write for the next day’s rehearsals. Between 1600 and 1607 he wrote ten plays, including Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth and Antony and Cleopatra. Most years he produced at least two or three plays, and all this time he was acting, touring, helping to run the Globe and attending to domestic matters in Stratford.

He assiduously courted aristocratic connections and patronage and was determined to achieve a coat of arms—though not for himself, it should be noted, but for his father. The roles he assumed on stage were usually those of kings and dukes, and he wanted to be known as a gentleman. Like Burbage, Heminges, Condell and the rest of his troupe, he was keen to throw off the ‘rogue and vagabond’ image of the actor and establish his craft as a respectable profession. (The first actor to be knighted was Henry Irving, but that was a couple of hundred years later.) This desire for respectability may have driven his acquisitiveness. He was frugal, prudent and shrewd in his property investments, and was accused of hoarding malt in one of his barns in Stratford in order to force the price up.

He was apparently pleasant and witty company, and obviously enjoyed the society of women. The women in his plays are never sentimentalised or soppy like the heroines of Victorian drama. Early on some of his women are shrews and vixens, like Joan La Pucelle in Henry VI: Part 1, Katharina in The Taming of the Shrew, Tamora in Titus Andronicus and Margaret in King Henry VI: Part 2. Then we get the sharp and witty ladies like Beatrice in Much Ado About Nothing and the Rosaline of Love’s Labour’s Lost. Next we have the warm-hearted lovely heroines who assume a male disguise—Rosalind in As You Like It, Viola in Twelfth Night and Portia in The Merchant of Venice. And we finish up with heroines who are almost idealised figures of devotion, patience and chastity: Othello’s Desdemona, Lear’s Cordelia and The Winter’s Tale’s Hermione. Looming over them all is that most feminine and complex creation, Cleopatra: irresistible in her wit and sensuality; formidable in her rages, whims and imperiousness.

And then there is a gallery of wonderful character sketches of older women, marvellous creations like Juliet’s nurse, Mistress Quickly, Volumnia in Coriolanus and the Countess of Roussillon in All’s Well That Ends Well, great character roles for middle-aged male actors. (The pantomime Dame and men in drag are part of a long and illustrious tradition.)

Shakespeare’s love of and fascination with women is evident everywhere. So are some of his dislikes. He has no time for puritans, time-servers, hypocrites, pedants or stuffed shirts. These are the constant butts of his jokes and satire.

The above is a picture of a mature Shakespeare—discreet, industrious, respectable and socially aspirational. His youth may have been a bit wilder. (Is there a hint of this in a speech by the old shepherd in The Winter’s Tale? ‘I would there were no age between ten and three-and-twenty, or that youth would sleep out the rest; for there is nothing in the between but getting wenches with child, wronging the ancientry, stealing, fighting . . .’) He certainly learned to govern his youthful impulses, but it’s likely that his character contained both the pragmatist and the scapegrace—a Hal and Falstaff in one.

His experience as an actor was of enormous value to his craft as a playwright. He knew that a play is more than just the text; that gesture, silence, significant images could be as eloquent as words. In short, he knew what to leave out . . . He knew what he could leave to the actors. One of the most marvellous moments in Antony and Cleopatra occurs towards the very end of the play. Cleopatra has committed suicide and her devoted companion Charmian follows her. A shocked Roman guard discovers her and exclaims:

What work is here! Charmian, is this well done?

To which the dying Egyptian maid replies:

It is well done, and fitting for a princess descended of so many royal kings. Ah, soldier! [Charmian dies]

That ‘Ah, soldier!’ is an inspired piece of writing and a gift for any actress. What does she mean? She could mean any number of things:

Ah, soldier, if only you understood the greatness of Cleopatra and how much I loved her . . .

Ah, soldier, if only you had witnessed the love affair of these two great spirits . . .

Ah, soldier, you are young and handsome. What might have been, but now it is too late: I am dying . . .

The actress playing Charmian can make of those words anything she wants and evoke a pathos that goes beyond language.

