Still seeking Shakespeare

In the Turkish language, there's a special tense for describing things whose reality is in some doubt, such as a dream or an event the speaker didn't witness. It's a way of warning the listener to be on guard.

When it comes to books about the world's greatest playwright, that Turkish tense could sure come in handy.

Compared with the other two most popular subjects of biography - Jesus and Abraham Lincoln - William Shakespeare is surely the most mysterious. We can read thousands of his words, but only a tiny number that he actually said aloud or wrote privately were recorded. We know little about his parents, his wife, his children. Even his friends didn't write much about him.

Who was this guy? It's truly hard to tell. But biographers try to figure him out anyway, offering educated deductions at best and outlandish speculation at worst, leaving readers to figure out which is which. Now, an American professor and a British literary star have joined the club, trying to shed their own light on Shakespeare through the prism of his times and his work.

While they take different approaches to understanding Shakespeare, the books by James Shapiro and Peter Ackroyd share some traits. For one, their guesswork is often more aggravating than enlightening. For another, they're on the scholarly side, lacking the accessibility that turned last year's fascinating Shakespeare biography "Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare," by Stephen Greenblatt, into a bestseller and critical success.

Still, both authors manage to broaden our understanding of Shakespeare's world.

Of the two biographers, Shapiro takes the more unusual approach by focusing not on Shakespeare's entire life, but on just a single year - 1599, when he managed to churn out many of his best plays, including "Hamlet," "As You Like It," and "Julius Caesar."

In A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare, Shapiro explores the rollicking tensions that marked the beginning of the end of Queen Elizabeth I's amazing reign. Shapiro, a professor of English at Columbia University, spends much of his time describing the largely forgotten war against the Irish rebellion and its effects on the English people, including its most prestigious dramatist.

This makes for interesting reading, to a point. But Shapiro goes too far into detail, at times turning the book into a military history. And too often, he stretches too far when he gets back to Shakespeare himself.

When Shakespeare accidentally uses the word "Ireland" instead of "England" in a play, for example, it might seem like a minor transcription error to most people. But to Shapiro, it's a sign that the playwright is preoccupied by the Irish troubles.

And when Shakespeare briefly identifies two characters by "Irish" and "Scot" instead of their names, Shapiro figures it's a sign of his prejudice.

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