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James Shapiro will no longer teach "The Book Review, a Columbia College writing seminar that sounds really great and decreasingly practical.

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“There are intellectual reasons to teach the course again,” Professor Shapiro wrote in an email, when the Transom asked if a rumor that he’d discontinued the class was true. “But what’s no longer there is the possibility of training a generation of book reviewers, since, as you know, newspapers around the country are shedding their book reviews, or shrinking these sections.”

He added that because so many reviewers are now blogging, freelancers are having a harder time than ever earning anything substantial from their work. “It’s depressing—in large part because I see a lot of talent pass through my classrooms, and little opportunity for those talented students to have the opportunity early on … to review and get paid for it.”

Professor Shapiro noted that many Book Review alumni have ended up with jobs at The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, and Slate. “So far as I know, there aren’t many courses like this taught around the country, which is a shame,” he said. “If you look at most of the major fiction writers from the 18th century until today, you’ll see that many, probably most of them, reviewed extensively. I’d probably go so far as to say that Coetzee, Toibin, Banville and Joyce Carol Oates—four of my favorite contemporary novelists—wouldn’t be as good at their craft if they hadn’t reviewed and continued to review. And I suspect that they would say much the same.”

Columbia Professor James Shapiro, come on down!

Although I’m involved personally in the matter, let me emphasize that there is a larger issue here. We’ve been living through an era in which the ethics of journalists have been subjected (and rightly so) to severe scrutiny—the better for all involved, particularly readers, who deserve to know if something they’re reading that poses as a fair consideration conceals a biased hidden agenda.

But what about the ethics of academics, particularly those who take it upon themselves to sneer loftily at journalists, as Mr. Shapiro does?

Three weeks ago, I pointed out to Eric Banks, the editor in chief of the respected literary journal Bookforum, that Mr. Shapiro had concealed from Bookforum’s readers the fact that he’d reviewed a book (mine) that subjected Mr. Shapiro’s views to ridicule.

Mr. Banks, an honorable man, agreed to revisit the pages in question in The Shakespeare Wars, in which I’d called attention to the foolishness of Mr. Shapiro’s reasoning in a key controversy over Hamlet texts. After having read my pages and the review, Mr. Banks quickly called me back to apologize for not having vetted the matter more closely before publication—and promised to publish an apology in the next issue in his letter to readers.

But really, it is Mr. Shapiro who owes an apology to Mr. Banks, for putting him in this position. More importantly, he also owes the readers of Bookforum an apology for concealing his conflict of interest from them.

There’s nothing wrong with disparaging a book that one reviews, but there’s something very wrong in concealing from readers the fact that the book you’re disparaging has made you out to be a bit of a fool.

An editor must rely on the integrity of his reviewers to come clean about just how severe a conflict of interest may be involved in a review. The reader must rely on the reviewer not to conceal them.

It seems to me that Mr. Shapiro himself was, to say the least, “economical with the truth,” as the phrase goes, in not disclosing the degree to which my book made his views seem laughable.

I characterize Mr. Shapiro as promoting a “dumbed-down” version of Hamlet, an “action-film” Hamlet, “a diminished version of literary art” based upon unproven assumptions “without any foundation” in evidence, aside from Mr. Shapiro’s dubious attempts at “read[ing] Shakespeare’s mind.”

In addition, I make fun of his jejune Freudian analysis of The Merchant of Venice, in which he actually takes seriously the notion that the “pound of flesh” Shylock demands is really a displaced reference to the genitals. (I’m not making this up, I swear.)

The idea that these remarks on his work would not prejudice his evaluation of my work is ludicrous. By the way, I think there is much of value for secondary-school students in his sedulous if soporific analysis of the historical background of Shakespeare’s work in his book, 1599. I think he benefited from non-specialist reviewers’ unfamiliarity with Hamlet text issues in advancing his evidence-challenged opinions on Hamlet text questions as if they were fact, which is one reason I felt the necessity of correcting them in my discussion of the issues, so that unsuspecting readers would be warned.

He could easily have disclosed my critique of him and taken issue with it, and then at least readers might have taken his overall appraisal with the appropriate shaker of salt.

