Shakespeare seems to have been the mildest of fellows, and yet the earliest written account we have of him is an attack on his character by a fellow artist. He appears to many biographers to have spurned his wife-famously he left her only his second-best bed in his will, and that as an apparent afterthought-and yet no one wrote more highly, more devotedly, more beamingly, of love and the twining of kindred souls.

We are not sure how best to spell his name-but then neither, it appears, was he, for the name is never spelled the same way twice in the signatures that survive. (They read as “Willm Shaksp,” “William Shakespe,” “Wm Shakspe,” “William Shakspere,” “Willm Shakspere,” and “William Shakspeare.” Curiously one spelling he didn’t use was the one now universally attached to his name.) Nor can we be entirely confident how he pronounced his name. Helge Kökeritz, author of the definitive Shakespeare’s Pronunciation, thought it possible that Shakespeare said it with a short a, as in “shack.” It may have been spoken one way in Stratford and another in London, or he may have been as variable with the pronunciation as he was with the spelling.

We don’t know if he ever left England. We don’t know who his principal companions were or how he amused himself. His sexuality is an irreconcilable mystery. On only a handful of days in his life can we say with absolute certainty where he was. We have no record at all of his whereabouts for the eight critical years when he left his wife and three young children in Stratford and became, with almost impossible swiftness, a successful playwright in London. By the time he is first mentioned in print as a playwright, in 1592, his life was already more than half over.

For the rest, he is a kind of literary equivalent of an electron-forever there and not there.

To understand why we know as little as we do of William Shakespeare’s life, and what hope we have of knowing more, I went one day to the Public Record Office-now known as the National Archives-at Kew, in West London.