Before he came into a lot of money in 1839, Richard Planta-genet Temple Nugent Brydges Chandos Grenville had led a largely uneventful life.

He had sired an illegitimate child in Italy, spoken occasionally in the House of Commons and installed some of the first flush toilets in England; but otherwise he was distinguished by nothing more than his glorious prospects.

After inheriting his titles as second Duke of Buckingham and Chandos, however, he astonished his associates, and no doubt himself, by managing to lose every penny of his inheritance in just nine years through a series of spectacularly unsound investments.

In the summer of 1848 he fled to France, leaving one of England’s great estates – Stowe in Buckinghamshire – to his creditors. The auction of its contents became one of the social events of the age.

Among the lesser-noted disposals was a dark oval portrait purchased by the Earl of Ellesmere for 355 guineas and known ever since as the Chandos portrait.

The painting had been much retouched and was so blackened with time that a great deal of detail was lost. It shows a balding but not unhandsome man of about 40, who sports a trim beard. In his left ear he wears a gold earring. His expression is confident, serenely rakish. This is not a man to whom you would lightly entrust a wife or grown daughter.

Although nothing is known about the origin of the painting, it has been said for a long time to be of William Shakespeare. Certainly it looks like Shakespeare – but then really it ought to, since it is one of the three likenesses of him from which all others are taken.

Ellesmere gave the painting to the new National Portrait Gallery in London. Almost at once its authenticity was doubted. Many critics thought the subject was too dark skinned and foreign-looking – too Italian or Jewish – to be an English poet, much less a very great one. (One suggested, perhaps a touch hopefully, that he was portrayed in stage make-up, probably in the role of Shylock.)

“Well, the painting is from the right period – we can certainly say that much,” Tarnya Cooper, curator of 16th century portraits at the gallery, told me when I set off to find out what we could know and reasonably assume about the most venerated figure of the English language.

“The collar is of a type that was popular between about 1590 and 1610, just when Shakespeare was having his greatest success and thus most likely to sit for a portrait. We can also tell that the subject was a bit bohemian, which would seem consistent with a theatrical career, and that he was at least fairly well to do, as Shakespeare would have been in this period.”

I asked how she could tell these things. “Well, the earring tells us he was bohemian,” she explained. “An earring on a man meant the same then as it does now – that the wearer was a little more fashionably racy than the average person. Drake and Raleigh were both painted with earrings. It was their way of announcing that they were of an adventurous disposition.

“Men who could afford to wore a lot of jewellery back then, mostly sewn into their clothes. So the subject here is either fairly discreet, or not hugely wealthy. I would guess probably the latter. On the other hand, we can tell that he was prosperous – or wished us to think he was prosperous – because he is dressed all in black.”

She smiled at my puzzlement. “It takes a lot of dye to make a fabric really black. Much cheaper to produce clothes that were fawn or beige or some other lighter colour. So black clothes in the 16th century were nearly always a sign of prosperity.”

She considered the painting appraisingly. “It’s not a bad painting, but not a terribly good one either. It was painted by someone who knew how to prime a canvas, so he’d had some training, but it is quite workaday and not well lighted.

“The main thing is that if it is Shakespeare, it is the only portrait known that might have been done from life, so this would be what William Shakespeare really looked like – if it is William Shakespeare.”

And what are the chances that it is?

“Without documentation of its provenance we’ll never know, and it’s unlikely now, after such a passage of time, that such documentation will ever turn up.”

And if not Shakespeare, who is it?

She smiled. “We’ve no idea.”

If the Chandos portrait is not genuine, then we are left with two other possible likenesses to help us decide what Shakespeare looked like. The first is the copperplate engraving that appeared as the frontispiece of the collected works of Shakespeare in 1623, the famous First Folio.

It is an arrestingly – we might almost say magnificently – mediocre piece of work. Nearly everything about it is flawed. One eye is bigger than the other. The mouth is curiously mispositioned. The hair is longer on one side than the other, and the head itself is out of proportion to the body and seems to float off the shoulders, like a balloon. Worst of all, the subject looks diffident, apologetic, almost frightened – nothing like the gallant and confident figure that speaks to us from the plays.

Furthermore, the engraving was not done from life: Shakespeare had been dead for seven years by the time of the First Folio.

