‘Shakespeare Without a Life’
By Margreta de Grazia
Oxford University Press, 192 pages

‘Stalking Shakespeare: A Memoir of Madness, Murder, and My Search for the Poet Beneath the Paint’
By Lee Durkee
Scribner, 272 pages

‘What Was Shakespeare Really Like?’
By Stanley Wells
Cambridge University Press, 168 pages

‘Shakespeare Was a Woman and Other Heresies: How Doubting the Bard Became the Biggest Taboo in Literature’
By Elizabeth Winkler
Simon & Schuster, 416 pages

‘Hamnet’
By Maggie O’Farrell
Vintage, 320 pages

Shakespeareana is a capacious term encompassing literary criticism, biography, fiction, portraiture — not to mention detective work, conspiracy theories, art history, and, really, what have you.

Long ago, Lord Alfred Tennyson supposed Shakespeare was safe from prying biographers because so little was known about him, and that was a blessed relief to a poet who believed the less we know about a writer the better, because then we have, as Margreta de Grazia puts it, “Shakespeare Without a Life.”

Ms. de Grazia examines what Shakespeare meant to his audience two centuries after his death, and before biographers made a case out of him.  What we learn from her is about more than Shakespeare, as what she offers is a critique of how biography, at one time, did not even occur to commentators as a way of addressing his work. 

Does this mean that Shakespeare’s writing, for all the biographical inquiry, has no personality? Stanley Wells takes the playwright’s words and makes inferences about the author the way actors make inferences about the characters they play. So what is characteristic of Shakespeare, the man? Can we say? Well, take a look at his sense of humor, as Mr. Wells does in order to, indeed, suss out a sensibility, if not quite a person. 

Well, maybe we can get at Shakespeare through a few of the famous portraits, though they tell us more about the portraitists and trends in portraiture that resulted in Shakespeare getting “prettier by the century,” Mr. Durkee observes. What he does, in the end, is what the painters do: confect an image of the bard that matches the image Mr. Durkee wants to see.

That Shakespeare was not actually Shakespeare but some other better-educated and well-placed fellow is, of course, a staple of Shakespeareana. Elizabeth Winkler canvases the list of pretenders to the Shakespearean throne like Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford, and also the illustrious ranks of those like Henry James, Sigmund Freud, and a Supreme Court justice, John Paul Stevens, who did not find the case for concluding that Shakespeare was Shakespeare dispositive.

What happens when you abandon the search for the real Shakespeare and what he was like is a novel,“Hamnet,” which is still biographical in the sense that past lives are deeply imagined, but without the pressure of trying to prove anything.

Hamnet, Shakespeare’s son, died at the age of 11 in 1596, and four years later his father wrote “Hamlet.” Maggie O’Farrell notes at the beginning of her novel, quoting Shakespeare biographer Steven Greenblatt, that “Hamnet and Hamlet are in fact the same name, entirely interchangeable in Stratford records in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.”

Ms. O’Farrell also quotes, as an epigraph, lines from “Hamlet,” Act IV, Scene V: “He is dead and gone, lady, / He is dead and gone; / At his head a grass-green turf, / At his heels a stone.” The lines that imply the play is a displaced act of mourning.

Early on it is apparent that Ms. O’Farrell is creating “Hamlet” in an age before memoirs and biography as Shakespeare’s only way of memorializing his son, who is a Hamlet, with a “quick” mind and with “no trouble understanding the schoolmasters’ lessons.” The boy can “grasp the logic and sense of what he is being told,” memorizes “readily,” and exercises excellent recall of “grammar and tenses and rhetoric” — a veritable Shakespeare with no need of an Earl of Oxford, thank you very much.

Employing a novel like “Hamnet” might seem the unlikeliest way of adjudicating the case for Justice Stevens and the other doubters, yet Ms. O’Farrell persuasively shows how it is that Shakespeare was in fact Shakespeare, with a biography even if she can only imagine it. 

Mr. Rollyson is the author of “Reading Biography.”