Katherine Duncan-Jones must be granted a certain originality. There cannot be many Shakespeare scholars who combine a refusal to accept that Hand D in the manuscript of Sir Thomas More has been demonstrated beyond reasonable doubt to be Shakespeare’s, with a willingness to believe that he might have been part-author of a run-of-the-mill domestic drama of c. 1605 called A Yorkshire Tragedy. When, moreover, we find Duncan-Jones misquoting the editors of the latter play—attributing to them the statement that “there is very strong evidence” for Shakespeare’s authorship when they actually say “there is apparently very strong external evidence” (italics added)—and failing to acknowledge that they are not persuaded by this evidence, we are less than impressed. This curious combination of wariness and rashness occurs elsewhere in Ungentle Shakespeare. She refrains, for example, from deciding whether Shakespeare was a Protestant or a Catholic, but is willing to believe that he may have had a sexual relationship with the Earl of Southampton.

Her title strikes the keynote. Shakespeare was “ungentle”: a social upstart, a sexual opportunist, and mean with his money. He was eager to escape the cares of marriage and fatherhood for bachelor lodgings and distinctly cool towards his native town. Duncan-Jones’s account of his last illness and death is every bit as unpleasant as Edward Bond’s in his terrifying play Bingo. Syphilitic, troubled with heart and circulation problems, Shakespeare takes to the bottle, falls out with old friends, insults the beneficiaries in his will, and causes a curse to be carved on his tomb in order to keep his widow out. Sweet swan of Avon? Well, swans have nasty tempers.

Duncan-Jones warns us, “I quite often risk conjecture” and that her approach is “more thematic than narrative,” each chapter comprising “a collection of short related essays” on key topics. The result is a lively read, whose strengths and weaknesses can be best appreciated by those already well versed in Shakespeare’s biography. The speculations work well in contexts in which she can build on accepted evidence, as with her treatment of the uneasy professional relationship between Shakespeare and Ben Jonson. Jonson described Shakespeare, in Discoveries, as “honest, and of an open and free nature,” a disconcerting quotation of Iago’s contemptuous verdict on Othello. Duncan-Jones persuasively suggests that Shakespeare repaid Jonson’s acerbities through the character of Jacques in As You Like It, who, like Jonson, is “a satirist with a murky past, who believes himself nevertheless perfectly entitled to anatomize the follies and vices of others,” an oppositional figure whose sudden conversion at the end of the play recalls Jonson’s rapidly acquired Catholic faith a year or so earlier. We can accept this as plausible without insisting that Jacques is a full-fledged portrait of Jonson or turning the play into a clumsy allegory of the contemporary literary scene.

Jonson was not Shakespeare’s only rival, of course, and one aspect of Shakespeare’s career that this book well brings out is his place in a complicated nexus of playwrights, all jockeying for position, influence, and audience approval. Early threats from Marlowe, Nashe, Kyd, and Greene were succeeded by challenges from Marston and Middleton. Indeed, Duncan-Jones feels that Shakespeare may have collaborated with Marston, whose family was a sponsor of Shakespeare’s cousin, Thomas Greene, when he entered the Inns of Court. The puzzling relationship between Hamlet and Marston’s Antonio’s Revenge may be best accounted for by a kind of teasing, friendly rivalry, further symbolized by the fact that Marston’s title What You Will became the alternative title to Twelfth Night. There were outright collaborations late in Shakespeare’s career with John Fletcher, and Duncan-Jones supports less firm evidence that gives Thomas Middleton a share in Timon of Athens and the disreputable George Wilkins one in Pericles (to which she would add A Yorkshire Tragedy).

These were pragmatic rather than affectionate ventures; Duncan-Jones’s Shakespeare remains a cold fish, litigious and quarrelsome. We know more of his legal and financial affairs than of almost any other aspect of his life. In 1612 he was chief witness in a legal dispute between a young couple, the Belotts, and the wife’s father, Christopher Mountjoy, in whose house Shakespeare had lodged while the marriage was being negotiated. Duncan-Jones imagines him resenting the time it took, chafing at keeping company with ordinary people. The trial over, his connection with the parties apparently ended; it was not worth his trouble, we surmise, since he “stood to gain nothing personally.”

Ungentle Shakespeare does not bring the life and the work closer, since the Shakespeare it depicts seems no more likely to have written the plays than that of any other biographer. It will come as no surprise that the tragedies receive proportionately more attention than the rest, but in many ways the most interesting discussion is of The Tempest. Duncan-Jones revives the traditional autobiographical reading, with a new twist. Reworking Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus (the name means the same as Prospero, and the play had been reprinted in 1609) in a more benign mode, Shakespeare used the skills of a large troupe of boy actors, playing Miranda, Ariel, and the numerous spirits of the illusions, for the only time in his career. Prospero/Shakespeare acts out a dream of absolutist control over boys compelled to obey him, chastening adults who would rebel against him. His greatest love, Duncan-Jones claims, is for Ariel (this seems to distort the importance of Miranda), and his renunciation of power coincides with Ariel’s psychological puberty and freedom:

As in the closing “fair youth” poem of the Sonnets [no. 126], loss of power is expressed in terms of the ending of a relationship with a “lovely Boy.” As Shakespeare’s public literary career had opened with an exploration of doomed love for a “tender boy” (Adonis), so it closed.

A footnote at this point invokes the ending of Mann’s Death in Venice as a suggestive analogue. That, we may feel, is going too far, but the speculation here has a haunting, mythical quality. Shakespeare’s inner life may have been so profound that he had no need for much of an outer one. We are all left guessing, and muttering, with Touchstone, “Much virtue in ‘If.’”