The online declaration of ‘reasonable doubt about the identity of William Shakespeare’ carries thousands of signatures by individuals sceptical about the authorship of the plays and poems. They come from many walks of life. As the legal language suggests, lawyers are well represented, and there are theatre-makers, authors, diplomats, psychologists and other interested parties. There are not many professional historians in the list. Susan Amussen points out drily that unanimity among historians is unusual, so we should attend to their collective certainty about Shakespeare’s authorship. Her book proposes to reassess the evidence with a historian’s skill set, to amplify ‘what can be known about the man and his time and place’.

Her tone is helpfully pedagogical: in the opening chapter titled ‘How to be an (early modern) historian’, Amussen offers a primer outlining the documents that make up a historical life and how to find, interpret and cite them appropriately. She covers ‘vital records’, discussing what demographic trends can be aggregated from baptism and marriage records, and contextualising Shakespeare’s own will in wider testamentary practices. Property, government, court and personal records are also outlined, giving a sense of what kinds of evidence we might expect to find for Shakespeare’s own life and how to understand specific documents as part of a larger dataset. ‘Historians’, she warns us, ‘never trust any source uncritically.’ This chapter makes visible the work of interpretation, encouraging readers to ask critical questions of documentary evidence. Who wrote a document? Why? And for whom? What are the expectations for this type of document? Who kept it and for what reason? Amussen’s distinguished career as an academic historian is brilliantly showcased in this accessible historiographical masterclass. 

Chapter One suggests that Amussen’s engaging method will be to present the extant documents about Shakespeare in these different categories so that readers can develop their skills as sceptical historians. This is not, alas, the form of the book. It settles into something flatter, both more authoritative and less interrogative.