Imagination in Recent Shakespeare Biographies Lois Potter

Cambridge University Press 0521850746 - Shakespeare Survey: Writing about Shakespeare, Volume 58 Edited by Peter Holland Excerpt More information HAVING OUR WILL: IMAGINATION IN RECENT SHAKESPEARE BIOGRAPHIES LOIS POTTER ‘The biographer begins, of course, with the town his life into art, it is important to use our own of Stratford-upon-Avon, where Mr. Shakspere was imagination’.3 born and died, giving a lengthy, nostalgic descrip- Certainly, a depiction that appeals to the imagi- tion of Stratford in Shakespeare’s time, refulgent nation may well stimulate a new reader of the plays with the glow of small-town boyhood.’1 As Joseph and poems more than any amount of accurate doc- Sobran sarcastically indicates, there is indeed some- umentation. It is becoming common for writers thing ‘almost comically formulaic’ about Shake- on Shakespeare to refer at some point to Shake- speare biographies. Of course, this is equally true speare in Love, not because they believe its delib- of other biographies; what the Renaissance would erately fantastic version of events but because it call copia is perhaps inevitable in Shakespeare’s case, is the only one they can expect their readers to when there are so many books and so few facts. know. My own favourites among fictitional Shake- Since Sobran is an Oxfordian, he naturally makes a speares are the actor briefly sketched in one chap- distinction between the ‘Shakspere’ of Stratford and ter of John Arden’s Books of Bale, the enigmatic the ‘Shakespeare’ who wrote the plays. He is right figure, possibly a spy, in Peter Whelan’s play The about this too: there is a gap between the biograph- School of Night, and the hard-working writer – ical and the literary figure, though not, I think, whose notes for Twelfth Night we get to read – because they were two different people. After two in Grace Tiffany’s My Father had a Daughter. The decades of writing about Shakespeare’s life, Sir question is how much imagination a book can con- Sidney Lee concluded that ‘The literary history of tain and still be taken seriously as a biography. To the world proves the hopelessness of seeking in bio- my mind, Gary O’Connor’s Shakespeare: A Popu- graphical data, or in the fields of everyday business, lar Life (2000) falls on the wrong side of the bor- the secret springs of poetic inspiration.’2 This view, derline. Russell Fraser’s two-volume critical biog- famously insisted on by T. S. Eliot, was once taken raphy (1988 and 1992) allows itself a mixture of for granted in literary criticism. It is now largely fictionalizing, or imagining, alongside detailed fac- superseded, on the one hand, by cultural material- tual information and very full, sometimes frankly ism, which wants to know all it can about those ‘fields of everyday business’, and, on the other, 1 Joseph Sobran, Alias Shakespeare: Solving the Greatest Literary by the postmodern taste for indeterminacy, which Mystery of all Time (New York and London, 1997), pp. 57–8. has readmitted legendary and anecdotal evidence 2 A Life of William Shakespeare (Oxford, 14th edn, 1931), p. 634. in order to play with alternative life stories. And This comment first appears in the 1916 edition; the brief so Stephen Greenblatt argues, in his recent contri- ‘General Estimate’ of the author in the 1898 edition was more vaguely adulatory. bution to the biographical tradition, ‘to understand 3 Stephen Greenblatt, Will in the World: How Shakespeare became how Shakespeare used his imagination to transform Shakespeare (New York and London, 2004), p. 14. 1 © Cambridge University Press www.cambridge.org Cambridge University Press 0521850746 - Shakespeare Survey: Writing about Shakespeare, Volume 58 Edited by Peter Holland Excerpt More information LOIS POTTER idiosyncratic, critical analyses.4 Anthony Holden’s Apart from the major book-length biographies, William Shakespeare: His life and work (1999)is a number of more general works have made bio- more problematic.5 Rather than get bogged down graphical contributions. After at first ignoring the in questions of probability, Holden often simply anti-Stratfordians, some scholars have found it accepts such traditions as that Shakespeare played worthwhile to do the kind of contextual work that Adam in As You Like It or that he ‘was godfather was needed to put their objections into propor- to one of Ben Jonson’s sons’ (310). But he can be tion. Irvin Matus’s Shakespeare, in Fact (1994)isone constructively imaginative too: citing the compar- of the best of these.7 For instance, in answer to isons Mercutio and Falstaff make to the alderman’s the common question of why so little remains in thumb-ring, he suggests that John Shakespeare’s Shakespeare’s own handwriting, he points out that official ring had made an impression on his son even a work recognized at the time as of the utmost (22). As long as strict accuracy isn’t a prime