R. W. Desai
Shakespeare the Man: New Decipherings
For William Butler Yeats, Shakespeare’s unassertive personality is the secret of his artistic supremacy. “Unlike Ben Jonson,” Yeats points out, “he fought no duels; he kept out of quarrels in a quarrelsome age; not even complaining when somebody pirated his sonnets; he dominated no Mermaid Tavern, but—through Mask and Image, reflected in a multiplying mirror—he created the most passionate art that exists” (72). The essays comprising this volume may be regarded as forays of informed speculation, of intuitive re-creation, of attempts to dovetail the known facts of Shakespeare’s life and the socio-political circumstances of his times with seeming correspondences in his works, to capture what must always remain elusive, similar to what Sherlock Holmes explains in Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Hound of the Baskervilles. As will be recalled, Dr. Mortimer, skeptical of Holmes’s thought process, remarks, “we are coming now rather into the region of guesswork,” to which the great detective replies, “Say, rather, into the region where we balance probabilities and choose the most likely. It is the scientific use of the imagination, but we have always some material basis on which to start our speculation” (2:30).
The question of the relationship between authorial identity and dramatic works is not easy to resolve. Graham Holderness has suggested no fewer than nine variations of Shakespeare’s identity, all of which seem equally plausible. Except for Shakespeare’s will, and that of his father, neither he nor the members of his immediate family left behind any letters, diaries, or journals. However, while Ben Jonson spoke of his lack of a university education, his “small Latine, and lesse Greeke” (Hinman 9), his contemporaries, the University Wits, envious of his growing reputation, directed gibes at him. Among the celebratory verses addressed to Shakespeare is an epitaph by William Basse entitled “On Mr. Wm Shakespeare he dyed in Aprill 1616,” written in expectation of his burial taking place in Westminster Abbey: “Renowned Spencer, lye a thought more nye / To learned Chaucer, and rare Beaumont lye / A little nearer Spencer to make roome / For Shakespeare in your threefold fowerfold Tombe” (60). Jonson responded with a more superlative conferment of honor: “My Shakespeare, rise, I will not lodge thee by Chaucer or Spenser, or bid Beaumont lye / A little further, to make thee a roome: / Thou art a Moniment, without a tombe” (Hinman 9). Thus, C. J. Sisson’s wise observation—“It is of the highest importance to attend to contemporary opinion concerning Shakespeare” (9)—gives special credence to the testimony of these two witnesses.
John Heminge and Henry Condell, editors of the First Folio, give us a glimpse of Shakespeare the man in their note “To the great Variety of Readers”: “Who, as he was a happie imitator of Nature, was a most gentle expresser of it. His mind and hand went together: And what he thought, he uttered with that easinesse, that wee have scarce received from him a blot in his papers” (Hinman 7). Others told stories of doubtful truth. It is to Nicholas Rowe (1674-1718), Shakespeare’s earliest formal biographer, that we owe the famous account of the deer-poaching in Sir Thomas Lucy’s estate, whereupon “he was oblig’d to leave his Business and Family in Warwickshire . . . and shelter himself in London” (in Chambers 1:265). Rowe detects the presence of this episode in The Merry Wives of Windsor, where Shakespeare makes Falstaff “a Deer-stealer, that he might at the same time remember his Warwickshire Prosecutor, under the Name of Justice Shallow” (in Chambers 1:267-68). Rowe’s may be the first, though not the most reliable, instance of tracing correspondences between the life and the works.
After Rowe, John Aubrey (1626-1697) records another tale: when Shakespeare, son of a butcher, whittawer and glover, “was a boy he exercised his fathers Trade, but when he kill’d a Calfe, he would doe it in a high style, & make a Speech” (Schoenbaum, Documentary Life 58). Based on this anecdote, Eric Sams assembled a number of image-clusters, including Hamlet’s “It was a brute part of him to kill so capital a calf there” ([3.2.105-6], 28). Far from despising Shakespeare for his rural background, Dryden dismisses the notion of his lack of learning, for, “he was naturally learned; he needed not the spectacles of books to read Nature; he looked inwards, and found her there” (in Bredvold 113). Dryden’s defence of Shakespeare marks a shift from the conventional notion of wisdom residing in books to the celebration of Shakespeare’s unique personality, his creative energy producing works that afford pleasure rather than mere edification. Preferring Shakespeare’s aesthetic achievement to didacticism, Dryden confesses, “I admire him [Jonson], but I love Shakspeare” (in Bredvold 114). In a similar vein, Edward Phillips, Milton’s nephew and biographer, lavishes praise on Shakespeare, for, he says, though “his Learning was not extraordinary, he pleaseth with a certain wild and native Elegance” (632).