Let me re-emphasize that this is not a matter of my complaining about a less-than-laudatory review (in fact, he bestows some compliments on my book) or the complaint of someone who feels unduly injured by academics. In fact, as this is written, less than a week after publication date, The Shakespeare Wars has been blessed with enthusiastic reviews from writers both inside and outside the academy: John Sutherland, professor of English at University College London (in The Financial Times); William E. Cain, chairman of the English department of Wellesley College (in The Boston Globe); John Gross, respected independent Shakespearean scholar and theater critic for the London Telegraph (in The Wall Street Journal); John Simon, notorious curmudgeon (in The New York Sun); and independent critics such as Stephen Metcalf (in Slate) and Walter Kirn (in The New York Times Book Review).

Yes, there have been some dissents and mixed reviews, but none—as far as I know—with a shamefully concealed conflict of interest such as Mr. Shapiro’s.

But one of the things that his act of concealment does is permit me to bring his flawed reasoning to the attention of future readers of his book, who might otherwise have taken his word for them.

For the past quarter century, the entire Shakespearean scholarly profession has been riven by a civil war over what kind of writer Shakespeare was. (Mr. Shapiro absurdly and disingenuously claims that the Shakespeare wars were over in the 1960’s—particularly ironic for someone conducting his own little covert war.)

In any case, the ongoing war asks the question: Was he the one-draft wonder of Shakespeare in Love, who dashed off manuscripts for the playhouse and then never gave them a second thought? Or do the variations in the early printings of works like Hamlet and Lear indicate that he went back to his early drafts and altered them in both subtle and substantial ways, leaving us essentially two distinct versions of each play that some have characterized (not without hot dissent) as first and second “drafts”?

Were the variations in the early texts the result of errors by typesetters, changes by actors and theater managers, or did they indicate that Shakespeare himself made the changes?

And there is a war within the war over whether Shakespeare revised. If Shakespeare made the changes, did he do so to make the play more suitable for the theater, because he was, as one sub-faction argues, primarily “a man of the theater”?

Or, as an important and controversial 2003 book by Lukas Erne has argued, was Shakespeare primarily a “literary dramatist” who may have made expedient changes for the theater but preferred the earlier wordier Quarto versions?

(No Shakespeare wars?)

Mr. Shapiro falls into the circular fallacy of some of the revisionists by accepting without any evidence that every change in the later, allegedly more theatrical Folio version was brilliant because it must have been made by Shakespeare, and that it must have been made by Shakespeare because it was brilliant.

ONE FOCUS OF THE CONTROVERSY IS Hamlet’s final 35-line soliloquy, the one that begins “How all occasions do inform against me … what is a man … ?”

It’s the soliloquy that Hamlet utters in the fourth act of the 1604 Quarto version, when he sees action-hero Fortinbras marching his army all over the landscape, willing to send thousands to their death for an empty title, for “an eggshell.” This leads Hamlet to reprove himself at great and eloquent length for lacking the will to exact vengeance for a far more concrete wrong, the murder of his father by his uncle.

To some people, like Mr. Shapiro, this soliloquy—35 lines of Hamlet’s most agonized eloquence—should be cut, the way it is in the posthumous 1623 Folio version, because (in this simplistic view) it repeats the kind of self-lacerating self-reproach we’ve heard from Hamlet before. Why listen to Hamlet examine his thought process further? (Unless you think what makes Hamlet distinctive is precisely its examination of Hamlet’s thought process.)

But Mr. Shapiro suggests Shakespeare chose a simplified, dumbed-down, fast-moving, direct-action Hamlet, rather than the Hamlet who might indeed have returned to further self-examination. In fact, the soliloquy that Mr. Shapiro says Shakespeare cut (on the basis of reading Shakespeare’s mind) might be seen to have taken self-examination to an even deeper level, a kind of self-consciousness about self-consciousness.

No: too complicated for Mr. Shapiro, who wants Hamlet to be more like the Terminator at this point, an action-film figure who dispenses with self-doubt. Well, it’s one point of view—a simple-minded one—but there are others who believe the soliloquy is the essence of what makes Hamlet Hamlet, and that those like Mr. Shapiro who want to cut Hamlet’s last soliloquy to move things along more quickly are giving us a “diminished view of dramatic art,” as the respected scholar Edward Pechter put it.

But Mr. Shapiro believes that Hamlet’s last soliloquy should be cut, that it belongs in the play “only if we want to see Hamlet as dark and existential.”

To which I reply, in my book: “Hamlet ‘dark and existential’? Who could possibly want that? Let’s have a Hamlet who becomes an action-film hero!”