Charmian was probably played by the young actor Alexander (Sander) Cook, John Heminges’ apprentice for whom Shakespeare had written Portia, Rosalind and Olivia. He must have been a wonderful young actor. So was his friend, the small and swarthy Nick Tooley (Burbage’s apprentice), who had played the roles of Hermia, Nerissa, Celia and Viola. For him Shakespeare wrote one of his greatest roles, Cleopatra, and gave him the wonderful cadences:

O, withered is the garland of the war,

The soldier’s pole is fallen! Young boys and girls

Are level now with men. The odds is gone,

And there is nothing left remarkable

Beneath the visiting moon.

But to Sander he entrusted the words:

Ah, soldier!

Shakespeare’s greatness is so universally acknowledged and his popularity so entrenched that some people think he’s almost too good to be true. Hence the emergence of some ludicrous theories that the plays must have been written by somebody else: theories that betray a woeful ignorance of history and theatrical practice. ‘One person cannot have written so many masterpieces,’ some exclaim. In fact, Shakespeare’s output, compared to that of many artists, is reasonably small. The difference is that nearly all of his works are regularly studied and performed, whereas only three or four of those of a playwright as prolific as George Bernard Shaw have survived the test of time.

How to explain the phenomenon of Shakespeare? It’s relatively simple. To begin with, we have to accept the fact of his genius, just as we accept the genius of Mozart, Leonardo, Einstein and a few dozen others. But genius in itself is no guarantee of success, as we know:

Many a flower is born to blush unseen

And waste its sweetness on the desert air . . .

The conditions have to be right, and in Shakespeare’s case, they could hardly have been more so.

He was born in just the right place at the right time. Elizabethan England was a sturdy mercantile nation with a powerful navy, a thriving middle class, widespread literacy and a strong sense of identity that expressed itself in a bellicose adventurism. Its formidable queen enjoyed an iconic status that rubbed off on many of her acolytes: Raleigh, Drake, Sidney, Leicester and Essex. The New World was being colonised, the French and Dutch held at bay and the Spanish treasure fleets routinely plundered. Having thrown off the yoke of Rome, England had its own national Church headed by its own Blessed Virgin, Elizabeth. Despite the spectres of espionage, trial by torture and repression of religious freedom, it was considered a glorious time to be an Englishman, especially after the defeat of the great Spanish Armada. National pride and patriotic fervour knew no bounds and people eagerly sought expression for them in song, poetry and drama.

The English language, too, was at last coming into its own, despite the efforts of classicists like Francis Bacon to curtail it. The court now spoke English instead of French (though Elizabeth herself was proficient in seven languages, including Hebrew). The Bible had at last been wrenched from the hands of the clergy and translated from Latin, encouraging not only universal readership but personal interpretation. There were rules of grammar to be sure, but as yet no dictionary, so the precise meaning of words was variable, as was their pronunciation. What a word meant, how you spelled it and how you pronounced it depended on where you came from.

Shakespeare spoke and spelled with a Warwickshire accent and uses many words, phrases and references peculiar to his native Stratford. Queen Elizabeth and many of her court spoke with a cockney twang and the actors on the stage of the Globe spoke in a wide variety of dialects; there was no one ‘correct’ standard accent.

New words were coined with an intoxicating profligacy, Shakespeare himself one of the prime contributors. Public speaking, oratory and preaching were among the most prized and important of a man’s attributes, and little wonder: in an age before newspapers, radio or television, the words of town criers and public proclamations could be a matter of life and death. And as for sermons—why, your immortal soul depended on them.

It was a highly litigious age, and boys like Shakespeare were taught at grammar school to argue all sides of an argument—in Latin! Shakespeare was quite a litigant himself (though no more so than most of his contemporaries) and had a shrewd working knowledge of the law. There is some evidence that he may have worked for a short time as a lawyer’s clerk, but his familiarity with the law was that of the average Londoner. A good proportion of his audience was made up of lawyers and students of the Inns of the Court, hence the presence of so many legal jokes and references. Twelfth Night was performed in the hall of the Middle Temple in 1602 and The Comedy of Errors at Gray’s Inn in 1594. There was no doubt a chorus of cheers and catcalls from the audience during Henry VI: Part 2 when Dick the rebel suggests: ‘First thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers!’

