William Shakespeare: The Man Behind the Genius

First-time bardographer (and biographer of Olivier and Prince Charles), Holden colorfully if superficially fills in the blanks between Shakespeare's vast output of verse and the paltry official record, which leaves much about the man to speculation. Unlike Park Honan's recent, soberly deductive life, and more in tune with Harold Bloom's and Anthony Burgess's zealous conjectures, Holden's kitchen-sink approach packs in his own hypotheses based on circumstantial evidence, recent biographic theories and all the hoary old traditions. Regarding the early ""lost years,"" Holden supports the Lancashire hypothesis, that the young Catholic William ""Shakeshafte"" was a tutor and amateur actor in the stately home of a recusant Lancastrian nobleman. Holden further speculates that the legend of the deer-poaching Will's escape to London after a run-in with an anti-Catholic Warwickshire knight had as much to do with religious persecution as theft. As Shakespeare's life progresses, Holden's guesswork becomes less convincing in explaining such mysteries as the identities of the sonnets' Dark Lady (just an amalgamation) and their dedicatee, ""Mr. W.H."" (his brother-in-law, William Hathaway). With the better established facts of the Globe's theatrical world, Holden's biography loses some of its energy. Sometimes reading dubiously between the lines of Shakespeare's plays, such as projecting Macbeth's insomnia on the Bard, Holden sums up the actor-playwright-poet's final change of roles into Stratford's first citizen. 8 pages color, 8 pages b&w illus. not seen by PW. (July)