I could go on (and do in the book), but I think it’s fair to say that I leave Mr. Shapiro’s argument in tatters for the half-baked, unexamined assertion it is, and that it’s not surprising he would not want a reader of his review to know about this, that he would not seek to defend it, and that he would not find anything good to say about my book.

But it’s also true that he manages to find something demonstrably false to say about my book, a desperate give-away of the supercilious condescension he demonstrates throughout his disingenuous review. In sneering about the fact that I left Yale graduate school to become a mere reporter rather than the lofty academic pooh-bah he fancies himself, Mr. Shapiro suggests that, as a reporter, I should have analyzed the “market forces” behind the decisions that publishers have made to divide Hamlet texts and to include dubious poems like the so-called “Funeral Elegy” in the canon (until it was discredited).

After all, reporters should concern themselves with grubby things like market forces, he implies. In fact, anyone reading my chapters on textual issues would find pointed discussion of the market forces in the Shakespeare publishing industry, and my chapter on the “Funeral Elegy” contains substantive analysis of the market forces behind the decisions made in that fiasco.

One would think Mr. Shapiro would be ashamed to have included such a flagrant misrepresentation (akin to his laughable claim that postmodern literary theory has triumphed for all times).

But then again, his conduct in this affair indicates a surprising degree of shamelessness.

Columbia Professor James Shapiro, come on down!

Although I’m involved personally in the matter, let me emphasize that there is a larger issue here. We’ve been living through an era in which the ethics of journalists have been subjected (and rightly so) to severe scrutiny—the better for all involved, particularly readers, who deserve to know if something they’re reading that poses as a fair consideration conceals a biased hidden agenda.

But what about the ethics of academics, particularly those who take it upon themselves to sneer loftily at journalists, as Mr. Shapiro does?

Three weeks ago, I pointed out to Eric Banks, the editor in chief of the respected literary journal Bookforum, that Mr. Shapiro had concealed from Bookforum’s readers the fact that he’d reviewed a book (mine) that subjected Mr. Shapiro’s views to ridicule.

Mr. Banks, an honorable man, agreed to revisit the pages in question in The Shakespeare Wars, in which I’d called attention to the foolishness of Mr. Shapiro’s reasoning in a key controversy over Hamlet texts. After having read my pages and the review, Mr. Banks quickly called me back to apologize for not having vetted the matter more closely before publication—and promised to publish an apology in the next issue in his letter to readers.

But really, it is Mr. Shapiro who owes an apology to Mr. Banks, for putting him in this position. More importantly, he also owes the readers of Bookforum an apology for concealing his conflict of interest from them.

There’s nothing wrong with disparaging a book that one reviews, but there’s something very wrong in concealing from readers the fact that the book you’re disparaging has made you out to be a bit of a fool.

An editor must rely on the integrity of his reviewers to come clean about just how severe a conflict of interest may be involved in a review. The reader must rely on the reviewer not to conceal them.

It seems to me that Mr. Shapiro himself was, to say the least, “economical with the truth,” as the phrase goes, in not disclosing the degree to which my book made his views seem laughable.

I characterize Mr. Shapiro as promoting a “dumbed-down” version of Hamlet, an “action-film” Hamlet, “a diminished version of literary art” based upon unproven assumptions “without any foundation” in evidence, aside from Mr. Shapiro’s dubious attempts at “read[ing] Shakespeare’s mind.”

In addition, I make fun of his jejune Freudian analysis of The Merchant of Venice, in which he actually takes seriously the notion that the “pound of flesh” Shylock demands is really a displaced reference to the genitals. (I’m not making this up, I swear.)

The idea that these remarks on his work would not prejudice his evaluation of my work is ludicrous. By the way, I think there is much of value for secondary-school students in his sedulous if soporific analysis of the historical background of Shakespeare’s work in his book, 1599. I think he benefited from non-specialist reviewers’ unfamiliarity with Hamlet text issues in advancing his evidence-challenged opinions on Hamlet text questions as if they were fact, which is one reason I felt the necessity of correcting them in my discussion of the issues, so that unsuspecting readers would be warned.

He could easily have disclosed my critique of him and taken issue with it, and then at least readers might have taken his overall appraisal with the appropriate shaker of salt.

