William Shakespeare wore his king’s livery and paid good money for a coat of arms and the title of Gentleman. Also, he retired to his rural hometown and made sure he was buried inside his parish church. Implications from these basic facts seem clear: a conventional, churchgoing man, a respectable pillar of the community.

Yet, for all the words Shakespeare left behind, he remains elusive. As Edith Hamilton observed in Three Greek Plays (1937) when writing about the now shadowy Euripides, Shakespeare proves even more enigmatic. “Always that disconcerting power of imagination,” she wrote, “blocks the way to our knowledge of him.” She explained, referring to Henry V, “He saw eye to eye with Henry on one page and with the citizens of Harfleur on the next, and what he saw when he looked only for himself, he did not care to record.”

One reason for Shakespeare’s reticence about himself was his essentially introverted nature. With his plays and poems and his acting he held up a cavalcade of masks, and then he went home. Whether at his lodgings in London or at his home in Stratford, Shakespeare spent a lot of time reading. As he neared forty, he settled down with a new book, his friend John Florio’s English translation from French of something new, short prose pieces on various topics. Their author, Michel de Montaigne, called them mere efforts or attempts, his French word essai coming into English as “essay.”

As Park Honan noted, Shakespeare used Montaigne’s essays when working on King Lear. “He enriched his outlook and even his vocabulary by reading Florio’s vigorous translation of Montaigne (1603),” wrote Honan, “and he borrowed a number of Florio’s words for the play.” While a comfortable place to begin understanding Shakespeare’s multitudinous vocabulary is Robert MacNeil’s The Story of English (1987), a modern essayist can be amused by imagining Shakespeare getting ideas from what in his day was a new genre.

In Montaigne’s essays that Florio rendered as “Of Bookes” and “A Defence of Seneca and Plutarke,” Shakespeare found a kindred spirit. He and Montaigne had read many of the same books, especially in ancient history. As he read what Montaigne wrote about Roman authors and Roman history, Shakespeare could think back to his earliest writings that drew upon scenes and sources from ancient Rome.

Around ten years before reading Montaigne, Shakespeare had a big hit on stage with his first tragedy, Titus Andronicus. For that Roman play, Shakespeare relied on Seneca’s grisly tragedy, Thyestes. The gore, mayhem, and cannibalism that Shakespeare splatters across the stage in Titus Andronicus would probably have been seen as light lunch-time entertainment in Seneca’s Rome, where a fun time was had watching lions eat criminals and seeing gladiators duel to the death.

How Shakespeare’s actors portrayed such savage violence as hands being cut off and heads being chopped off still puzzles students of Elizabethan stagecraft. A century later, literary critics were convincing themselves that Titus Andronicus could not have been written by Shakespeare. Among those doubters was Samuel Johnson, saying, “The barbarity of the spectacles, and the general massacre, which are here exhibited, can scarcely be conceived tolerable to any audience.”

Two centuries later, Harold Bloom thought Titus Andronicus was Shakespeare “attempting a parody” of the intense and popular tragedies of Christopher Marlowe. In his Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human (1998), Bloom regretted that it was indeed one of Shakespeare’s creations and said, “I don’t think I would see the play again unless Mel Brooks directed it, with his company of zanies, or perhaps it could yet be made into a musical.”

Either as parody or tragedy, Titus Andronicus makes no claim to being based on a true story. Titus Andronicus never existed, and his battles with Goths never happened. In that play Shakespeare pitted Romans against Goths like a Cavalry versus Indians movie vaguely set in the Wild West, where the audience doesn’t care about historical context, simply wanting a lot of shooting and scalping, bare-chested braves and laconic medicine men, square-jawed officers and damsels in distress.

In any case, Shakespeare’s Roman plays can include another of his early works, A Comedy of Errors. Written around the same time as Titus Andronicus, Shakespeare based it on Plautus’ farce, Menaechmi, and it can be done in togas and sandals and laurel wreaths. Just as Titus Andronicus indulged Shakespeare’s little boy ghoulishness, A Comedy of Errors let him frolic in his love of slapstick.

More to the point, Shakespeare knew his audience would enjoy horrific violence as well as screwball comedy. While rehearsing next week’s show, he was writing yet another play that would keep bringing in the crowds and their coins. To do so, he knew that the purpose of a comedy is to make people laugh, and the purpose of a tragedy is to make them gasp.

As for Shakespeare as funny man, a consensus finds his greatest comedic character in Sir John Falstaff. In his plays about Henry IV and Henry V, Shakespeare developed Falstaff as a loveably debauched court jester, and legend has it that Queen Elizabeth I told Shakespeare that she wanted to see a play where Falstaff falls in love.

Whether she ever met Shakespeare, the last time we see Falstaff is in The Merry Wives of Windsor. A production in 2010 (now on DVD) at the restored Globe Theatre in London was downright funny, wisely cutting the scene where a boy is being quizzed in Latin, and composer Nigel Hess added a song, “My Love is Fair,” fitting in as seamlessly as though written by Shakespeare.

Once again, though, some critics are never pleased. About Falstaff in The Merry Wives of Windsor, Samuel Johnson judiciously conceded, “having perhaps in the former plays completed his own idea,” Shakespeare “seems not to have been able to give Falstaff all his former power of entertainment.” Even less amused, Harold Bloom harrumphed that this Falstaff “is a nameless imposter masquerading as the great Sir John Falstaff.”

Both critics miss the point: Falstaff exists to be laughed at. Taking him from history plays into a situation comedy made no difference to Shakespeare or his audience. Although Shakespeare mentions local landmarks in Windsor like the Garter Inn, it could well be set in Stratford. The play is all about small-town people in Elizabethan England, having fun with one another and making fun of fat men and foreigners.

It was the world Shakespeare would come home to every year after months of making money in London. In 1932 Stanley Baldwin spoke at the opening of the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre in Stratford, and he expressed his intuitive appreciation of Shakespeare as a man loving his native countryside. “His heart was in the meadows by the river,” Baldwin observed, “and to those meadows he returned, by those meadows he died, and in the sound of that running water he laid his bones.”