Shakespeare the playwright is Hollywood's latest star and Britain's man of the millenium. But what do we know of his real character? Maurice Chittenden reports

For Britain's greatest living playwright, the view from the four-poster bed looks decidedly rosy this morning. The Hollywood star Gwyneth Paltrow may not be nestled beside him under the sheets, but her latest film, Shakespeare in Loe, opens in Britain this week, with six Golden Globe nominations; it will send the reputation of William Shakespeare even higher.

Living playwright? Of course. Young Will has six productions currently on stage in London, two more than Lord Lloyd-Webber. Six new biographies are on the publisher's lists.

The knights of the theatre are lining up to declaim his lines in new productions: Sir Nigel Hawthorne as King Lear, Sir Ian McKellen as Prospero in The Tempest. Alan Bates and Frances de la Tour will make an arresting Antony and Cleopatra at Stratford this summer.

Rufus Sewell, the television hearthrob, returns to the West End as Macbeth. Even Alicia Silverstone, best known as Batgirl, flies into London next month to start filming Kenneth Brannagh's Love's Labour's Lost.

It is a fine tally for a jobbing playwright who fell into the theatre because nobody would buy his poems and who used to look after the horses of the gentlefolk arriving at the theatre.

"I am going to say he invented valet parking," said Anthony Holden, the author who is preparing a populist life of Shakespeare. Theatrical superstar, man of the millenium, or valet-parker?

Those who go good Will hunting must search for clues in his 39 plays, and in the anecdotes handed down by his contemporaries. Though it is said a new book about Shakespeare or his works is published every day somewhere in the world, the facts are scarce. He left no letters, diaries or original manuscripts. Who was the man, rather than the literary genius?

Young Will was waiting in the wings when he heard a young lady of certain character proposition a fellow actor. "Come to my house tonight," she said. "Say you are Richard III."

The eavesdropper saw his opportunity, went to the house an hour earlier and used the password. When his fellow thespian arrived, he sent down a triumphant message: William the Conqueror comes before Richard III.

The anecdote appears in the diary of John Manningham, a lawyer who went to see Shakespeare perform his plays. It is part of the evidence to suggest that the writer, then aged 29, was just as lusty as the character played by Joseph Fiennes, 29, 400 years later in the new film. Indeed Tom Stoppard, the playwright who scripted the film, has a girl winking at Shakespeare and calling him William the Conqueror in a subtle reference to the story.

Shakespeare had arrived in London seven years earlier, a budding poet and a refugee from marriage to an older woman. His talent was not immediately apparent: Ben Johnson, fellow playwright, ridiculed his learning as a "little Latin and less Greek.".

The son of a glove maker and agricultural trader in Stratford-upon-Avon, Shakespeare had gone to Strat-ford grammar school where he would almost certainly have read French and Italian as well as Latin and Greek.

At 18 he got Anne Hathaway pregnant, and was forced by her friends to marry her to save her reputation. She was 26, and their daughter Susanna was born six months after the ceremony. Two more children followed.

Conventional family life did not last long. In 1585 he left his wife and family, probably teaching for a year in a Lancashire school before emerging in a London of open sewers, rats and the plague, clutching his scribbled poems.

He almost certainly drifted into the theatre when he found he could not sell his verse. Like a messenger boy made good, he succeeded by seizing openings as they happened. From caring for theatre-goers' horses he moved on to prompting, helping the actors with their lines. When one of them fell ill, Shakespeare stepped into his role.

A star was not born. According to surviving accounts, he was little more than a pedestrian actor. His roles were few and far between, even when he graduated to writing the plays.

The dramas were not published in full but simply outlined, perhaps in an inn or rooming house. Shakespeare would have sat by a brazier, writing by lamp or candle-light. He probably dressed simply in a leather jerkin over a shirt and breeches. Mutton and fish would have been staples of his diet, washed down with sack (sherry), ale and wine.

He rented rooms in lodging houses, and was no stranger to the inside of taverns. "He was a man who loved life and lived it energetically," says David Scott Kastan, professor of English at Columbia University in New York. "To produce a figure like Falstaff suggests those pleasures were vital to him."

Actors, who improvised on his work, were given only their own lines to prevent entire scripts being pirated by other companies. A play might run for 12 days; then a new script was needed.

Shakespeare could meet a deadline: when Queen Elizabeth praised his character Sir John Falstaff in Henry IV and insisted he feature in another production, Shakespeare rattled out The Merry Wives of Windsor in two weeks.

The secret of his financial success, however, was not fees generated by his plays, but shrewd investment: he gathered sufficient money, perhaps £50, to buy a share in the company of actors with whom he worked. As London's theatreland grew - the Rose opened in 1592, the globe in 1599 - so did the profits from plays.

Shakespeare, no wild or mad genius, was careful with his money and mindful with his status. The early taunts of Johnson and Marlowe still pricked him and he went to the lord chamberlain's office to buy a coat of arms for his family to prove he was a gentleman.

"I think he would have done well in cool Britannia, but he was also a Thatcherite individualist who knew how to make money for himself," said Professor Peter Holland of the Shakespeare Institute of Birmingham University.

Hathaway was not entirely neglected. Two or three times a year, when the open-air theatres were closed because of the winter or an outbreak of the plague, he went back to Stratford. The journey took two days on horseback; four days on foot.

It seems he still found the energy to break the trip at a tavern in Oxford where he had an affair with the innkeeper's wife. Her son, William Davenant who later boasted Shakespeare was his real father as well as his godfather, later became poet laureate.

Holden will suggest in his forthcoming biography that some of the lines of King Lear and Timon of Athens are so vehement in their portrayal of women as carriers of disease that Shakespeare had probably caught the pox from ladies of easy virtue.

In later life he returned to Stratford where he had bought New Place, the second-biggest house, for £60 in 1597. That his will left his wife "the second-best bed" in the house is sometimes interpreted as an insult; but in Elizabethan houses the best bed was kept for guests. The husband adn wife shared the second-best bed and these final words may be proof of a reconciliation and some happy last years.

But his death, on his 52nd birthday, April 23, 1616, has been put down to a cause that might be described as very rock'n'roll: overindulgence during a drinking bout with Jonson and the poet Michael Drayton.

The bandwagon rolls on. There is even a movement afoot to rename April 23 Shakespeare Day instead of St. George's Day. More than a million people will visit the Shakespeare properties in Stratford this year, they can take home the Midsummer Night's Dream range of soaps exclusive to the six gift shops there, romantic Shakespearean quotes in gold frames, or a teddy bear wearing a jumper with the stage direction "Exit, pursued by a bear".

The town's namesake in Ontario will host the world's biggest Shakespeare festival for the 47th successive year; more than half a million people will see 10 plays performed over six months.

Coming soon is Shakespeare the musical: Play On!, an all-singing, all-dancing version of the bard set to the music of Duke Ellington which is currently going down a storm in the United States.

The fascination shows no sign of waning. Sir Frank Kermode, who is writing a Shakespeare study, said: "People might understand only one line in five of Coriolanus, but they know it better than most things written since."