Let me re-emphasize that this is not a matter of my complaining about a less-than-laudatory review (in fact, he bestows some compliments on my book) or the complaint of someone who feels unduly injured by academics. In fact, as this is written, less than a week after publication date, The Shakespeare Wars has been blessed with enthusiastic reviews from writers both inside and outside the academy: John Sutherland, professor of English at University College London (in The Financial Times); William E. Cain, chairman of the English department of Wellesley College (in The Boston Globe); John Gross, respected independent Shakespearean scholar and theater critic for the London Telegraph (in The Wall Street Journal); John Simon, notorious curmudgeon (in The New York Sun); and independent critics such as Stephen Metcalf (in Slate) and Walter Kirn (in The New York Times Book Review).

Yes, there have been some dissents and mixed reviews, but none—as far as I know—with a shamefully concealed conflict of interest such as Mr. Shapiro’s.

But one of the things that his act of concealment does is permit me to bring his flawed reasoning to the attention of future readers of his book, who might otherwise have taken his word for them.

For the past quarter century, the entire Shakespearean scholarly profession has been riven by a civil war over what kind of writer Shakespeare was. (Mr. Shapiro absurdly and disingenuously claims that the Shakespeare wars were over in the 1960’s—particularly ironic for someone conducting his own little covert war.)

In any case, the ongoing war asks the question: Was he the one-draft wonder of Shakespeare in Love, who dashed off manuscripts for the playhouse and then never gave them a second thought? Or do the variations in the early printings of works like Hamlet and Lear indicate that he went back to his early drafts and altered them in both subtle and substantial ways, leaving us essentially two distinct versions of each play that some have characterized (not without hot dissent) as first and second “drafts”?

Were the variations in the early texts the result of errors by typesetters, changes by actors and theater managers, or did they indicate that Shakespeare himself made the changes?

And there is a war within the war over whether Shakespeare revised. If Shakespeare made the changes, did he do so to make the play more suitable for the theater, because he was, as one sub-faction argues, primarily “a man of the theater”?

Or, as an important and controversial 2003 book by Lukas Erne has argued, was Shakespeare primarily a “literary dramatist” who may have made expedient changes for the theater but preferred the earlier wordier Quarto versions?

(No Shakespeare wars?)

Mr. Shapiro falls into the circular fallacy of some of the revisionists by accepting without any evidence that every change in the later, allegedly more theatrical Folio version was brilliant because it must have been made by Shakespeare, and that it must have been made by Shakespeare because it was brilliant.

ONE FOCUS OF THE CONTROVERSY IS Hamlet’s final 35-line soliloquy, the one that begins “How all occasions do inform against me … what is a man … ?”

It’s the soliloquy that Hamlet utters in the fourth act of the 1604 Quarto version, when he sees action-hero Fortinbras marching his army all over the landscape, willing to send thousands to their death for an empty title, for “an eggshell.” This leads Hamlet to reprove himself at great and eloquent length for lacking the will to exact vengeance for a far more concrete wrong, the murder of his father by his uncle.

To some people, like Mr. Shapiro, this soliloquy—35 lines of Hamlet’s most agonized eloquence—should be cut, the way it is in the posthumous 1623 Folio version, because (in this simplistic view) it repeats the kind of self-lacerating self-reproach we’ve heard from Hamlet before. Why listen to Hamlet examine his thought process further? (Unless you think what makes Hamlet distinctive is precisely its examination of Hamlet’s thought process.)

But Mr. Shapiro suggests Shakespeare chose a simplified, dumbed-down, fast-moving, direct-action Hamlet, rather than the Hamlet who might indeed have returned to further self-examination. In fact, the soliloquy that Mr. Shapiro says Shakespeare cut (on the basis of reading Shakespeare’s mind) might be seen to have taken self-examination to an even deeper level, a kind of self-consciousness about self-consciousness.

No: too complicated for Mr. Shapiro, who wants Hamlet to be more like the Terminator at this point, an action-film figure who dispenses with self-doubt. Well, it’s one point of view—a simple-minded one—but there are others who believe the soliloquy is the essence of what makes Hamlet Hamlet, and that those like Mr. Shapiro who want to cut Hamlet’s last soliloquy to move things along more quickly are giving us a “diminished view of dramatic art,” as the respected scholar Edward Pechter put it.

But Mr. Shapiro believes that Hamlet’s last soliloquy should be cut, that it belongs in the play “only if we want to see Hamlet as dark and existential.”