London was a strident, tough and energetic city. Of its population of one hundred and seventy thousand, half were under the age of twenty. High-spirited apprentices made up ten per cent.

Provincial audiences as well as Londoners had a thirst for pageantry, display and performances, and literacy was widespread enough for everyone to play a part. The honest artisans of Athens put on a play for the Duke’s wedding just as the rustics of Love’s Labour’s Lost devise a pageant to entertain the nobility.

All of this amounted to fertile ground for theatre. Now that the Reformation had done away with the Mystery and Miracle plays on biblical themes, theatre turned for its source material to the history chronicles, myths, legends, folktales and depictions of contemporary life. Theatres began to spring up all over London to cater to the hunger for entertainment—and Shakespeare arrived in London just as all this was happening! If he’d come fifty years earlier, he’d have had no theatre to write for, no company of actors to employ him. And some forty years after he died the theatres were all pulled down and theatre disappeared completely during the Ice Age of the puritan Commonwealth. For Shakespeare, as with many a successful career, timing was everything.

The genie was out of the bottle: bawdy, violent, iconoclastic, irreverent, subversive, wildly popular plays were attracting all of London. Courtiers like Essex and Southampton spent most of their leisure time at the theatre, and the Queen herself had her own troupe of players. Rail against it they might, but the Puritan preachers could not check the popularity and proliferation of the theatre. Aristocrats rivalled each other to see who could employ the most popular troupe of actors. Seeing this, the Queen’s spymaster Walsingham decided to put the new phenomenon to good use: acting companies were to be used as a propaganda tool; travelling the provinces they would perform plays that celebrated English history and Protestant values that legitimised the Tudor succession and added to the lustre of Gloriana. Besides, having troupes of actors performing in the great country houses could be a very useful source of information. A canny actor could chat up the servants, observe the audience and report back to Walsingham and Secretary Cecil any hints of disloyalty or Catholic sympathies.

For the investors in the new phenomenon, people like James Burbage and Philip Henslowe, building playhouses meant a big risk but huge potential gain. To cover themselves, most theatre proprietors had other investments—they maintained brothels, inns and troupes of bears and other animals for the arena. Eventually most of them became wealthy men. Shakespeare certainly did, as did his friends Heminges and Condell. For Will it sure beat the hell out of glove-making or being a lawyer’s clerk or country schoolteacher. This was big money.

And the Elizabethan theatre was exactly the right kind of theatre for a man of Shakespeare’s particular genius. It was a writer’s theatre, a theatre of the imagination—an empty space that could become anything you wished through the sheer power of words and images. There was no clutter, no distraction, no smart technology, no directorial spin. It was all up to the writer and his band of actors. And here too Shakespeare had it all pretty much his own way. As a sharer in the Globe, one of its owner-managers, he could use the actors of his choice, mould them into an ensemble and write roles according to their particular talents. That is how great drama is born. Brecht had a similar opportunity and so did Chekhov. But not many playwrights are lucky enough to get their own theatre and permanent company of actors.

He was born into the right family. Had Will Shakespeare been born into a family of farmers, he might never have got his lucky break. Life was not easy for those on the lower rungs of Elizabethan society and the pressure would have been intense for him to become apprenticed to his father’s trade or take up a job on the land as soon as he was able. He probably would have gone to ‘petty school’ along with his sisters, but not on to grammar school. A farmer or artisan would have no use for Ovid and Seneca, Latin, Greek and rhetoric. As long as he could read his Bible and do his sums, that would be education enough. And if he had been born into the aristocracy he would have been destined for the army, the Church or the life of a courtier. He’d have been well taught in the arts of arms and hunting and had private tuition in the classics, but he’d never have known the hurly-burly of the schoolyard or the life of the classroom Shakespeare depicts so accurately in Merry Wives of Windsor. He’d never have met a country schoolmaster like Sir Hugh Evans or Holofernes in Love’s Labour’s Lost. Indeed, he’d never have met a Nym, Bardolph, Pistol or Falstaff, a Quince, Bottom, Flute or Starveling. These are the people Shakespeare saw in the streets and shops of Stratford, the pubs and brothels of Cheapside. He might have been an aristocratic poet like Philip Sidney or he might have dabbled in a little entertainment for his fellow courtiers, but he could never have become a playwright.