That leaves us with just one other possible likeness: the painted life-size statue that forms the centrepiece of a wall monument to Shakespeare at Holy Trinity Church in Stratford-upon-Avon, where he is buried. It is an indifferent piece of work artistically, but it does have the merit of having been seen and presumably passed as satisfactory by people who knew Shakespeare.

It was executed after Shakespeare’s death by a mason named Gheerart Janssen who had lived and worked near the Globe theatre in Southwark, London, and thus may well have seen Shakespeare in life – though one rather hopes not, as the Shakespeare he portrays is a puffy faced, self-sat-isfied figure with (as Mark Twain memora-bly put it) the “deep, deep, subtle, subtle expression of a bladder”.

So we are in the curious position of having three likenesses from which all others are derived: two that aren’t very good by artists working after his death, and one that is rather more compelling as a portrait but that may well be of someone else altogether.

The paradoxical consequence is that we all recognise a likeness of Shakespeare the instant we see one, and yet we don’t really know what he looked like.

It is like this with nearly every aspect of his life and character: he is at once the best known and least known of figures. MORE than 200 years ago, in a sentiment much repeated ever since, the historian George Steevens observed that all we know of William Shakespeare is contained within a few scanty facts: that he was born in Stratford-upon-Avon, produced a family there, went to London, became an actor and writer, returned to Stratford, made a will and died.

That wasn’t quite true then and it is even less so now, but it is not all that far from the truth either.

After 400 years of dedicated hunting, researchers have found about 100 documents relating to Shakespeare and his immediate family – baptismal records, title deeds, tax certificates, marriage bonds, writs of attachment, court records (many court records; it was a litigious age) and so on.

That’s quite a good number, but deeds and bonds and other records are inevitably bloodless. They tell us a great deal about the business of a person’s life but almost nothing about the emotions of it.

In consequence there remains an enormous amount that we don’t know about Shakespeare, much of it of a fundamental nature. We don’t know exactly how many plays he wrote or in what order he wrote them. We can deduce something of what he read but don’t know where he got the books or what he did with them when he had finished with them.

Although he left nearly 1m words of text, we have just 14 words in his own hand – his name signed six times and the words “by me” on his will. Not a single note or letter or page of manuscript survives.

We have no written description of him penned in his own lifetime. The first textual portrait – “he was a handsome, well-shap’t man: very good company, and of a very readie and pleasant smooth witt” – was written by John Aubrey, who was born 10 years after his death.

Shakespeare seems to have been the mildest of fellows, and yet the earliest written account we have of him is an attack on his character by a fellow artist. He appears to many biographers to have spurned his wife – famously he left her only his second best bed in his will, and that as an apparent afterthought – and yet no one wrote more highly, more devotedly, more beamingly of love and the twining of kindred souls.

We are not sure how best to spell his name – but then neither, it appears, was he, for the name is never spelt the same way twice in the signatures that survive. They read as Willm Shaksp, William Shakespe, Wm Shakspe, William Shakspere, Willm Shakspere and William Shak-speare. One spelling he didn’t use was the one now universally attached to his name.

Nor can we be entirely confident how he pronounced his name. Helge Kökeritz, author of the definitive Shakespeare’s Pronunciation, thought it possible he said it with a short a, as in shack.

We don’t know if he ever left England. We don’t know who his principal companions were or how he amused himself. His sexuality is an irreconcilable mystery. On only a handful of days in his life can we say with absolute certainty where he was.

We have no record at all of his whereabouts for the eight critical years when he left his wife and three young children in Stratford and became, with almost impossible swiftness, a successful playwright in London. By the time he is first mentioned in print as a playwright, in 1592, his life was already more than half over. For the rest, he is a kind of literary equivalent of an electron – forever there and not there. TO understand why we know as little as we do of Shakespeare’s life, I went to the National Archives at Kew in west London. There I met David Thomas, a compact, cheerful, soft-spoken man with grey hair, the senior archivist.

When I arrived Thomas was hefting a mass of Exchequer documents from 1570 onto a long table in his office: 1,000 pages of sheepskin parchment, loosely bound and with no two sheets quite matching.

