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|title=Nine Lives of William Shakespeare

|author=Graham Holderness

|borrow=Yes

|isbn=9781441151858

|pages=215

|publisher=Continuum

|date=September 2011

|summary=Nine possible 'short lives' of Shakespeare, based on specific facts and traditions, drawn from the existing documentary evidence and from biographical interpretation.

}}

This book emphasises the fact that his biographers (or would-be biographers) have so little to go on, as ‘the author’ is so visible through his works, but the private data remains largely mysterious and unfathomable. His career as a writer, his property dealings, the contents of his will, and the members of his family are common knowledge. Yet we only know approximately when he was born, and nothing about his relationship with his wife and children, how much he cared about his writing, what he died from, or what he thought about anything at all. Even knowledge of his personal likeness, and how faithful the existing images are, is uncertain. W.H. Auden is quoted as saying that ‘a shilling life’ will give us all the facts. In that case, we are unlikely to have a five-pound life.

The nine lives deal with various aspects of his life from what little factual evidence we have – as a writer, actor, businessman, butcher’s son, lover and husband, as a papist or Catholic, and finally on how authentic are the existing portraits . They are each paired with a short story on the associated theme, and the author is to be congratulated on writing them in several different styles. One, ‘The Shakespeare Code’, has more than a nod to Dan Brown, while others are in the vein of Oscar Wilde and Ernest Hemingway respectively. (I almost found myself wishing for another aping the inimitable prose of P.G. Wodehouse. Next time, maybe).

For further reading, may we also recommend [[The Shakespeare Handbook by Michael Schmidt and Robert Maslen]]

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