THERE isn’t actually a huge amount of information about William Shakespeare, and for a man who is widely considered to be the greatest writer in the English language, with an oeuvre of almost 40 plays, and over 150 sonnets, this is — to say the least — mildly surprising. However, it’s also probably why Jude Morgan, who has fictionalised the lives of the Brontë sisters, is able to fill in the blanks with his latest novel, The Secret Life of William Shakespeare. Using fact as the basis of fiction is not an easy undertaking, but Morgan manages to pull together an entirely compelling person(ality) with nothing more than a few threads. This is really well done, historical accuracy be damned, especially for a subject about whom entire libraries of speculation, academia, conspiracy theories and analysis exist.

So, let’s see. He was baptised in the 16th century. Grew up in Stratford. Had a father who was a glove-maker. Married a pregnant older woman while barely an adult himself. Had a daughter and then twins (a boy and a girl). Lost his 11-year-old son to the plague. Moved to London — eventually — to become an actor and subsequently a writer. Didn’t have huge amounts of luck with the former, but the latter made him rich and famous. And that’s really about it.

There are Pakistani politicians who would wake up in cold sweats in the middle of the night at even the thought of being scrutinised with a fraction of the attention paid to Shakespeare. The Bard of Avon has been — and remains — the subject of serious strife, with arguments about his life that run a gamut so broad, Atlas’ shoulders would be hard-pressed to hold it all up. There is — quite literally — almost nothing about which Shakespearean scholars have not argued: authorship of his works, his personal life, the objects of his affection, his reasons for moving to London, his relationship with his family, and so on. Morgan’s willingness to charge with such insouciance into his own particular riff on Shakespeare could be seen as demonstrating either great courage or great foolishness. It does, after all, take a remarkable amount of sangfroid to deal with the thought of a small army of doctoral students who will take up their pitchforks.

The initial setting of the novel starts with Shakespeare and his father, a man fallen from society’s grace, who cannot understand why his son is unwilling to work in the family business as a glove-maker, and is equally perplexed by the young William’s fascination with “unsuitable” actors. As Shakespeare senior puts it, in a moment of wonderful bafflement that will resonate with any parent or son who has had a conflict of expectations: “You are not a villain or a wastrel, no, but you excel at small disappointments.” This is a form of reproach that is the prototype for all jokes about Jewish and Catholic guilt across the last several centuries, and is only compounded by the loss and turmoil that Anne, William’s wife, faces as her husband begins to vanish for long periods of time and rises in fame and fortune.

Two elements in particular stand out in Morgan’s writing: his use of dialogue, which could very easily have been a ham-handed caricature of Victorian and Elizabethan voices, and his use of negative space to flesh out Shakespeare. In the case of the former, language is a tricky balancing act; even talented writers run the risk of turning their characters’ conversations into tedious droning (see: Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall). Fortunately, Morgan manages to strike the right balance between modernising delivery without making it feel like a poorly fitted construct. By turns understated and humourous, Morgan weaves Ben Johnson, Marlowe, Camden and many other luminaries of the time into this story, but does so without turning them into cliché. But he also manages to leave something for the modern reader, the gentle nudge in the ribs that engages an audience; for example, when asked if he has ever written a play, Shakespeare casually agrees that he does, sometimes “turn [his] hand to it.”

The negative space that Morgan creates comes out of his focus not on Shakespeare’s presence, but his absences. Away for long stretches of time, we see how Shakespeare in absentia affects the people in his life, and Morgan brings this awareness to us by spending a large amount of time in Anne’s shoes. This is a clever trope: in Anne Shakespeare, née Hathaway, we find someone with whom it is easy to empathise. Living a life that is intensely separate from that of her husband, both geographically and emotionally, Anne gives readers a sense that she is — as before her marriage, so after — detritus in someone else’s life. Her sadness manifests itself in her worries and interactions with other members of Shakespeare’s family: their children, Susanna, Judith and Hamnet; her brother Bartholomew, Shakespeare’s immediately family, and their social circle in Stratford. This is almost ancillary however, to the suspicions she has of being betrayed by Will, who she is convinced is having an affair with someone in London (the affair, such as it were, turns out to be close friendships with an actor, Jack Tonne, and the mentorship of a handsome young man, Matthew Hollingbury). To his credit, rather than choosing to take on the questions of sexuality and fidelity, Morgan remains within the bounds of Anne’s personality and viewpoints, managing to delicately handle a subject of much debate.

One of the reasons that The Secret Life of William Shakespeare works out well is because Morgan wisely puts together a novel that avoids mention of Shakespeare the Playwright and Bard. Rather, the professional Will Shakespeare is subsumed by the individual: the man, not the machine (so to speak). Instead of spending inordinate amounts of time on working in sly asides about Shakespeare’s canon as literary “in jokes”, Morgan instead focuses on Shakespeare’s relationships with his father and with Anne Hathaway. In so doing, he manages to construct a story that the Bard himself might well admire.