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Lois Potter's Book Provides a Delightful Guide Through Shakespeare's “Lois Potter’s book provides a delightful guide through Shakespeare’s world. A splendid introduction for those new to the facts about Shakespeare’s life, it is also a revelation for anyone all too familiar with them. The Life of William Shakespeare revitalizes old truths by asking questions where none seemed necessary, by filling in new detail, and, most of all, by approaching the material from the perspective of a would-be, then practicing and collaborating, player-playwright. Potter’s unique emphasis on Shakespeare’s imaginative life and the words that fed it works brilliantly to produce what I would have thought impossible: a really new biography that never thins into mere speculation. Learned, modest, witty, and above all smart, the book will be a must-read for anyone who cares about early modern theater.” Meredith Skura, Professor of English, Rice University “By keeping her eye on the enduring power of Shakespeare’s writing, Lois Potter manages to gather all the interesting and puzzling questions we have asked about his life into a focused and authentically critical biography. She is adventurous in taking on speculation and counter-speculation but never allows us to confuse conjecture with fact. Richly informative and engagingly written, this book should appeal to general readers as well as to professional Shakespeareans.” Edward Pechter, Distinguished Professor Emeritus, Concordia University “Lois Potter has produced an astonishing, revelatory, fully literary biography. The Life of William Shakespeare is a product of deep reservoirs of historical knowledge, theatrical experience, and critical acumen, all deployed with an extraordinarily sympathetic imagination. Potter adjudicates standing quarrels about the life story with intelligence and dispassion, offers up scintillating new readings of the works, and produces interesting and original observations on every page.” Lena Cowen Orlin, Executive Director, Shakespeare Association of America, and Professor of English, Georgetown University “This is not just (just!) a biography of Shakespeare: it is a theatrical biography. It uses Lois Potter’s immense, unrivalled knowledge of things theatrical to draw very logical and frequently original inferences.” Laurie E. Maguire, Professor of English, University of Oxford “This is a lively, fresh new introduction to the life of Shakespeare, no mere regurgitating of earlier lives. It reads well. It is judicious, intelligent, coherent, and well documented.” David Bevington, Distinguished Professor Emeritus, University of Chicago BLACKWELL CRITICAL BIOGRAPHIES General Editor : Claude Rawson This acclaimed series offers informative and durable biographies of important authors, British, European, and North American, which will include substantial critical discussion of their works. An underlying objective is to re-establish the notion that books are written by people who lived in particular times and places. This objective is pursued not by programmatic assertions or strenuous point-making, but through the practical persuasion of volumes which offer intelligent criticism within a well-researched biographical context. Also in this series The Life of Geoffrey Chaucer The Life of Henry Fielding Derek Pearsall Ronald Paulson The Life of Samuel Johnson The Life of W. B. Yeats Robert DeMaria, Jr Terence Brown The Life of Robert Browning The Life of Evelyn Waugh Clyde De L. Ryals Douglas Lane Patey The Life of William Faulkner The Life of Goethe Richard Gray John R. Williams The Life of Walter Scott The Life of John Milton John Sutherland Barbara Lewalski The Life of Samuel Taylor Coleridge The Life of Daniel Defoe Rosemary Ashton John Richetti The Life of Thomas Hardy The Life of William Shakespeare Paul Turner Lois Potter The Life of Celine The Life of George Eliot Nicholas Hewitt Nancy Henry The Life of William Shakespeare A Critical Biography Lois Potter This edition first published 2012 Ó 2012 Lois Potter Blackwell Publishing was acquired by John Wiley & Sons in February 2007. Blackwell’s publishing program has been merged with Wiley’s global Scientific, Technical, and Medical business to form Wiley-Blackwell. Registered Office John Wiley & Sons Ltd, The Atrium, Southern Gate, Chichester, West Sussex, PO19 8SQ, UK Editorial Offices 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148-5020, USA 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford, OX4 2DQ, UK The Atrium, Southern Gate, Chichester, West Sussex, PO19 8SQ, UK For details of our global editorial offices, for customer services, and for information about how to apply for permission to reuse the copyright material in this book please see our website at www.wiley.com/wiley-blackwell. The right of Lois Potter to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, except