Shakespeare was both a non-dramatic poet and a playwright. It’s not too difficult to understand how he became a poet. The King’s New School in Stratford-upon-Avon provided its pupils with a primarily literary education and Shakespeare may have started writing poems when he was still at school. The two sonnets printed last in the collection published in 1609 are translations of a poem originally written by the fifth-century ad Greek poet Marianus Scolasticus and may have been originally written as schoolboy exercises. The sonnet numbered 153 appears to be a revision of No. 154, as if perhaps the schoolmaster had made criticisms of the boy’s first shot at it. And it is generally agreed that Sonnet 145, which ends with a pun on the name of Anne Hathaway – ‘“I hate” from hate away she threw, / And saved my life, saying, “not you”’ – is a teenage effusion, a wooing poem written, if not while Shakespeare was still at school, at any rate not long after he left.

Shakespeare was primarily a public writer, an entertainer, a teller of tales about people other than himself, two of them – Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece – in narrative verse, but mostly dramas which cast only an oblique light on the mind and emotions of their writer. But he also wrote 154 individual, non-dramatic sonnets, almost all cast in the first person singular, as if they were personal utterances. They are at once some of the most famous, the most personally revealing, and the most badly misunderstood poems ever written.

Like many readers, I got to know some of the sonnets as an adolescent, attracted by their quintessentially romantic reputation – a bit like Abraham Slender in The Merry Wives of Windsor who, inarticulate at the prospect of wooing Anne Page, wishes he had his ‘book of songs and sonnets here’ (1.1.181–182).

In this book I want to think about four specific aspects of Shakespeare’s life and work. In this first chapter I shall discuss the general problem of discerning the personality of a writer who spent a lifetime of creative activity in depicting people other than himself. In the second chapter I shall address the question of how Shakespeare set about the task of writing a play. Thirdly, I shall ask what we can deduce about his personality from the body of work in which he seems to write most directly about himself, his sonnets. And finally I shall ask what made him laugh.

First, how can we hope to know what he was like? It’s a question that characters in his plays ask about other characters. When a nobleman intrudes upon the revels in the Boar’s Head Tavern (1 Henry IV, 2. 5.295), Sir John Falstaff asks ‘What manner of man is he?’

For the last chapter I decided that I wanted to write about Shakespeare’s sense of humour. I thought I would write about how – if at all – it is possible to know what made him smile and laugh. And I wanted to think about how this relates to our sense of his overall personality and of how that changed and developed over the years. But when I started actually to try to write the chapter, I began to think it would be a great deal easier to write a whole, rather long book about the subject than to try to encompass it within a single chapter. I also felt surprise that, so far as I know, no such book exists. Perhaps that is because it is easier to talk and write about tragedy, which we all know is a very serious matter, than about comedy, which it’s too easy to think of as a trivial matter.

I have been going to see performances of Shakespeare’s plays since the 1940s, and have seen most of the plays many times, in a wide range of production styles, on film and television as well as on the stage. I have seen some of them played in French, in German, in Swedish, in Romanian, in Hungarian, in Polish, in Greek, in Japanese, in Chinese, and in Russian. I have seen them given in pure and in heavily adapted texts. Early in my career I was a schoolmaster, struggling with the problems of making Shakespeare understandable, and if possible enjoyable, to the young. Later I taught Shakespeare in universities both in England and overseas. On being appointed director of the Shakespeare Institute of the University of Birmingham I became, I believe, the first ever Professor of Shakespeare Studies – there are quite a lot of them now.