How learned (or un-learned) in fact was Shakespeare? The classics scholar J. A. K. Thomson points out that, compared to other writers of the time, Shakespeare’s work has far fewer classical allusions, and these could well have been acquired from the limited education he got at the grammar school in Stratford. Robert Greene (1558-92), in a posthumous pamphlet, A Groatsworth of Wit, warned his Oxbridge playwright contemporaries of “an upstart Crow, beautified with our feathers . . . [who] supposes he is as well able to bumbast out a blanke verse as the best of you: and . . . is in his owne conceit the onely Shake-scene in a countrie” (Greene 12:144).
It is difficult not to detect Shakespeare’s retort in the encounter between the high-born Rosalind and the low-born shepherdess Phebe in As You Like It. Refusing to believe Phebe capable of writing a letter, Rosalind declares, “I say she never did invent this letter, / This is a man’s invention and his hand” (4.3.28-29). “Hand,” of course, is a metonym for hand-writing, also suggested in Orlando’s complimenting Rosalind for her “white hand” (3.2.385), which is the opposite of poor Phebe, who has a “leathern hand, / . . . I verily did think / That her old gloves were on, but ’twas her hands; / She has a huswive’s hand” (4.3.24-27). But in her contemptuous appraisal of the supposedly ill-educated Phebe, she is mistaken: Phebe is the writer of the letter, and, in order to teach his Oxbridge rivals a lesson, it is “to her Shakespeare gives his great tribute to Marlowe” (Desai 6): “Dead shepherd, now I find thy saw of might, / ‘Who ever lov’d that lov’d not at first sight?’” (3.5.81-82). Similarly, might not the discomfiture of the rustic William by the ex-courtier Touchstone be Shakespeare’s joke at his own expense, the “rude groom” as Greene had described him (Sams 218) being routed by his court-educated rival for possession of Audrey? “Art thou learned?” Touchstone arrogantly asks. “No, sir,” is William’s meek reply (5.1.38-39). For the University Wits and anti-Stratfordians, Shakespeare’s humble background disqualifies him from authorship. For them, David Bevington has the best reply: “For most biographers and students of Shakespeare, the wonder is not that a provincial lad lacking in higher education could have written the works we associate with Shakespeare, but that any mortal could have done so” (156).
With Samuel Johnson’s “Preface” to The Plays of William Shakespeare (1765), biographical criticism enters a new phase, a continuation and development of the Jonsonian attempt to create a vivid Shakespeare-persona by bold insight and reasoned extrapolation through an enhanced sensitivity to the events in the life of the author, familiarity of a high degree with the works, and the sensibility to draw persuasive conclusions as to the author’s identity. Dr. Johnson’s “Preface” signals this new concept of an author-reader nexus that is in one sense the death knell of the author but, in another, the re-birth of Shakespeare in a vast variety of avatars refusing, like the Ghost of King Hamlet (a role acted by Shakespeare himself, according to Nicholas Rowe), to remain within “the sepulcher, / Wherein we saw thee quietly [inurn’d]” (1.4.49), and haunting over 400 years of Shakespearean biographical scholarship commodiously encapsulated in S. Schoenbaum’s Shakespeare’s Lives.
It is this haunting that causes Shakespeare’s biographers to find him appearing momentarily, then disappearing—“’Tis here! ’Tis here! ’Tis gone!” (Hamlet 1.1.141-42)—during the so-called “lost years” from 1585 to his appearance in London in 1592. Was the William Shakeshafte mentioned in Alexander Hoghton’s will of 1581 William Shakespeare of Stratford? The similarity of “shafte” and “speare” is arresting and might explain Shakespeare’s re-naming of Oldcastle as Falstaff where, again, “staff” parallels “shafte” and “speare.” The possibility is intriguing , but it must be noted that “Shakeshafte” was a common name in Lancashire. According to Aubrey, “‘he understood Latine pretty well; for he had been in his younger yeares a schoolmaster in the countrey’” (quoted in Sams 91). Does Aubrey’s remark fill in the gap of the “lost years”? Further, the license issued by the Bishop of Worcester was for the marriage of Wm. Shaxpere to Annam Whately, but the marriage that was solemnized a day later on 28 November 1582 was between William Shagspere and Anne Hathwey. Is Ann’s identity as tenuous as that of William Shakespeare? “It faded on the crowing of the cock” (Hamlet 1.1.157). As Mark Eccles observes, “The picture of Shakespeare’s life in Warwickshire is a mosaic with most of the pieces missing” (110).
