As Bill Bryson so rightly says, the world does not really need another book on Shakespeare - but the Eminent Lives' series from HarperPress does. Hence this new book, entitled merely Shakespeare (£14.99). And what a good idea of HarperPress to ask Bill Bryson to write it.

William Shakespeare is probably the best known of all English writers, leaving behind him almost a million words of written text. He was, and continues to be, a rich mine of material for academic study, giving rise to at least 4,000 new works every year. But despite all this, there is very little known for certain about the man himself.

We have only 14 words in his own handwriting, and a few questionable likenesses'; his name crops up in the records of a few business dealings, but only peripherally.

The intention of this latest book is simple: to start with the few known facts and to see how much of Shakespeare we can really know from the record. The answer is not much', which is partly why the book is so slender. There is nothing that gives any insight into the man as a private person - not a single scrap.

But what Bryson lacks in hard fact in his subject matter, he more than makes up for in reasoned conjecture, anecdotes and fascinating snippets of contemporary life - all told with his customary wit and unpretentious style.

He transports the reader to the London of Shakespeare's times, the smells, the fashions. He explains why it was important for audiences to be under cover (rain would make the dyes in their clothes run and would dissolve the starch in the ruffs). He details the precarious existence and financial instability of playwrights, and surmises what Shakespeare was up to in those seven lost years'.

If you are not the sort of person who would ever read a book on Shakespeare, you could make this an exception. It is so eminently readable, so very interesting, and so very amusingly written, with Bryson's trademark deadpan humour at every turn, that it is a veritable pleasure to read - and fascinating, to boot.

And, while we're on the subject, we should mention Park Honan's Christopher Marlowe: Poet and Spy (OUP, £12.99). In contrast to the Bryson Shakespeare, this is a scholarly study, a detailed biography, and consequently a substantial paperback.

Marlowe packed a great deal into his short life. He was born two months before Shakespeare, and died at the age of 29. The book highlights his dangerous career as a part-time spy, as well as his life in the theatrical world; in addition, Marlowe was also known as an atheist and blasphemer, a tough street-fighter and a homosexual, which all make for interesting reading.

Like Bryson, Honan is looking for known facts about his subject, and he too gives a rich description of Elizabethan life.

This is a book that is altogether different from the Bryson one, with a completely different intended audience, but nonetheless readable and rewarding.