“In some ways the records are extremely good,” Thomas told me. “Sheepskin is a marvellously durable medium, though it has to be treated with some care. Whereas ink soaks into the fibres on paper, on sheepskin it stays on the surface, rather like chalk on a blackboard, and so can be rubbed away comparatively easily.

“Sixteenth-century paper was of good quality, too,” he went on. “It was made of rags and was virtually acid free, so it has lasted very well.”

To my untrained eye, the ink had faded to an illegible watery faintness, and the script was of a type that was effectively indecipherable. Moreover the writing on the sheets was not organised in any way that aided the searching eye. Paper and parchment were expensive, so no space was wasted. There were no gaps between paragraphs – indeed, no paragraphs. Where one entry ended, another immediately began, without numbers or headings to identify or separate one case from another. It would be hard to imagine less scannable text.

To determine whether a particular volume contained a reference to any one person or event, you would have to read every word – and that isn’t always easy even for experts like Thomas, because handwriting at the time was extremely variable. Elizabethans were as free with their handwriting as they were with their spelling. Handbooks of handwriting suggested up to 20 different – often very different – ways of shaping particular letters. Nearly every letter could look like nearly every other.

Complicating matters further is the fact that court cases were recorded in a distinctive lingua franca known as court hand – “a peculiar clerical Latin that no Roman could read”, Thomas told me, smiling. “It used English word order but incorporated an arcane vocabulary and idiosyncratic abbreviations. Even clerks struggled with it because when cases got really complicated or tricky, they would often switch to English for convenience.”

Although Thomas knew he had the right page and had studied the document many times, it took him a good minute or more to find the line referring to “John Shappere alias Shakespere” of “Stratford upon Haven”, accusing him of usury. This is of considerable importance to Shakespeare scholars, for John was William’s father.

“It appears that he hung out with some fairly shady fellows,” says David Thomas. Four times in the 1570s, John was prosecuted (or threatened with prosecution – the records are sometimes a touch unclear) for trading in wool and for money lending, both highly illegal activities.

Usury in particular was considered a “vice most odious and detestable” in the stark phrasing of the law, and fines could be severe, but John seems to have engaged in it at a seriously committed level. In 1570 he was accused of making loans worth £220 (including interest) to a Walter Mussum. This was a very considerable sum – well over £100,000 in today’s money.

The risk attached to such an undertaking was really quite breath-taking. Anyone found guilty of it would forfeit all the money lent, plus interest, and face a stiff fine and the possibility of imprisonment.

The law applied – a little unfairly, it must be said – to any extension of credit. If someone took delivery of, say, wool from you with the understanding that he would repay you later, with a little interest for your trouble, that was considered usury too. It was this form of usury of which John Shakespeare was probably guilty, for he also traded (or so it would seem) in large quantities of wool. In 1571 he was accused of acquiring 300 tods – 8,400lb – of wool. That is a lot of wool and a lot of risk.

Something severely unfavourable seems to have happened in John’s business life, for in 1576, when William was 12, he abruptly withdrew from public affairs. He was listed at one point among nine Stratford residents who were thought to have missed church services “for fear of processe for debtte”.

There are more than 100 miles of records like this in the National Archives – nearly 10m documents altogether. The references to John were only found in the 1980s. The only certain way to find more would be to look through all the documents.

In the early 1900s an odd American couple – Charles Wallace, an instructor in English at the University of Nebraska, and his wife Hilda – decided to do just that. Working for up to 18 hours a day, mostly at the Public Record Office on Chancery Lane, as it then was, they pored over hundreds of thousands documents documents of all types: Exchequer memoranda rolls, property deeds, messuages, pipe rolls, plea rolls, conveyancings and all the other dusty hoardings of legal life in 16th and early 17th century London.

The Wallaces’ devotion was truly extraordinary. So we may imagine a muffled cry of joy when in 1909 they came across a dispute in 1612 between Christopher Mountjoy, a refugee Huguenot wigmaker, and his son-in-law Stephen Belott over a marriage settlement.

Shakespeare, it appears, was caught up in the affair because he had been a lodger in Mountjoy’s house in Cripplegate in 1604 when the dispute arose. By the time he was called upon to give testimony eight years later, he claimed – not unreasonably – to be unable to remember anything of consequence.