Dr. Johnson’s assessment of Shakespeare’s learning is that “it is most likely that he had learned Latin sufficiently to make him acquainted with construction, but that he never advanced to an easy perusal of the Roman authors” (108). But for Johnson, as for Dryden, Shakespeare’s formal education is not an issue; more important for them—as more recently pointed out by T. W. Baldwin, Virgil Whitaker, Robert Miola, and Stuart Gillespie—is what he was able to achieve. “He came to London a needy adventurer,” Johnson observes, “and lived for a time by very mean employments [but] the genius of Shakespeare was not to be depressed by the weight of poverty nor limited by the narrow conversation to which men in want are inevitably condemned: the encumbrances of his fortune were shaken from his mind, as ‘dew-drops from a lion’s mane’” ([Troilus and Cressida 3.3.224], 109). Here we find a newly fashioned Shakespeare emerging with leonine majesty, a Shakespeare born of Johnson’s admiration and high regard, as well as the memory of his own early years of poverty in London. Far from believing Shakespeare to be deficient in literary and artistic judgment, Johnson’s Shakespeare knows that his works do not match “his own ideas of perfection; when they were such as would satisfy the audience, they satisfied the writer” (111). Building on his intuitive sense of Shakespeare’s genius, Johnson goes on to picture him as above and beyond his own works: “So careless was this great poet of future fame, that, though he retired to ease and plenty while he was yet little ‘declined into the vale of years’ [Othello 3.3.265-66], before he could be disgusted with fatigue or disabled by infirmity, he made no collection of his works” (111).
The distance between Milton’s “sweetest Shakespear Fancies childe, / Warbl[ing] his native Wood-notes wilde” (23) and the Romantics’ view of Shakespeare the man is enormous. For Coleridge, “he was a child of nature, but it was of human nature. . . . In the meanest characters, it was still Shakespeare” (78). Twenty years or so later, perhaps influenced by Keats’s attribution of “negative capability” (1:193) to Shakespeare—of taking “as much delight in conceiving an Iago as an Imogen,” of being “the most unpoetical of all God’s Creatures” (1:387), of leading “a life of Allegory: his works are the comments on it” (2:67)—Coleridge sees him as timeless, as belonging to “no age—nor, I may add, any religion, or party, or profession. The body and substance of his works came out of the unfathomable depths of his own oceanic mind” (122). Both Coleridge and Keats here corroborate Maurice Morgann’s view of Shakespeare in his delightful essay on Falstaff of being himself, as well as each one of his characters: “for what is Falstaff, what Lear, what Hamlet, or Othello, but different modifications of Shakespeare’s thought?” (16). Even A. C. Bradley, usually associated with character criticism in its most persuasive form, declared that Hamlet among all “of Shakespeare’s characters reveals most of his personality” (355).
Edward Dowden, author of Shakspere: A Critical Study of His Mind and Art (1875), surely one of the great milestones in nineteenth-century Shakespeare criticism, stresses the importance of finding Shakespeare the man in his works without minimizing his accomplishments as artist. “In such a study as this,” Dowden states, “we endeavour to pass through the creation of the artist to the mind of the creator: but it by no means prevents our returning to view the work of art simply as such, apart from the artist, and as such to receive delight from it” (3). And walk the tightrope between the personality of Shakespeare and his dramatic characters Dowden indeed does, though later critics like E. E. Stoll and Bernard Spivack find his approach impressionistic and simplistic, preferring to see these characters not as projections of the dramatist’s personality but as conventional types in the Elizabethan theater—the malcontent, the revenger, the Machiavellian villain, the braggart. Sharing in some respects their refusal to idolize the dramatist, Frank Harris sees Shakespeare as more man than superhuman: he is governed by an “excessive sensuality” and “mad passion” (391) that renders him abjectly obsessed for twelve years with his inamorata Mary Fitton, the “dark lady” of the Sonnets, later metamorphosed into the lineaments of Cleopatra. Harris overstates his case, but such is his style, and, while reading him, we must be on our guard without being too dismissive. As with Harris, so with Oscar Wilde. The Sonnets, he declares, were “wrung out of the bitterness of Shakespeare’s heart” (1094). But Sidney Lee’s warning not to confuse Renaissance conventions in sonneteering with autobiography is salutary.
