Best Biography of the Bard?

There are probably a bazillion Shakespeare biographies out there. (Amazon lists 2,311 books if you search "Shakespeare biography). Some are super scholarly, some are meant for children and some split the difference by being engaging as well as literate. One of the best I've read is Peter Ackroyd's Shakespeare: The Biography.  Ackroyd is a novelist as well as a biographer (he has chronicled the lives of Sir Thomas More, Charles Dickens, T. S. Eliot, William Blake, and Chaucer), Ackroyd writes uniquely immersive books. If you're interested in the man's world as well as the man, Ackroyd's bio is a great place to start.