as permitted by the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, without the prior permission of the publisher. Wiley also publishes its books in a variety of electronic formats. Some content that appears in print may not be available in electronic books. Designations used by companies to distinguish their products are often claimed as trademarks. All brand names and product names used in this book are trade names, service marks, trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective owners. The publisher is not associated with any product or vendor mentioned in this book. This publication is designed to provide accurate and authoritative information in regard to the subject matter covered. It is sold on the understanding that the publisher is not engaged in rendering professional services. If professional advice or other expert assistance is required, the services of a competent professional should be sought. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Potter, Lois. The life of William Shakespeare : a critical biography / Lois Potter. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-631-20784-9 (cloth) – ISBN 978-1-118-28152-9 (pbk.) 1. Shakespeare, William, 1564-1616. 2. Dramatists, English–Early modern, 1500-1700–Biography. I. Title. PR2894.P68 2012 822.303–dc23 2011043348 A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Set in 10/12pt Bembo by Thomson Digital, Noida, India 1 2012 Contents List of Illustrations vi Preface and Acknowledgments vii List of Abbreviations x The Shakespeare Family Tree xii 1 “Born into the World”: 1564–1571 1 2 “NemoSibiNascitur”: 1571–1578 21 3“Hic et Ubique”: 1578–1588 40 4 “This Man’s Art and That Man’s Scope”: 1588–1592 64 5 “Tigers’ Hearts”: 1592–1593 86 6 “The Dangerous Year”: 1593–1594 106 7 “Our Usual Manager of Mirth”: 1594–1595 134 8 “The Strong’st and Surest Way to Get”: Histories, 1595–1596 162 9 “When Love Speaks”: Tragedy and Comedy, 1595–1596 181 10 “You Had a Father; Let Your Son Say So”: 1596–1598 201 11 “Unworthy Scaffold”: 1598–1599 231 12 “These Words Are Not Mine”: 1599–1601 258 13 “Looking Before and After”: 1600–1603 277 14 “This Most Balmy Time”: 1603–1605 300 15 “Past the Size of Dreaming”: 1606–1609 330 16 “Like an Old Tale”: 1609–1611 360 17 “The Second Burden”: 1612–1616 384 18 “In the Mouths of Men”: 1616 and After 414 Bibliography 443 Index 475 v List of Illustrations 1. Elizabethan-Jacobean Stratford-upon-Avon 4 2. New Place, the Guild Chapel, and the grammar school in Stratford 23 3. Elizabethan-Jacobean London: locations associated with Shakespeare and his contemporaries 52 4. Portrait of the Earl of Southampton 111 5. Portrait of Richard Burbage 138 6. The Shakespeare coat of arms 206 7. Title page of The Spanish Tragedy 227 8. Portrait of Ben Jonson 233 9. Will Kemp as depicted in his pamphlet The Nine Days’ Wonder 239 10. Title page of Robert Armin’s The Two Maids of Moreclacke 240 11. Title page of the appendix to Robert Chester’s Love’s Martyr 270 12. Page from the manuscript of Sir Thomas More 273 13. Portrait of George Chapman 293 14. Portrait of John Lowin 304 15. Title page of the 1608 Quarto of King Lear 322 16. Portrait of Thomas Middleton 333 17. Title page of George Wilkins’ The Painful Adventures of Pericles 348 18. Portrait of John Fletcher 390 19. The frontispiece to the First Folio (1623) 417 20. Portrait of Sir John Suckling 421 21. Images of Shakespeare and his characters, c.1820 426 22. A nineteenth-century composite of Shakespeare portraits 435 23. The Chandos portrait 436 24. The Cobbe portrait 437 vi Preface and Acknowledgments What differentiates one Shakespeare biography from another is the kind of context (and therefore speculation) within which it locates the available facts. This biography does not have a great deal of local color, and there isn’t much sex either. Other people can and will write better on these subjects; the only Shakespeare I can imagine is one whose imaginative life was fed essentially by words. Though the chapters follow a chronological sequence, with occasional overlapping, each one begins with the discussion of the words in its epigraph, which are not necessarily part of the chronology. These mini-critiques are meant to remind both me and the reader that my subject is a writer whose words, more than most people’s, have taken on a life of their own. As “Seeds spring from seeds, and beauty breedeth beauty” (Venus and Adonis 167) words, I believe, spring from the memory of other words. Memory is crucial: actors cannot function without it, and the Greeks made Mnemosyne the mother of the Muses. This book, then, will focus mainly on Shakespeare’s literary and theatrical world. Its most unusual feature may be its stress on his relation to his fellow-dramatists and actors, particularly as collaborator and reviser.
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