In his Preface to The Man Shakespeare, Harris announced that his purpose was “to liberate Englishmen . . . from the tyranny of Shakespeare’s greatness” (xviii). G. B. Shaw’s purpose is the same. Reacting against the bardolaters—Swinburne, for instance—Shaw is irreverent, sardonic, blunt, witty, yet admiring. Shakespeare the man, according to Shaw, is, “like all highly intelligent and conscientious people, business-like about money” (Wilson 202). His characters are “individualistic, sceptical, self-centred in everything but their love affairs, and completely personal and selfish even in them” (Eastman 171). Further, Shakespeare lacks a spiritual vision beyond the present reality. The end is always despair: “‘Out, out, brief candle’ and ‘The rest is silence’ and ‘We are such stuff as dreams are made of’” (Wilson 222). Shaw, of course, is too discerning a critic to believe that Shakespeare’s characters are merely mouthpieces for Shakespeare the man. Acknowledging him as his greatest rival, he downgrades him. Yet Shaw has nothing but praise for the power, the music of Shakespeare’s language: “Leontes is a magnificent part . . . and full of wonderful music—‘I have tremor cordis on me’” (Eastman and Harrison 326). In the last play that he wrote a year before his death in 1950, “Shakes Versus Shav,” Shav admits, “We both are mortal. For a moment suffer / My glimmering light to shine,” to which Shakes replies, “Out, out, brief candle!” (Wilson 269), the conclusion hinting at the immortality of Shakespeare contrasting with his own ephemerality.
While the Sonnets inevitably offer the most obvious route to Shakespeare the man, Hamlet is an equally well-trodden highway into Shakespeare’s personality. Applying the theory of the Oedipus complex to Hamlet, Ernest Jones sees Shakespeare’s mother as the prototype of Queen Gertrude, arguing that as a child Hamlet resented his father’s monopoly of his mother’s affection, that these “repressed” feelings find expression in his inability to kill his uncle who, by murdering Hamlet’s father becomes a surrogate of Hamlet himself, having accomplished what Hamlet desired but could not bring himself to do. This accounts for his “delay.” Had Hamlet killed Claudius earlier than he finally did, this would have been tantamount to suicide because he regards Claudius in his unconscious mind as his alter ego. What, then, releases the spring of action in Hamlet prompting him to kill Claudius? Jones’s answer is the death of his mother by Claudius’s poisoned chalice. Though Jones’s detailed application of Freud’s theory seems persuasive on the surface, as it did to Laurence Olivier, there is no biographical evidence to suggest that Shakespeare had a mother-fixation that would justify the equation “Queen Gertrude = Shakespeare’s mother” that the theory implies. However, what Jones does is to give us a refreshing projection of a Shakespeare who is more human than divine.
Less unilinear and formulaic than Jones is Norman Holland’s Psychoanalysis and Shakespeare (1964), which widens the coverage of Shakespeare’s personality beyond Hamlet while employing the tools of psychoanalysis and cluster-imagery. Holland’s in-depth investigation in “A Guess at Shakespeare’s Personality” argues that it is precisely because the plays contain so much violence—incest and murder in Hamlet, unsexing and murder in Macbeth, torture in King Lear, murderous jealousy in Othello—that Shakespeare the man enjoys such “blooming mental health”: he worked out the conflicts within himself “in terms of plays, symbolic actions instead of real ones” (136). This takes us back to Aristotle’s notion of cathartic release and to Yeats’ theory of Shakespeare’s passivity that enabled him to create “the most passionate art that exists” (153). It must be pointed out, however, that Ernst Honigmann, Katherine Duncan-Jones, and Lukas Erne have shown, in separate publications spanning nearly forty years, that Shakespeare was not so passive with his detractors and rivals in the profession as was earlier supposed. Holland reads sibling rivalry in Shakespeare’s relationship with his brothers Gilbert, Edmund, and Richard, as reflected in “his marked propensity for splitting or pairing characters: Antonio and Bassanio, Claudio and Benedick, Viola and Sebastian, Brutus and Cassius, Iago and Cassio. . . . Often he writes about two young men competing for a prize only one of them can have: Hal and Hotspur, Richard and Bolingbroke, . . . Demetrius and Lysander, Troilus and Diomede, . . . Hamlet and Laertes” (134, 135). Joyce, too, we recall, has Stephen make the snide remark, “an Edmund and a Richard are recorded in the works of sweet William” (209). Holland is never dogmatic; he does not assert; he suggests: “We would like a portrait, but psychoanalysis can only offer an X-ray” (139). More recently, in his introduction to a collection of essays edited by him, Sidney Honan, and Bernard J. Paris, Holland continues to maintain that, though in the present age of “Theory” the personality of the writer has been displaced by contextuality, there still remains scope for psychoanalytical investigation that uncovers rivalry and aggression, especially within the family, being predominant in Shakespeare.
