In 1949, Duff Cooper published Sergeant Shakespeare, about the so-called lost years of William Shakespeare. From 1585 to 1592, there is a gap in the record of Shakespeare’s life, and much speculation has gone into filling that gap. More recent efforts have included two entertaining novels by Benet Brandreth, The Spy of Venice and The Assassin of Verona. For his part, Cooper, having served in the British army in Flanders during the First World War, made an almost convincing case for Shakespeare having been a British soldier serving in the Low Countries under the command of the Earl of Leicester.

Just as there is the temptation to reconstruct the historical Jesus into one’s own image and likeness, there is a tendency to look into Shakespeare and find only a mirror. A favorite sleight of hand for historians and others is to insist upon what must have been the case. Of course, “must have” is simply another way of saying “I guess.”

When after his death Shakespeare’s friends collected his plays into what we now call the First Folio, about half of the thirty-six plays in that collection were based on historical characters and events. Whatever else he was, William Shakespeare was a student of history. The span of his genius could go from romping through a magical, fairy tale version of ancient Athens in A Midsummer Night’s Dream to brooding on a variegated political tragedy from Roman history, Coriolanus.

Whether Shakespeare spent his lost years reading history, he made time for it here and there throughout his life. His historian’s instincts permeated his works. When in Sonnet 19 he wrote of “swift-footed Time” lining our faces with his “antique pen,” when in Sonnet 55 he wrote of the marble and gilded monuments of princes, of “unswept stone, besmear’d with sluttish time,” and of war burning public records, Shakespeare showed his sense of history.

Needless to say, I believe that Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare. It is as silly to imagine that Francis Bacon or Edward de Vere wrote Shakespeare’s plays as to try to prove that Rod Serling’s The Twilight Zone teleplays were really written by J. Edgar Hoover or Clare Boothe Luce. In 1912, Arthur Conan Doyle, in his adventure novel The Lost World, described one character glaring at another: “So looks the Shakespearean who is confronted by a rancid Baconian, or the astronomer who is assailed by a flat-earth fanatic.”

Shakespeare’s primary interest in history was patriotic, drawing upon episodes of medieval British history. Most of Shakespeare’s history plays present the colossal dynastic and political struggles that divided England throughout the Middle Ages. Some of those plays have come vividly to life in Orson Welles’s film, Chimes at Midnight (1965), and Kenneth Branagh’s masterpiece, Henry V (1989).

As historians are enjoying a drama based on history, they want to know what really happened. After all, before long someone will ask the nearest historian about the historical accuracy of a given play or film. For historians interested in how Shakespeare used history, since 1999 an invaluable resource has been John Julius Norwich’s Shakespeare’s Kings.

Long before writing about Shakespeare’s plays about British royals, Norwich made his name writing multi-volume narrative histories of Byzantium and Venice. His Shakespeare’s Kings complements Peter Saccio’s Shakespeare’s English Kings, which is more academic in scope. A reviewer for the scholarly journal Speculum called Norwich’s book “sensible” and “a compelling, accessible book for general readers” that “offers more historical anecdote but less critical discussion than Saccio.”

Something most historians have in common is a lively sense of the absurd. Still, Norwich restrained his sense of humor when dealing with the clownish character of Sir John Falstaff. As have other writers, Norwich explained how Shakespeare combined two historical figures, Sir John Oldcastle and Sir John Fastolf, and turned the composite into something of a court jester, back in a time when it was thought fair game to make fun of fat slobs. For Norwich, though, Falstaff, with his humiliation in the Henry IV plays, “obviously deserves all he gets.”

While Oldcastle was convicted of being a Lollard heretic and executed, Fastolf kept his reputation for honor and valor. “He certainly did nothing to deserve,” Norwich declared, “the character of a drunken poltroon which Shakespeare was so unfairly to foist upon him.” After all, the comic relief of fictional characters like Falstaff, along with his antics in the situation comedy of The Merry Wives of Windsor, falls outside the limits Norwich set for himself in this engaging book. When I met him, though, Norwich was less reserved.

One autumn evening in 2006 at Heffers bookshop in Cambridge, Norwich gave a talk about his new book, The Middle Sea, a history of the Mediterranean. He began by saying that whenever anyone heard he was working on a history of the Mediterranean, the comment was always that of course he was reading Fernand Braudel’s famous and massive three-volume work on that subject.

“Braudel, Braudel, Braudel!” Norwich exclaimed in exasperation. “The trouble with Braudel,” he explained, “is there are no jokes in Braudel!”

He added that, unlike Braudel, he was no original scholar, just a jovial storyteller, saying, “I wouldn’t know what to do with a piece of original research if I found one.”

After his talk, he happily signed my copy of The Middle Sea, as well as my copy of his edition of diaries by his late father, Duff Cooper. Sadly, my copy of Shakespeare’s Kings was three thousand miles away. As he flourished his signature, I said he was right about staying away from history books without jokes, that history ought to be fun.

“Exactly,” he smiled, “or what’s the point?”