Will in the World Stephen Greenblatt Jonathan Cape, 430pp, £20 ISBN 022406276X

To ask whether we really need another life of Shakespeare is as pointless as asking whether Shane MacGowan really needs another drink: it is going to happen anyway. This is partly because the name Shakespeare is more like the names Disney and Rockefeller than it is like Wayne Rooney. The Swan of Avon is less an individual than an institution, more of an industry than an artist. As a cherished part of the nation's mythology, he is to be ranked alongside Dunkirk, the weather and Richard Dimbleby. When unfounded rumours spread recently that Shakespeare was to be dropped from some university English courses, the public was as outraged as if medical schools had announced that they would no longer study the lungs and bowels.

Lives of Shakespeare are also plentiful. We happen to know rather more about the Bard than we do about most of his contemporaries. It is true that we do not know enough to be absolutely certain that he wasn't Christopher Marlowe or the Earl of Oxford. The present Earl of Oxford, who no doubt is in need of a little high culture in his family tree, has been arguing the case for his ancestor for some years, despite the incon-venience that there is not a scrap of evidence for it. In this splendid new biography, however, Stephen Greenblatt assumes, unlike the well-named 19th- and 20th-century scholar Thomas Looney, that Shakespeare was indeed what the Oxfordians call "the Stratford man".

Greenblatt has no dramatic revelations to unfold. The story he recounts is the familiar tale of the provincial grammar-school boy - son of a prosperous glover who was probably a closet Catholic - who, after a shotgun wedding to a woman who probably never read a word that he wrote, made his way to the metropolis as one of that vagabond, semi-criminal tribe known as actors. There he became a highly successful scriptwriter- cum-theatre producer, before retiring on the proceeds as a well-respected burgher of his native Stratford. There are some intriguing gaps in the narrative: was the young Shakespeare part of an underground Catholic resistance movement centred on Lancashire, as has plausibly been suggested? Was he run out of town for poaching deer, as legend has it? ("No," is this book's answer.) Did he get his start by holding horses outside playhouses, thus becoming, in Greenblatt's words, "the patron saint of parking lot attendants"? Did he bequeath his second-best bed to his wife as a calculated insult?

That Greenblatt has little new to tell us is beside the point. What matters is the stylishness and lucidity with which this most accomplished of narrators delivers his well-thumbed fable. Greenblatt is best known in academic circles as the founder of the so-called new historicist school of American literary criticism, which on the whole prefers anecdote to analysis; and this artfully paced, tonally varied study has all the virtues of a gripping yarn. It plays its formidable erudition close to its chest, without talking down to its readers: Greenblatt knows just how much a pack of paper would have cost Shakespeare (fourpence), but he doesn't make a fuss of it.

Aiming for a non-specialist readership, and rumoured to have been granted an astronomical advance on royalties, Greenblatt seems to have strategically ditched the rest of his new-historical baggage. If new historicism is fashionably offbeat, this book is innocuously mainstream. New historicism is wary of the old-fashioned habit of treating literary works as mirrors of their authors' minds, yet this discredited approach is exactly the one Greenblatt adopts here. Indeed, it is no less than his proclaimed justification for perpetrating yet another life of Shakespeare. The method yields some inventive, ingenious hypotheses: is there a hint of the declining fortunes of Shakespeare's father in the plays' preoccupation with being restored to one's true social rank? Yet it also spawns some notably fanciful speculation. Like most biographies in which the evidence is patchy, this one overdoes the subjunctive mood, laced as it is from end to end with "might have beens", "could well haves" and "almost certainlys".

On the other hand, it can be far too certain for comfort. Assertions that we "know" that the young Shakespeare's attitude to authority was at once sly, submissive and challenging have all the bogus authority of Tony Blair on weapons of mass destruction. As with the Joint Intelligence Committee, fragile hypotheses become bald facts: freshly arrived in London, Shakespeare "discovered what it was to pine for the open country". Short of a successful seance, how on earth does the author know? In keeping with this image of a child of nature, Greenblatt's account of the early years in Stratford is a touch too idyllic, all festive custom and earthy ritual. Even so, he also does justice to the darker realities of the age: in the year of the dramatist's birth, bubonic plague killed one-sixth of the Stratford population, and nearly two-thirds of the newborn babies died before their first birthday. It seems that we have Hamlet and Lear only by the skin of our teeth.

"Throughout his career," Greenblatt informs us, "Shakespeare kept thinking about drunkenness." He may have kept writing about it, but that's different. It is like concluding from Waiting for Godot and Endgame that Samuel Beckett must have been a miserable old codger, even though we happen to know that he enjoyed a jar and a joke. There is no seamless continuum between art and life. It is not out of the question that Jane Austen ran a brothel, or that William Golding never clapped eyes on the ocean. "Will could have studied the lute with one of his accomplished neighbours, dancing with another, swordsmanship with another." Maybe. Or maybe he just propped up the bar at the Mermaid tavern.

Greenblatt, who could find his way around Jacobean London as easily as around Manhattan, writes finely on Jews, purgatory, homosexuality, witches and leather, while pressing the interesting case that Falstaff was modelled on the roistering Elizabethan playwright Robert Greene, the Brendan Behan of his day. He sees Shakespeare as being particularly intrigued by gloves, juridical torture, the law, wooing, bear-baiting and a game of bowls. Like many biographies, the book is a touch too indulgent to its subject: there is plenty of dross in the Stratford man, not least some over-cerebral wordplay and a few grotesquely unfunny stabs at comedy. One does not expect hagiography from a new historicist, but this lapse of critical acumen is more justified in the case of Shakespeare than it is in the case of Wagner or Woodrow Wyatt.

Few modern literary critics, esoteric creatures that they are, can write for a general public. American prose in particular finds it hard to steer a course between the racy and the portentous. Will in the World, by contrast, is that rare phenomenon: a work which is at once easy and elegant, wonderfully accessible yet packed with learning. As such, it is a fitting tribute to its topic - a man with the claim to be the greatest writer in history, whose image (or is it his image?) is also to be found everywhere from beer commercials to the £20 note.

Terry Eagleton's most recent book is The English Novel: an introduction (Blackwell)

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