To which I reply, in my book: “ Hamlet ‘dark and existential’? Who could possibly want that? Let’s have a Hamlet who becomes an action-film hero!”

I could go on (and do in the book), but I think it’s fair to say that I leave Mr. Shapiro’s argument in tatters for the half-baked, unexamined assertion it is, and that it’s not surprising he would not want a reader of his review to know about this, that he would not seek to defend it, and that he would not find anything good to say about my book.

But it’s also true that he manages to find something demonstrably false to say about my book, a desperate give-away of the supercilious condescension he demonstrates throughout his disingenuous review. In sneering about the fact that I left Yale graduate school to become a mere reporter rather than the lofty academic pooh-bah he fancies himself, Mr. Shapiro suggests that, as a reporter, I should have analyzed the “market forces” behind the decisions that publishers have made to divide Hamlet texts and to include dubious poems like the so-called “Funeral Elegy” in the canon (until it was discredited).

After all, reporters should concern themselves with grubby things like market forces, he implies. In fact, anyone reading my chapters on textual issues would find pointed discussion of the market forces in the Shakespeare publishing industry, and my chapter on the “Funeral Elegy” contains substantive analysis of the market forces behind the decisions made in that fiasco.

One would think Mr. Shapiro would be ashamed to have included such a flagrant misrepresentation (akin to his laughable claim that postmodern literary theory has triumphed for all times).

But then again, his conduct in this affair indicates a surprising degree of shamelessness.

The crucial question, though, is not about the author’s identity. It’s how daily life, emotion and thought transmute into art—art being that impersonal creation which communicates intense responses from one being to another. Those verbal constructs known to us as Lear, Hamlet and Rosalind emerge as spectacular personalities, and critics struggle to account for their invention. How does one account for genius? Why is it that one person has creative abilities and another doesn’t? Every book about Shakespeare—including Mr. Shapiro’s and a new biography from the hugely prolific British author Peter Ackroyd—attempts an answer of sorts.

Mr. Shapiro devotes his book to the year 1599 (Shakespeare’s 35th), during which, he believes, As You Like It, Julius Caesar and Henry V were first performed, and the playwright polished a revision of an old play (possibly his own) called Hamlet. This was “the most decisive year of his career, one in which he redefined himself and his theater.”

Literature was doing great, but political life not so great. Old Queen Elizabeth was on her last legs (she had four years left), Spain was plotting to send a new Armada against a weakened England, and an English attempt, conducted by the Earl of Essex, to suppress an Irish rebellion was a costly disaster. For Mr. Shapiro, the destabilizing insecurity of royal succession and national humiliation are in the weave of the 1599 plays. Of Hamlet he writes, “It was all the more striking that he would choose such a moment to update a story of a corrupt court (before whom a seditious play is performed), problematic succession, the threat of invasion, and the dangers of a coup.”

Mr. Shapiro—an eminent Columbia professor and a good writer—forces his argument by stuffing lots of facts and plays into those 12 months; he works strenuously and convincingly to make them implicate one another. He shows how the aborted Irish campaign, as it turns from heroic venture to disaster, “haunts” the author’s mind and drives Henry V and its revisions. “It wasn’t a pro-war play, or an anti-war play, but a going-to-war play.” Shakespeare’s ambiguous view of kingship and war are well demonstrated by comparing Laurence Olivier’s excited warrior in the 1944 film with Kenneth Branagh’s troubled bully boy of 1989.

Having pored over all the literary remains of the year 1599 and considered its social and political events, Mr. Shapiro ultimately abandons the slight gimmick of its framework and arouses greater interest and genuine excitement when he settles down to his home turf of literary studies (which he complements with an invigorated form of historiography). He gets his best results by considering how Shakespeare’s dramas were affected by a new translation of Plutarch and John Florio’s translation of Montaigne’s essays. Close study of the differences among the three extant versions of Hamlet compels him to rethink, profitably, Shakespeare’s method of working and suggests a new appreciation of Shakespeare as an artist fully in control of his craft. As Mr. Shapiro knows, it’s there, in the making of his plays, that we’ll find his heart and mind.

In this fundamentally solid job, there’s too much of Tacitus, too much of the historian John Hayward and a belabored description of the construction of the Globe Theater. Peter Ackroyd’s telling of the same story—much shorter and conflicting in major detail—has less authority. Mr. Shapiro knows how to traffic through source material, and has spent prodigious effort doing so; his 40-page bibliographical essay, a good read in itself, humiliates Mr. Ackroyd’s thin notes. Mr. Ackroyd—“a Shakespeare enthusiast rather than expert”—doesn’t even use to advantage the works listed in his bibliography.