con- importance, the Authorized/King James Bible, left sideration, this book can be recommended, but virtually no manuscript evidence behind (50–1). it suffers from Holden’s lack of real inwardness Alan Nelson’s careful archival work has resulted in a with the literature of the period which sometimes filling-in of many contextual details, and his biogra- leads him to misunderstand its tone. His own tone phy of the Earl of Oxford, though it carefully avoids sometimes surprises as well. Many have suggested mentioning Shakespeare, gives a detailed analysis that Shakespeare’s mother may have taken the baby of this nobleman’s written English as well as his William to her family home in Wilmcote while financial incompetence. A different kind of con- plague infested Stratford in 1564; by referring to text is provided by Stanley Wells’s Shakespeare: for her as Mary and to him as ‘her first-born son’ all Time, which looks like a coffee table book, but (20), Holden recreates the Holy Family’s flight into is much more.8 The main objection to the lavishly Egypt. illustrated book is that the availability of pictorial Few biographies of Shakespeare can avoid being material often dictates the emphases of the writing. critical biographies, since to leave out the works Here, however, illustrations do an important part is to make the life meaningless. But there is often of the work of creating the visual background – not much distinction between a critical biography those evocations of Stratford about which Sobran and a general book on Shakespeare that discusses is so sarcastic, for example. Wells’s book is not pri- the works in chronological order. Dennis Kay’s marily a biography – about half of it is devoted very readable critical biography (1991) emphasizes to the dramatist’s afterlife in the theatre and in the the works more than the life, but brings in other fictions of others – but its first section is closer to interesting pieces of contextual information – for one than his Shakespeare: a Life in Drama (revised as instance, he found that only one of the twenty-six Shakespeare: The Poet and His Plays). It contains, male babies christened in Stratford in 1564 went almost as asides, some directions in which further on to attend university (a William Smith, who research might go: since those who learned Latin in later became a schoolmaster in Essex).6 His critical school (like Richard Quiney and Thomas Greene) approach is independent: he thinks the epitaph on Elias James, found in the same MS as ‘Shall I die?’, is 4 Russell Fraser, Young Shakespeare (New York, 1988), and a possible Shakespeare composition (327). He and Shakespeare: The Later Years (New York, 1992). Russell Fraser are the only recent biographers who 5 William Shakespeare: His Life and Work (London, 1999). respond sympathetically to The Two Noble Kinsmen, 6 Dennis Kay, Shakespeare: His Life, Work and Era (London, probably because they are the only two who know 1992), pp. 30–1. Kay also wrote a shorter, more streamlined biography, William Shakespeare: His Life and Times, for the anything about its effect in performance; Kay even Twayne’s English Authors series (New York, 1995). argues that it, rather than The Tempest, is Shake- 7 Irvin Leigh Matus, Shakespeare, in Fact (New York, 1994). speare’s farewell to his profession (335). 8 Stanley Wells, Shakespeare for All Time (Oxford, 2003). 2 © Cambridge University Press www.cambridge.org Cambridge University Press 0521850746 - Shakespeare Survey: Writing about Shakespeare, Volume 58 Edited by Peter Holland Excerpt More information RECENT SHAKESPEARE BIOGRAPHIES continued to use it, ‘It is quite possible that, if has indicated the prevalence of the name Shake- letters written by Shakespeare ever turn up, they shafte in Lancashire,14 and there has always been will be in Latin’ (14). Maybe the ‘broad silver and good sense in the argument that it would seem gilt bowl’ bequeathed to Judith will turn up some odd to choose so transparent an alias. But many day too although it’s hard to see how we would of the other connections traced by Honigmann recognize it if it did (43). are persuasive – the Stratford schoolmasters with Theatre historians have likewise made important Lancashire and Catholic origins; the satirist John contributions to the biography, though Andrew Weever, who knew all the parties involved and Gurr’s most widely accepted suggestion is of a quite wrote several epigrams on Shakespeare; the fact different kind: that Sonnet 145, with its appar- that Shakespeare wrote his only commendatory ent pun on ‘hate away’, is a youthful poem writ- verse, ‘The Phoenix and the Turtle’, for a poem ten during the poet’s courtship of Anne Hath- by Robert Chester dedicated to Sir John Salus- away.9 Richard Dutton’s Shakespeare: A Literary Life bury, whose wife was an illegitimate daughter to (1989) does not offer a complete biography, but the Earl of Derby, a friend of Hoghton.

Load more