J. Dover Wilson’s reputation as a textual scholar and the author of the influential and controversial What Happens in “Hamlet” (1935) did not prevent him from hoping to arrive at the essence of Shakespeare’s mind, to pluck out the heart of his mystery. His The Essential Shakespeare: A Biographical Adventure (1932) equating Essex (Robert Devereux) with Hamlet relies heavily on the study of documents, lawsuits, and records of contemporary events, as does E. K. Chambers’ over-one-thousand-page William Shakespeare: A Study of Facts and Problems (1930) in which only two chapters describe his life, but they prepare the ground for his Sources for a Biography of Shakespeare (1946). All of the above-mentioned works contrast sharply with the landmark publication of Caroline Spurgeon’s Shakespeare’s Imagery and What It Tells Us (1935). Relying almost entirely on internal evidence, Spurgeon pioneered the analysis of image-clusters and the frequency of their occurrence, thus opening the window for the detection of personality traits in Shakespeare. Appropriately, on her book’s title-page is a quotation from Hamlet: “And thus do we of wisdom and of reach, / With windlasses and with assays of bias, / By indirections find directions out” (2.1.61-63). And “find” she does. Consisting of fifteen chapters, including one entitled “Shakespeare the Man,” seven detailed charts, eight appendices, and an exhaustive and analytical index running into twenty-four pages of fine print, the book took her nearly ten years to write. Her work has proved to be a rich mine for researchers over the last eight decades and, along with Wolfgang Clemen’s Shakespeare’s Bilder (translated as The Development of Shakespeare’s Imagery [1936]), continues to enjoy a special status for Shakespeare scholars. True, it is easy to find deficiencies in Spurgeon’s work, to disagree with some of her conclusions, and to poke fun at her: thus, under Body in chart V, she lists “Food,” “Drink,” “Cooking,” “Sickness,” and “Medicine,” but “Sex” is conspicuous by its absence. This prompted an anonymous critic to remark, “Miss Spurgeon was a lady . . . [she] has studied Shakespeare and found him to be—a Victorian gentleman” (Eastman 257).
Her Shakespeare is “a compactly well-built man, probably on the slight side, extraordinarily well co-ordinated, lithe and nimble of body . . . he was probably fair-skinned and of a fresh colour, which in youth came and went easily, . . . He was healthy in body as in mind, clean and fastidious in his habits, very sensitive to dirt and evil smells” (202-3). Taking issue with John Ward’s explanation for the cause of Shakespeare’s death—“Shakespear, Drayton, and Ben Jhonson, had a merry meeting, and itt seems drank too hard, for Shakespear died of a feavour there contracted” (quoted in Schoenbaum, Documentary Life 241)—Spurgeon points to Ward’s “itt seems” as evidence of its “supposititious” (203n2) nature. Later critics have found Spurgeon’s work useful. Edward A. Armstrong, for example, in Shakespeare’s Imagination: A Study of the Psychology of Association and Inspiration (1946), finds a preponderance of imagery drawn from the English countryside, while Cleanth Brooks’ The Well Wrought Urn: Studies in the Structure of Poetry (1947) analyses the clothes imagery in Macbeth.
