“Shakespeare led a life of Allegory: his works are the comments on it.” Keats’s remark has licensed too much irresponsible speculation and novelettish embroidery masquerading as biography. E. K. Chambers and Samuel Schoenbaum are the major exceptions to this statement, although neither is immune from the odd flight of fancy. Chambers called his book of 1930 William Shakespeare: A Study of Facts and Problems, and if the factual deposit has grown imperceptibly since then, so have the problems. Schoenbaum never wrote a formal biography, but his scrupulous commentary on the documents, William Shakespeare: A Documentary Life (1975), makes a telling contrast to the lunacies of biographers which he charted so entertainingly in Shakespeare’s Lives (1970, revised 1991). Park Honan certainly can’t be accused of sensationalism; he moves at a stately pace through the chronological sequence of events, and is willing to let the record speak for itself, even to the extent of being dry.

That legendary postcard on which all we know about Shakespeare can be written must now be at least A4 size; new information is always liable to turn up—for example, the exact locations of the 107 acres of land he bought in 1602 came to light only in 1994. Yet Honan, no less than Keats, combs the life for clues to the works, and vice versa: how that person could have written those plays and poems remains an insoluble enigma. There is no doubt, however, that he did. Honan is not so wickedly