Anna Beer - The Life of the Author - William Shakespeare

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Much virtue in if

As You Like It (5.4.101)

I began work on this book long before any of us knew of Covid-19. As I write these words, the theaters in my own country remain closed, in an eerie echo of Shakespeare’s working life. The vast majority of people who work in the arts have had their creative lives disrupted at best, completely destroyed at worst. And those of us who took for granted a ready stream of live performances are thirsty for culture in ways we could not have imagined a year ago. Knowing that Shakespeare wrote his remarkable plays during similar times has, however, been strangely comforting, above and beyond the enduring comfort offered by his words. I, like millions of others, am now even more grateful for his legacy.

More prosaically, thank you to Richard Bradford who asked me to write a life of Shakespeare, and who has been wise and supportive throughout. It’s been an interesting ride, but one I would not have wanted to miss. Thank you also to the anonymous readers whose comments have made this, I hope, a better book.

I am grateful to Thomas Evans, who helped get the first draft into some sort of order, and to Louise Spencely who has been a patient, assiduous, and perceptive copyeditor. Any and all remaining errors are my own.

My friends and family have, as ever, kept me (relatively) sane. It is, however, Becca, Elise, and Hugh who have done the heavy lifting, and with grace. Most importantly, they learned quickly not to ask whether the world really needed another biography of Shakespeare. Thank you.

Last but most definitely not least, I would like to dedicate this book to every one of my students over the years. I have learned so much from all of you. I am particularly lucky to have worked with adult students at the Department for Continuing Education in Oxford. Your questions about, and insights into, Shakespeare’s work inform every page that follows.

It is invidious to single out one former student, but I would like to dedicate this book to my dear friend Karen Elliott, a woman who knows that there may be days when one has to milk one’s ewes ( The Winter’s Tale 4.4.455), but that there is still plenty of time to “queen it” (4.4.454).

All references to Shakespeare’s plays are taken from the Arden Third Series, unless stated otherwise.

The impossibility of writing Shakespeare’s biography has not prevented a great many people (including yours truly) from trying.

(Richard Dutton 2010, p. 122)

Before conjuring up an April 1564 christening in Holy Trinity Parish Church, Stratford-upon-Avon, the traditional starting point for a biography, a few words about my own ambivalence about writing Shakespeare’s life. By all means, move straight to the baptismal register in Chapter One, or if it is the plays, and only the plays, that interest you, then head to Chapter Two when William Shakespeare begins his career as a dramatist. 1But, if the biographical project itself interests you – and it fascinates me almost but not quite as much as the plays themselves – then stay with this Prologue in which, inspired and provoked by Dutton’s wry comment, I explore what happens when we, when I, attempt the impossible.

Putting aside for a moment the validity of any biographical project, why might it be specifically impossible to write a biography of Shakespeare ? One common answer is the perceived paucity of the kinds of archival documents that are the traditional raw materials for the writing of a literary life. Not a single letter written by Shakespeare or written to him survives, except one which was not sent. We have no information, beyond their names, about his relationship with his parents, wife, children, or grandchildren. Shakespeare almost never writes about his creations as a playwright and poet, and only a handful of people in his own time bothered to comment on his work.

Therefore, although there are plenty of things we want to know about Shakespeare (his political views, his religious beliefs, whom he loved, what he did with his time when he wasn’t writing or acting, and so on) these things cannot be known. This list is based on that of James Shapiro (2015, p. 12) who argues that, once the people who knew Shakespeare died, it became impossible to write “that sort of biography.”

I will return to a couple of assumptions made here (about “that sort of biography” and concerning the need for evidence from people who “knew” Shakespeare), but first I need to pick up the gauntlet thrown down by Shapiro’s next sentence: “Modern biographers who nonetheless speculate on such matters, or in the absence of archival evidence read the plays and poems as transparently autobiographical, inevitably end up revealing more about themselves than they do about Shakespeare.” This is harsh and not very fair, the more so since it comes in the Prologue to his own literary biographical account of 1606: William Shakespeare and the Year of Lear . Most literary biographers shy away from reading the plays and poems as “transparently autobiographical.” All those who engage with Shakespeare’s life and works are, on one level, speculating. It is just that some do it more openly than others. There are plenty of critics who make their assumptions discreetly, hiding behind the screen of, say, a discussion of Shakespeare’s literary influences. Did Shakespeare know the work of his fellow writer, Thomas Nashe? Shakespeare would “probably have read” Nashe’s Unfortunate Traveller ; “some believe” that Moth, a character in Love’s Labour’s Lost written “around” 1594, is based on Nashe; Nashe might even have been involved with Tamburlaine in 1587 (Hadfield 2004, p. 2). Or, what prompted Shakespeare to write the moment in A Midsummer Night’s Dream when Oberon asks Puck if he remembers when he, Oberon, sat “upon a promontory / And heard a mermaid on a dolphin’s back”? Could this be an echo of a production at Kenilworth in 1575? Kenilworth is in Warwickshire: we are in the right county, and William is 11 years old, so he could have been there. The evidence is unstable (one eyewitness noted the dolphin, another remembers a mermaid, but neither record seeing a mermaid on a dolphin’s back), but is nevertheless used to imagine scenarios rooted in Shakespeare’s lived experience. “Did Shakespeare’s memory play tricks on him over the years, or did he embroider the event for his own artistic purposes? Or, more prosaically, did Shakespeare simply read about these famous events in one or both printed accounts, and adapt them to his needs?” (Dutton 2018, pp. 25–27).

This kind of thing is not a million miles away from the assumptions made by previous generations that the playwright could not have created characters of such depth unless he had experienced at least something similar to those characters. Thomas Carlyle, for one, saw a bit of Macbeth, Hamlet, and Coriolanus in William Shakespeare, the man. This might be too simplistic for us now, but we still perceive that Shakespeare is concerned with, or preoccupied by, some aspect of life, and slide into the assumption that the concern is rooted in lived experience. His “particular sensitivity to ravaged landscapes of continental battlefields” for example, leads a critic to wonder whether Shakespeare went to be a soldier in France (Brennan 2004, p. 58).

Others, including the hugely popular Stephen Greenblatt (2004, p. 151), openly ask us to use our imaginations because what matters is “not the degree of evidence but rather the imaginative life that the incident has.” This comes very close to saying what matters is not the true story, but a good story, a stance complicated by the moments when Greenblatt does assert (his own) truths about Shakespeare. But it is at least honest, recognizing that each of our Shakespeares will be different, dependent on our imaginations.