The everlasting guessing game

On the very first page of Peter Ackroyd’s biography, you learn something strange and interesting about the first few moments of Shake- speare’s life: ‘A small portion of butter and honey was usually placed in the baby’s mouth. It was the custom in Warwickshire to give the suckling child hare’s brains reduced to jelly.’ Who knew that the first food our greatest dramatist tasted was jellied hare’s brains? Yuck.

On page after page that follows, he dishes out similar morsels. At the excavation of the site of the Rose theatre in 1989 he tells us that there were discovered ‘orange pips, Tudor shoes, a human skull, a bear skull, the sternum of a turtle, 16th-century inn tokens, clay pipes, a spur, a sword scabbard and hilt, money boxes, quantities of animal bones, pins and old clothing’. The detail is all. Ackroyd has written a big, expansive, densely imagined book in bite-sized chapters.