Allen Lane £25 pp304

Shakespeare has always had the most remarkable ability to appear through absence. There is a renowned paucity of historical fact left behind — his tread on the earth was fastidiously light. Yet through those scant details we do know about (a birth register here, a legal document there) we are able to build up an indistinct picture. He removes himself wholly from his own plays. There has never been a writer who editorialises less, whose authorial voice is more completely discreet. Yet behind the dazzling shimmer of his many invented voices, we can hear the distant echo of his own.

Any approach to the man almost has to be oblique. If you walk straight up to him, he will inevitably run away. In his recent study, 1599, James Shapiro summoned up an image by painting a detailed landscape of one particular year in his life. Stephen Greenblatt, in Will in the World, introduces us to him through a vivid re-creation of a series of previously unexamined historical events that dynamically influenced his work. And now Stanley Wells has come up with the ingenious idea of helping us to understand the lead singer of the Elizabethan world by concentrating on his backing group.

Between 1570 and 1630, London thew up a variety and a profusion of playwriting talent that has hardly ever been matched. Theatre talent has tended to cluster throughout history in cities that have been vital with a sense of new possibility. The democratic crucible of Athens; the imperial convulsions of Rome; the new industrial metropolises of Stockholm, Oslo and Moscow at the end of the 19th century — all produced bodies of work exploring the new possibilities of the human. Yet none can match the lawless, vulgar and beautiful prodigality of London at that moment.

The playwrights of the period were an extraordinary rock-star bunch, with a greater affinity to the Pete Doherty burning-the-candle archetype than the Phil Collins Swiss-chalet style. Most of them seemed to live permanently on the verge of bankruptcy, rushing out play after play to keep themselves in drink and away from debtors’ prison. Philip Henslowe, the great producer of his day, was the cashpoint of his era, dispensing £2 here and £7 there, for a new work, a bit of rewriting, a story idea or a new ending. Their money once obtained quickly disappeared into wine and whores. They patented living on the edge long before the rock world came up with its pale imitation, and their lives were as riddled with violence as those in the rap world. Christopher Marlowe was stabbed above the eye and killed in a tavern brawl; Ben Jonson killed a man in a sword fight, and was saved from the gallows only by his literacy. In the midst of all this mayhem, Shakespeare appears as a gentler figure, steadily accumulating his wealth and prudently keeping himself out of trouble.

It was a time and a place teeming with excitement, anecdote and incident, and Wells, in this richly enjoyable work, brings it to life with a novelist’s sense of the telling detail. My favourite one was a description of the perfunctory death of John Fletcher’s father; “His life came to a peaceful if abrupt end. Smoking a pipe of tobacco in his house in Chelsea on the evening of June 15, 1596 he said to his servant, ‘Boy, I die’, and expired on the spot.” Wells also has an acute understanding of the three great motors that drove the Elizabethan theatre — laughter, sex and death. If he errs in looking too hard at any one of those three, it would be sex. It sometimes seems that he is excited by the erotic strain in Elizabethan drama and verse to the exclusion of much else, but this serves well as a corrective to an excess of prudery elsewhere in the critical world.

The overriding impression given by this book is the astonishing lack of preciousness in the theatre world of the time. Collaboration was a hard fact of life, rather than something archly pretentious that people do in workshops with knitted brows. Playwrights were perpetually combining to produce work, divvying up their workload to lighten the burden, inserting speeches at an actor’s or a producer’s behest, stealing each other’s jokes, or blatantly copying one another’ s plots. It was a million miles from the hysterical auteurism of today, and all the healthier for it. Plays had to hold the attention of a boisterous crowd of up to 3,000, who were hungry for action and excitement and pain and wit. There was no time for playwrights to witter on about the special quality of their voice. They had to enthral or die. Life and theatre bumped rudely into each other then. It is a collision that we should seek to re-create.

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