According to his subtitle, Mr. Ackroyd’s Shakespeare is “The Biography.” Mr. Ackroyd’s subject has always been England and its writers. His last major book, Albion (2003), was an attempt to define the English imagination; readers of Shakespeare will recognize lots from that book.

The early sections are the best, especially when, on slim evidence, Mr. Ackroyd constructs a reasonable scenario of Shakespeare’s apprentice years in the theater, from 1585 to 1589, during which he might have written a lost version of Hamlet, first versions of King John and Taming of the Shrew, and made major contributions to the earliest versions of the Henry VI trilogy. There might be more: “Perhaps his first plays have simply disappeared, lost in the voracious maw of time and forgetfulness.”

With a touch of English snobbery—and by stretching the known facts—Mr. Ackroyd attempts to elevate Shakespeare’s social standing (as Shakespeare himself did when he applied for a coat of arms): “Shakespeare came from a family of undoubted affluence, with all the ease and self-confidence that such affluence encourages,” Mr. Ackroyd writes. “Shakespeare may have already considered himself to be of noble stock.”

Mr. Ackroyd is “with it” in taking up the relatively new twist of a Catholic Shakespeare, though he wobbles a bit on how Catholic in feeling the plays are. “Just as he was a man without opinions, so he was a man without beliefs.” Catholics in Elizabethan England had to keep their faith to themselves—even those “without beliefs”—and Mr. Ackroyd offers that this in part accounts for Shakespeare’s obscured personality. In fact, throughout the book, Shakespeare manages to disappear: “Once more, he becomes invisible. That invisibility, or ambiguity, is reflected in his work itself.” Are the plays really invisible or ambiguous, or is this just fancy prose?

Biographers and novelists have every right to imagine a life story for Shakespeare; it’s the quality and likelihood of that invention that’s to be judged. Last year, Colm Tóibín published a novel about Henry James, The Master, an exemplary instance of what can be achieved in this vein. Stephen Greenblatt’s recent attempt to imagine Shakespeare’s life, Will in the World, was warm beer. Peter Ackroyd’s is flat.

Like a pampered, gassy guest at a dinner party, Mr. Ackroyd is full of bright ideas (Shakespeare “would have made an excellent secretary”); surprising tastes (in The Merry Wives of Windsor, Shakespeare “is writing at the height of his invention”); recondite trivia (Shakespeare uses the word “crown” 380 times); wild guesses (“Although he clearly was at some pains to conceal it, Shakespeare himself had a sure sense of his own worth”); peculiar intuitions (“He does not know what guides his hand … or what force impels him”); provocative prejudices (Shylock “is beyond good and evil. He is simply a magnificent stage representation”); and glib confusions (“The ‘Moor’ himself is of Spanish origin”—that should come as a surprise to many North Africans). Absence of meaning and intent is a big thing for Mr. Ackroyd: “It is impossible to gauge what attitude [Shakespeare] takes towards the unfolding drama of King Lear …. The drama has no ultimate ‘meaning.’”

Expected to astonish his dinner companions at every moment, Mr. Ackroyd never shuts up. His book is composed of 91 anecdotal, vaguely chronological, chapterettes with cunning titles such as “I Am a Kind of Burre, I Shal Sticke,” and “Doth Rauish Like Inchaunting Harmonie” (he’s all for original spelling—so much more authentic). His patter is punctuated with swift descents into gibberish (“In the lives of great men and women, however, there is a pattern of destiny”) and mundane aesthetics (“Entire plays seem to be made up of parallels and contrasts and echoes”). As the evening drawls on, the guest of honor drinks too much wine, loses the point, tries to find it by repeating himself (is he or his editor responsible for the numbing reiteration of “as I mentioned”?). Finally, you don’t care whether or not he gets home safely.

Despite the inexhaustible interpretive flexibility of the plays, and their vitality—fair enough by now to grant them “immortality”—we’ll have to go on waiting patiently for the biography that exposes Shakespeare’s true life. And that, of course, will require a writer of genius.

Robert Cornfield’s book on Shakespeare’s plays will be published next year by Bloomsbury.