And that’s what Shakespeare was—a hard-working, ambitious professional actor and playwright who toiled hard at his craft day after day, year after year, as Ben Jonson witnessed. As he pushed the boundaries of his craft and skill, his plays became more complex, more demanding for both actors and audience. We travel a long way from the knockabout farce of The Comedy of Errors to the bleak and bitter satire of Troilus and Cressida, whose thought and language are at times so complex as to be almost indecipherable on first hearing. Shakespeare expected a lot from his audience and he wasn’t going to make it easy for them.

He met the right people. Shakespeare was extremely fortunate in his friendship with the Burbage family. There were Burbages in Stratford, but it was James Burbage, of the Queen’s Men, who helped to change Shakespeare’s life. They met when Shakespeare was an adolescent and the Queen’s Men paid regular visits to Stratford. There they were welcomed by the town’s Bailiff, John Shakespeare, and gave private performances for him and his family besides their public shows in the Guild Hall. When Shakespeare joined the Queen’s Men in his early twenties he renewed his acquaintance with James and his sons Richard and Cuthbert. This was timely. James was now an important entrepreneur, having built London’s first custom-made playhouse, The Theatre, and Richard was on the way to becoming the greatest actor of his day. He and Shakespeare inspired each other and Shakespeare wrote some of his greatest roles for him. Without the assurance of Burbage’s talent Shakespeare might never have created Richard III, Hamlet, Othello or Lear.

He also maintained his friendship with his schoolmate Richard Field, who had gone to London some years earlier and established a successful publishing business. It was he who published two of Shakespeare’s major successes, Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece.

Shakespeare seems to have forged close ties with most of his fellow players, especially John Heminges and Henry Condell, who rendered him the greatest service of all by collating and publishing his complete works. Even his testy rival Ben Jonson ‘loved the man’ and paid generous tribute to him. He made a big impression on aristocratic patrons—the Pembrokes and Henry Wroithsley, Earl of Southampton—and courted their favours. Perhaps most importantly, he earned the approval of Queen Elizabeth and her successor King James, who adopted Shakespeare’s company and made them the King’s Men as well as Grooms of the Chamber.

He was fortunate in being one of a number of talented writers. Competitive and ambitious in himself, he was nevertheless willing to learn, and gained a great deal by acting in the plays of Marlowe, Kyd, Greene and Jonson. He had great raw material to work with: loads of popular old plays, like The Famous Victories of Henry V, The Troublesome Reign of King John and The True History of King Leir. These were due for an overhaul and the works of Ovid, Seneca and Plutarch were all waiting to be plundered.

He made the most of his opportunities. Having absorbed the classics at school he put them to good use. He had an inquisitive mind and a prodigious memory (developed by rote-learning and his craft as an actor). Thus he was able to recall and quote plays he had seen as a child, including the old Mystery Plays at Coventry. When an opportunity arose to join an acting company he left home and went to London, leaving his wife to bring up their young family. But many a soldier or sailor had to do the same, and he had no future in Stratford. He seems to have made regular visits home and certainly provided for his family very well financially.

He mixed with the right crowd, cultivated the right patrons and learned from his peers and rivals, finally outstripping them. He was a shrewd investor in the theatre business as well as in rural properties.

In short, he was no idealistic poet languishing in an ivory tower but a hands-on, energetic theatre practitioner with a good nose for business and a shrewd eye for the caprices of a fickle and shifting audience.