Why are people so interested in writers’ lives, in your life? I ask him. “I have no idea,” he says flatly, and that’s the end of that. And yet he has a queer power to enter the mind of another, and this seems particularly true of Shakespeare, whose mind is so present and yet so fugitive: “This book wrote itself, somehow,” Ackroyd says, “and now, this sounds vain — but when I write about anyone, I try in some sense to reproduce the consciousness of the writer in my language, in the spirit of the writing . . . and I don’t know if I succeeded with Shakespeare, but it felt like quite a light, buoyant sort of book. Not as heavy as usual, as Dickens was, say — and I think that’s the spirit of Shakespeare, which somehow touched it, just as the spirit of Blake touched my biog of Blake. I don’t know what that process is or means, but it certainly takes place.”
As to language, Ackroyd places Shakespeare firmly in his time by using original spellings (as he always does in his books), quoting from The Complete Works, Original-Spelling Edition published by OUP. Thus familiar lines can look, to the modern eye, somehow less familiar: “Our Poesie is as a Goume, which ouses/ From whence ’tis nourisht: the fire i’th’Flint/ Shewes not, till it strooke . . .” Gum, oozes, struck, would come easier, but Ackroyd is unrepentant. In the first place, as he writes, there is simply a different music to hear in these words: “Any standardisation or modernisation of Shakespeare’s language robs it of half its strength; a shadow is not as dim and veiled as a ‘shaddowwe’, a cuckoo does not sing like a ‘kuckow’ and music is not as enchanting as ‘musique’. In the old language we can still hear Shakespeare talking.”
And, as he says to me: “Those things, for all they seem marginal or trivial, are really at the heart of my design, anyway, in an attempt to reformulate or reproduce the past in the present. You have to admit the strangeness of the past as well as its familiarity if you are going to do it justice.”
But don’t you, I ask, risk setting up a resistance in the reader? “Of course, but then — the resistance is OK. It only takes a moment’s reflection to find out what is really being written or meant or said. It might be a slight effort, but it will only be a slight effort. And it’s worth it, if in that effort you can get to understand the alienness of certain aspects of the past, well then that’s well and good. You’ve learnt a lesson.” Again, Ackroyd seems in the vanguard here — just as the actors at the Globe are performing Troilus and Cressida in the “original pronunciation”, advised by the linguistic authority Professor David Crystal.
It seems, I remark, Shakespeare’s moment. There has been a slew of recent biographies — Bill Bryson, no less, is about to take him on — and the Royal Shakespeare Company will shortly live up to its name and perform the full cycle of his plays. Deborah Warner’s recent production of the thornily political Julius Caesar was received with rapturous acclaim both in London and Paris. And yet Ackroyd is curiously ambivalent about Shakespeare’s true place in the national consciousness. “The plays themselves, you know, I think most people don’t understand them,” he says. “In the theatre, when I see them, I’m more interested in the audience than the drama because I don’t think they get it. They don’t follow it. I think they get the idea, the actions, but they simply cannot follow what’s being said. And people would never admit it, but I think 80 per cent are quite bewildered and want it to end quite quickly. That’s just my impression. So I don’t think in that sense he’s the towering figure he was even in the 18th and 19th centuries; but it’s just the culture has changed, the audience has changed.”
Ackroyd’s Shakespeare places the playwright firmly in his own culture, the febrile, vivid culture that was Elizabethan England. He doesn’t quite go so far as to make the case for Shakespeare as a Catholic or crypto-Catholic, but he highlights his sympathies and connections to the old faith. A psychologising interviewer might posit that this could be because Ackroyd himself was raised as a Catholic; but the more likely explanation is that this places Shakespeare more firmly in the tradition of pageantry and ritual that characterised early English drama.
One of the most fascinating aspects of the book is its willingness to consider Shakespeare not as a singular genius, a unique consciousness, but a single (if shining) thread in the warp and weft of literary life at the time. There is no canon, Ackroyd argues. The plays were constantly revised, reworked, changed, collaborated upon. The plays lived as they were breathed, by actors and by circumstances personal and political; in that sense Ackroyd puts Shakespeare back into an environment which was — for all the plays were written down — much more closely linked to the almost purely oral culture that has really only recently been traded in for the fixed notions of the “text”. Shakespeare’s audiences could follow his plays as we, perhaps, cannot — simply because they were used to listening.
The sun comes out again, and Ackroyd and I stroll by the river bank. I marvel at his rate of production — the biographies, a series of “brief lives” (Chaucer, Turner, Newton to come: there will be seven in the set), books for children (“though those came to an abrupt end. They didn’t sell,” he says without any rancour) and now television too — after the success of London, he’s now filming a series on the Romantics, travelling the world to do so, rising at dawn, constantly revising his scripts at the behest of directors and producers; a process, he says, that’s made him understand how Shakespeare must have worked. I would never gave guessed that his reticence and slight stiffness would work on television; and yet as a presenter he has a disaffected charm that recalls another great Englishman, Alfred Hitchcock. You’re a TV star now, I tell him. How’s that? “I’m not,” he says. “Look,” he waves his hands. “No one recognises me.” And yet they do. A guide comes rushing out of the Globe to buttonhole him and ask if he’ll speak at the theatre in the autumn; a woman shyly asks for his autograph. He obliges, hard-working and willing as ever, even when our photographer asks him to pose with a plastic skull. Alas, poor Ackroyd.
He doesn’t care what people think, I’m sure. He makes his own world, bringing the past alive in the present. Like all the most successful people — his complex books are bestsellers — he works, it seems, only to please himself. When we’d spoken of his use of language, I said that more and more, it seemed to me, people were unwilling to make the effort that might be required to re-enter the past; they had grown too used to things made easily, simply palatable. “In that case,” said Peter Ackroyd evenly, “Shakespeare’s fucked.”
Shakespeare: The Biography by Peter Ackroyd is published by Chatto & Windus, £25 (offer, £22.50, free p&p); 0870 1608080;
www.timesonline.co.uk/booksfirst
Peter Ackroyd: a life in lives
1985: HAWKSMOOR: ground-breaking novel. 17th-century London, 17th-century language
1990: DICKENS: for Dickens devotees
1993: THE HOUSE OF DOCTOR DEE: ghostly novel based on 16th-century sorcerer and astrologer John Dee and a Clerkenwell house
1995: BLAKE: another definitive biography
1998: THE LIFE OF THOMAS MORE: biography of Henry VIII’s Lord Chancellor turned Catholic martyr
2000: LONDON: THE BIOGRAPHY: Ackroyd takes on his beloved home town
2002: ALBION: what is Englishness?
2003: VOYAGES THROUGH TIME: Ackroyd does all sorts of history for kids. A series.
2004: CHAUCER: biography of the other giant of English literature
2004 THE LAMBS OF LONDON: Victorian London novel of Shakespearean discovery
2005: TURNER: painterly biography
What’s more . . .
SHAKESPEARE’S LANGUAGE
by Frank Kermode (Penguin): master literary critic at work.
1599 by James Shapiro (Faber): one crucial year in Shakespeare’s life.
WILL IN THE WORLD by Stephen Greenblatt (Pimlico): speculation adds flesh to bare bones of what is known and gives this a broad appeal.
SHAKESPEARE by Park Honan (Oxford): avoids speculation. Detailed, precise, well-researched.
THE ROUGH GUIDE TO SHAKESPEARE: and why not?
THE OXFORD COMPANION TO SHAKESPEARE edited by Stanley Wells: eclectic, unpretentious reference book.
