Heroes & Villains: Peter Ackroyd on William Shakespeare

SHAKESPEARE WAS the most consummate genius of all time. He was a great actor as well as playwright. I think that he helped to invent the notion of self-consciousness and the idea of individual identity. And, in my opinion, he is remarkable for his other gifts too: the ability to conflate tragedy and comedy, his professionalism, his remarkable energy.

When I came to Shakespeare, I came to him as an enthusiast rather than a scholar. There are lots of things that interested me about this man's life and career. One is his so-called invisibility and the fact that none of his contemporaries really deemed him worthy of extended comment. It's fascinating that his presence was not considered a very significant force " while he was considered amiable and quick-witted and charming, there's no sense in which his peers seemed to realise that he did have an outstanding genius of his own. That really interests me. I think part of the mystery of Shakespeare is the fact that there are so many unknowable areas of his life. There are controversies about what he'd done when he was a youth, and how he managed to enter the dramatic profession in the first place. But I don't think the solution to those riddles would in any way enhance our understanding of the man himself. That remains in the plays rather than in his life.

What really gets my attention is that Shakespeare was so energetic. He wrote 39 plays during his career " that's two or three plays a year for most of his writing life. And when you consider some of the plays were Othello and King Lear, it's a remarkable accomplishment. And at the same time as writing, he was working as a full-time actor for most of his life, which meant rehearsing in the mornings and playing in the afternoons. So I admire his energy and his industriousness very much.

As a writer, Shakespeare is one of the few who you don't get tired of. He doesn't weary you like some writers do. You can come to his work fresh every time and there's always something to spark the imagination. He's not predictable or commonplace, and he doesn't have any particular tics of style that become irritating. I don't particularly have a favourite play, although some of the works I would choose to read over others that are less intriguing for me. I enjoy reading Macbeth, and very much enjoy Love's Labours Lost, while a play like All's Well That Ends Well, for instance, doesn't interest me greatly.

I actually prefer to read Shakespeare's plays rather than go to see them " I often find the performances rather disappointing. I think that's often felt by the audiences too: the culture has shifted so remarkably over the past four centuries that it's no longer possible to experience Shakespeare as his first audiences experienced him. The first audiences were much more attuned to aural delivery than we are " they were accustomed to listening to long sermons and so on. These days, it's very difficult to understand him aurally, purely just by listening. I think Shakespeare is easier to understand on the page than he is on the stage. So the problems modern audiences have with him are partly the fault of actors, partly the fault of modern consciousness and also partly the fault of modern education which doesn't rate too highly the virtues which Shakespeare represents. When I read him at school, he was a set text and it was just schoolwork really. I don't remember thinking it was genius or that he held any particular interest to me. At university I was drawn to him much more, but more by his poetry than his stagecraft. It was later in life when I began to read him in the context of a book I was writing about the English imagination I saw his potential.

Although I'm not sure that many people are involved in reading Shakespeare so much, I don't think there's any chance that he'll be diminished in popular esteem. His works are still quite popular on television, and ongoing in various theatre companies. He was even voted the most important Englishman of the past 1,000 years recently. He'll always be there. As long as printing presses exist it doesn't seem likely that Shakespeare will fade from our consciousnesses. And he's so much a part of the language that as long as the language persists, so will the reputation of Shakespeare. F

Peter Ackroyd's 'Shakespeare: The Biography' is published by Chatto & Windus, pounds 25

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