Shakespeare the man remains the most potent of ghosts. Through his plays and poems we have a strong sense of him as a person, and yet the details of his life are tantalizingly obscure. We know that he was born in Stratford-upon-Avon in April 1564 and died there, also in April, in 1616, and that between those two Aprils, he spent 25 years in London, at various addresses, as an actor, playwright, and somewhat reclusive “gentleman.” We know a bit about his marriage to Ann Hathaway, to whom he bequeathed his “second-best bed,” and that he had three children, one of whom, his beloved son Hamnet, died at the age of 11 in 1596 (to Hamnet’s twin sister Judith, who survived her father, Shakespeare left a bequest of £150). Some legal documents survive, but there aren’t many. In the end, it would seem that, as Emerson remarked, “Shakespeare is the only biographer of Shakespeare.”

Emerson may have been unduly skeptical. Only six authentic examples of Shakespeare’s signature are known; these are little more than exquisite squiggles, baffling even to graphologists. But one is appended to a deposition which Shakespeare gave on May 11, 1612, at the Court of Requests in Westminster. Shakespeare had been called as a witness in a case of breach of contract and the deposition to which he affixed his signature contains his “sworn statement.” The document, discovered in 1909 by the American scholar Charles William Wallace of the University of Nebraska, thus represents the only known transcript of Shakespeare’s words, caught by the clerk in a crabbed chancery hand, just as he spoke them.

In “The Lodger Shakespeare: His Life on Silver Street” (Viking, 380 pages, $26.95), the historian Charles Nicholl uses this fragile and somewhat enigmatic document to reconstruct Shakespeare himself, and the rowdy world he inhabited, in the years between 1603 and 1605. During those two years, Shakespeare rented lodgings at the house of Christopher Mountjoy on Silver Street in London’s Cripplegate district. He was 48 years old at the time. “Hamlet,” his greatest success — first staged in 1601 — was behind him (as were “Romeo and Juliet,” “Julius Caesar,” “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” and “The Merchant of Venice”) and “King Lear,” first performed for King James on Christmas Eve, 1606, lay ahead. While lodging on Silver Street, he would write “Measure for Measure” and “Timon of Athens,” perhaps his harshest and most disturbing plays, along with “Othello” and “All’s Well That Ends Well.”

The case in which Shakespeare testified involved an unpaid dowry. His landlord, Mountjoy, had promised to give his apprentice Stephen Belott the sum of £60 when he married Mountjoy’s daughter, Mary. Shakespeare himself played the role of matchmaker. In his deposition he states that the mother of the bride “did sollicitt and entreat” him to “perswade the said Complainant to effect the said Marriadge,” and Shakespeare did so. The wedding took place in 1604, but eight years later, the promised dowry still had not been paid. Mountjoy was a notorious skinflint; he didn’t deny the debt but said that he would rather “rot” than pay. Such a case would take Judge Judy about two minutes to decide but the proceedings dragged on for years and in the end, Belott was never recompensed.

Shakespeare’s own testimony is curiously vague. He has difficulty remembering the details of the contract. Three times he breaks off and the clerk records “more he cannot depose.” Mr. Nicholl wonders whether his memory was failing with age but to the untutored reader, it seems clear that Shakespeare was being diplomatic; he praises the plaintiff and the defendant in equally warm terms. It’s hard to tell from the Jacobean legalese in which the testimony is couched but one has the sense that Shakespeare found the procedure embarrassing as well as stale.

Mr. Nicholl writes beautifully and, even better, is an admirable sleuth. He extracts every possible nuance from the skimpy documentation and adds to it a wealth of colorful reference. He leads us step by step from Silver Street and its pungent environs into the Mountjoy house, which he reconstructs in vivid detail, and into Shakespeare’s own room, with its books and furniture, including a typical Elizabethan four-poster bed. (In just such a bed, he notes, Othello smothered Desdemona.) He brings these vanished details back to life with aptly chosen quotations, largely from Shakespeare but also from a host of his contemporaries. Many of these, such as the pimp and playwright George Wilkins, who collaborated with Shakespeare on “Pericles,” or the quack doctor “Oracle” Forman, whose casebook records the extramarital hijinks of Mrs. Mountjoy, show what rich and seedy raw material Shakespeare had to draw on during his sojourn on Silver Street. Though Shakespeare himself never comes quite into focus, we see late 16th-century London — “overcrowded, squalid, corrupt, crime-ridden and plague-infested,” as Mr. Nicholl puts it — through his eyes, and seem to pick our way with him through those narrow streets with their “rich whiff of danger and pleasure.”

Silver Street was destroyed by the Great Fire in 1666 and then rebuilt, only to be obliterated forever during the Blitz. The site where Shakespeare once lived is now an underground parking garage. This seems awful but is quite apt. For so elusive and magnificent a ghost, the only possible permanent address is the English language itself.

eormsby@nysun.com