Still seeking Shakespeare

Sometimes, a typo is just a typo.

Shapiro is at his best when he explores the high-wire act that Shakespeare performed in a society riven by fear and dread. His life was truly on the line as he struggled to create penetrating works without threatening himself by angering the powers that be. As Shapiro puts it, he was the only major English playwright of the 1590s who avoided "a major confrontation with those in power." His rivals, by contrast, had been variously tortured, imprisoned, and killed.

What did Shakespeare do about this in 1599? He confronted the issue head-on, exploring the issue of censorship in "Julius Caesar." In Shapiro's telling, Shakespeare is one brave bard.

Ackroyd's sprawling Shakespeare: The Biography is a more traditional biography, following its subject from birth to death. In the book, Ackroyd - a poet, playwright and author of 2001's widely praised "London: The Biography" - once again reveals himself to be a fine cultural historian.

He vividly describes Shakespeare's hometown and the Wild West atmosphere of London itself, "where male citizens customarily carried daggers or rapiers, apprentices had knives and females were armed with bodkins or long pins, [and] there was a constant danger of violence."

Yikes.

But while the book is sprinkled with intriguing nuggets - Shakespeare, for one thing, couldn't spell his own last name - Ackroyd writes in a dense style full of $10 words like "contumely" and "obloquy."

To make things more challenging, Ackroyd likes to quote Shakespeare's works in the original spelling in order to preserve the beauty of the language. That's a nice idea, but he doesn't help baffled readers figure out how to decipher Olde English. ("Hauoke," for example, is "havoc," and "verie howre" is "very hour.")

Despite these two new works and countless others, our view into Shakespeare's personal life remains hazy.

His seemingly strained relationship with his wife is still barely understood. (He famously left her his "second-best bed" in his will, but does that even mean what we think it does?)

His religious views remain a matter of significant debate, along with his sexuality and even his looks.

There's more to wonder about. What events in Shakespeare's childhood and young adulthood gave him such insight into the glorious highs and terrible lows of human behavior? Did he love as passionately and playfully as Romeo and Rosalind? And, ultimately, did he believe his few decades on earth were well spent?

Even with the help of the best biographers, the answers are elusive. We're left to imagine - perchance, one might say, to dream.

• Randy Dotinga is a freelance writer in San Diego.

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