Shakespeareans in love

It would be interesting to know the year that the number of works about Shakespeare surpassed the works by Shakespeare -- the year he became, as he might have put it, a man more written about than writing. The attention (the Library of Congress lists about 7,000 titles) would make any writer uncomfortable, especially when the attention comes from a scholar who picks apart obscure records and documents, looking for themes that echo one's published work.

That's what Rene Weis does in "Shakespeare Unbound: Decoding a Hidden Life" (Holt, 496 pages, $35). Weis plumbs the registers and deeds of William Shakespeare's neighborhoods and times, finding a school chum here who may have served as the inspiration for a character there, and more.

A human context

Weis speculates, for example, that Shakespeare might have spent time in the public stocks in Stratford-upon-Avon, and that the experience gave him material for the Earl of Kent's ordeal in "King Lear." Other links between life and art are less speculative, such as the playwright's fatherhood of twins and the role that twins occupy in such plays as "Twelfth Night," or the effect that the death of one of those twins -- the boy, Hamnet -- would have on the composition of Shakespeare's great tragedy "Hamlet."

Weis never panders, but neither does he blush when it comes to describing the facts of Shakespeare's times, and much there is worthy of the tabloid treatment. Christopher Marlowe's death, hints of homosexuality and heterosexual adultery, babies conceived out of wedlock, the "dark lady," Shakespeare's witnessing of his mother's labor when he was 16 -- all combine to provide a human context for the poet who produced the most important plays in literature.

Weis keeps the text readable, and his apparently easy command of historical trivia makes the time seem well spent -- even if a lot of the "decoding" is really conjecture.

Just the facts, please

Where Weis can make the reader dizzy with tantalizing maybe-truths about Shakespeare -- for example, a famous drowning in Stratford that might have informed the death of Hamlet's Ophelia -- Bryson limits himself to what we know. Which is not much.

For starters, he invites the reader to ponder Shakespeare's image: the face we all think we know, but which is based on only three original renderings; of those, just one is a portrait from life -- and that one might be of a different person altogether. Bryson goes on to show that we don't know how the playwright spelled his name, or even how he pronounced it -- perhaps the first syllable sounded like "shack" or even "shag."

His relentless adherence to the facts makes Bryson's book refreshing and fast-paced, as well as brief. He explores the sexual ambiguities of the sonnets and makes sport of the Shakespeare-wasn't-really-Shakespeare crowd, all in a neat package of fewer than 200 pages. Even so, he raises intriguing questions that send the reader scurrying to Shakespeare's texts to read more -- and if there's a higher purpose a biography of Shakespeare can serve, I don't know what it might be.

The Royal treatment

Still, Bryson may leave you longing for pictures. If so, dive into "Shakespeare: The Life, the Works, the Treasures" (Simon & Schuster, 64 pages, $50), a combination book and gift box carrying the brand of the Royal Shakespeare Company. If some of Weis' material seems arcane, wait until you puzzle over a faux-parchment facsimile of Stratford's baptismal records. You can hardly turn a page without stumbling upon an onion-skin envelope containing one or more barely legible replicas of Hamnet's burial certificate or Shakespeare and Anne Hathaway's marriage license.

To top it off, the book comes with a nearly hourlong audio CD of Royal Shakespeare Company actors performing famous scenes stripped of context or any introduction. Even so, it's a pleasure to listen to such selections as Simon Russell Beale performing Hamlet's "To be or not to be" soliloquy.

Naughty, not nice

From the back room of the Bard bookstore comes Pauline Kiernan's "Filthy Shakespeare: Shakespeare's Most Outrageous Sexual Puns" (Gotham, 303 pages, $19.99). Like Weis, Kiernan claims to be revealing the true Shakespeare. But where Weis contents himself relating real-life incidents that informed the playwright's work, Kiernan "translates" Shakespeare's prose in terms reminiscent of Lenny Bruce.

There's no question that sexual double entendres, and sometimes single entendres, inhabit the plays, but Kiernan gets no credit for discovering them. Nor is there question that Shakespeare threw in some ground-level comedy for the semiwashed. But part of Shakespeare's art was the euphemism -- the vulgarity that revealed itself subtly, and was the funnier for it.

For example, we can print the passage of "Romeo and Juliet" in which Mercutio, calling to Romeo, says,

By her high forehead and her scarlet lip,

By her fine foot, straight leg, and quivering thigh,

And the demesnes that there adjacent lie. ...

It's dirty enough, with a little imagination. But Kieran's rendition of that passage ... no, that we can't print, not in a family newspaper. "Filthy Shakespeare" is at best a gag gift you might give to that black-sheep uncle who claims to enjoy theater, but runs up inexplicable credit-card bills on Internet downloads.