The case provided no fewer than 24 new mentions of Shakespeare and one precious additional signature – the sixth and so far last one found. Though it is only a deposition, it is also the only document in existence containing a transcript of Shakespeare speaking in his own voice.

The Wallace find was important for two other reasons. It tells us where Shakespeare was living at an important point in his career: in a house on the corner of Silver and Monkswell Streets near St Alder-manbury in the City of London. And the date of Shakespeare’s deposition, May 11, 1612, provides one of the few days in his life when we can say with certainty where he was.

As time passed Charles Wallace began to grow a little strange and developed paranoid convictions. But the Belott–Mountjoy papers were only part of what the Wallaces found. It is from their work that we know the extent of Shakespeare’s financial interests in the Globe and Blackfriars theatres, and of his purchase of a gatehouse at Blackfriars in 1613, just three years before his death. For Shakespeare scholars these are moments of monumental significance.

With so little to go on in the way of hard facts, students of Shakespeare’s life are left with essentially three possibilities: to pick minutely over legal documents; to speculate (“Every Shakespeare biography is 5% fact and 95% conjecture,” one Shakespeare scholar told me, possibly in jest); or to persuade themselves that they know more than they actually do.

Even the most careful biographers sometimes take a supposition – that Shakespeare was Catholic or happily married or fond of the countryside or kindly disposed towards animals – and convert it within a page or two to something like a certainty.

In fact it cannot be emphasised too strenuously that there is nothing – not a scrap, not a mote – that gives any certain insight into Shakespeare’s feelings or beliefs as a private person. We can know only what came out of his work, never what went into it.

“The documentation for William Shakespeare is exactly what you would expect of a person of his position from that time,” says scholar David Thomas. “It seems like a dearth only because we are so intensely interested in him. In fact we know more about Shakespeare than about almost any dramatist of his age.”

What we do have for Shakespeare are his plays – all of them but one or two – thanks in very large part to the efforts of his colleagues Henry Condell and John Heminges, who put together a more or less complete volume of his work after his death: the justly revered First Folio.

It cannot be overemphasised how fortunate we are to have so many of Shakespeare’s works, for the usual condition of 16th and early 17th century plays is to be lost. Few manuscripts from any playwright survive, and even printed plays are far more often missing than not. Of the approximately 3,000 plays thought to have been staged in London from about the time of Shakespeare’s birth to the closure of the theatres by the Puritans in a coup of joylessness in 1642, 80% are known only by title. Only 230 or so play texts still exist from Shakespeare’s time, including the 38 by Shakespeare himself – about 15% of the total, a gloriously staggering proportion.

It is because we have so much of Shakespeare’s work that we can appreciate how little we know of him as a person. If we had only his comedies, we would think him a frothy soul. If we had just the sonnets, he would be a man of darkest passions. From a selection of his other works, we might think him variously courtly, cerebral, metaphysical, melancholic, machiavellian, neurotic, light-hearted, loving, and much more. Shakespeare was of course all these things – as a writer. We hardly know who he was as a person.

Faced with a wealth of text but a poverty of context, scholars have focused obsessively on what they can know. Shakespeare, it seems, is not so much a historical figure as an academic obsession. A glance through the indexes of the many scholarly journals devoted to him and his age reveals such dogged investigations as Linguistic and Informational Entropy in Othello, Ear Disease and Murder in Hamlet, Poisson Distributions in Shakespeare’s Sonnets, Was Hamlet a Man or a Woman? and others of similarly inventive cast.

Plus, of course, was Shakespeare really Shakespeare? The number of published books suggesting – or more often insisting – that his works were written by someone else is estimated now to be well over 5,000.

When we reflect on the works of William Shakespeare it is of course an amazement to consider that one man could have produced such a sumptuous, wise, varied, thrilling, ever delighting body of work, but that is of course the hallmark of genius. Only one man had the circumstances and gifts to give us such incomparable works, and William Shakespeare of Stratford was unquestionably that man – whoever he was.

© Bill Bryson 2007

Extracted from Shakespeare, by Bill Bryson, to be published by HarperCol-lins on September 3 at £14.99. Copies can be ordered for £13.49 including postage from The Sunday Times BooksFirst on 0870 165 8585

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