Germaine Greer’s Shakespeare’s Wife (2007) addresses the issue of Shakespeare’s marriage to Ann Hathaway. In a close analysis of sonnet 145 and a questioning of the chronological accuracy of the sonnet sequence as published by Thomas Thorpe in 1609, she suggests that many of the most admired sonnets—25, 27, 29, 110, 111, 116, and 117—are actually addressed to Ann. “What is more,” she points out, “it was not the woman who seduced the boy, but he who ‘languished for her sake’ [Sonnet 145], to the point of death, it would seem, and only then did she succumb to his importunity, and so save his life” (59). Greer argues that “If the impregnation of Ann Hathaway had been accidental rather than part of a deliberate strategy, Shakespeare could have evaded marriage with her, just as Lucio evaded marriage with Kate Keepdown in Measure for Measure. Mistress Overdone tells us that Lucio seduced Kate under a promise of marriage, which is presumably how Kate ended up working as one of her whores . . . with Mistress Overdone paying for raising her child” (77). Citing substantial contemporary evidence, Greer shows that the man could evade marriage if he chose, thus indicating that Shakespeare’s involvement with Ann was not casual sex but a commitment, thus rejecting Stephen’s view in James Joyce’s Ulysses of Ann having first seduced and then trapped Shakespeare in unwelcome matrimony (191). In this connection, in defence of Greer’s argument, it is worth recalling Ophelia’s song, “Quoth she, ‘Before you tumbled me, / You promis’d me to wed,’” to which Hamlet answers, “‘So would I ’a’done, by yonder sun, / And thou hadst not come to my bed’” (4.5.63-66). Although less forthright than Greer, Park Honan has a similar understanding of the Will-Ann romance, seeing Will as the initiator, not the victim. His Shakespeare is an adventurous adolescent “partly moved by an urge to purchase experience. . . . as he became more self-confident so he enriched his sense of life” (73). Honan’s biography is a bold construct of Shakespeare the man, and he is not averse to speculation, though careful to make this clear: throughout, one finds “He probably felt obliged,” “It is unlikely that,” “He may have,” “However that may be,” “William may have been” (73, 74). Taking cognizance of all of the known external evidence available in the form of facts, references, allusions, recollections, official records pertaining to Shakespeare, his family members, friends, acquaintances, rivals, as well as detecting internal evidence in the works, Honan has created a richly textured biography of Shakespeare the man, actor, poet, and playwright.
In his Shakespeare, Sex and Love (2010), Stanley Wells shows how “Shakespeare is profoundly and continuously interested in sex as a fundamental human instinct and activity, as a source not only of comedy but also of joy, of anguish, of disillusionment and of jealousy, of nausea as well as of ecstasy, as a site of moral and ethical debate, and, at its best, as a natural fulfilment of spiritual love” (10). Wells suggests that Claudio’s situation in Measure for Measure is not unlike Shakespeare’s own entanglement with Ann, their o’er hasty marriage, and the birth of Susanna six months later. As Jay Halio in his review of the book observes, “Some may object that Wells’s insights are not especially new. Many of them are, but another part of the achievement of this book is bringing together . . . the whole range of Shakespeare’s interests in sex and love, both in the poems and the plays” (50). The possible homoerotic elements in the Sonnets and elsewhere in the canon had been noted as early as 1640 when John Benson in his edition of the Sonnets changed the male pronouns to female. (Some recent books on the subject are by Joseph Pequigney, Bruce R. Smith, and Paul Hammond.)
The most recent addition to Shakespeare’s biography is the claim by Jayne Elisabeth Archer, et al. that “during the late 1590s and the first few years of the seventeenth century, he stockpiled grain for sale at inflated prices to the local brewing trade” (537). (Interestingly, this is the very trade Greer proposed for Ann following her study of local records [329, 333, 339].) But are Archer, et al. embellishing the story by proposing that Shakespeare stockpiled the grain in his barn anticipating a rise in prices, or was it normal practice to store surplus grain instead of allowing it to perish? Another well-known charge against Shakespeare’s ethics is that he purchased New Place at below its market price by taking advantage of the owner’s financial difficulties. This has been effectively refuted by Robert Bearman’s examination of the complex legal details pertaining to the sale of the house. Further, Bearman sees Shakespeare’s purchase of the house as a consequence of his father’s house on Henley Street having to be vacated by the family on account of the two fires in 1594/95 that rendered it uninhabitable. The acquisition of New Place, according to Bearman, suggests an “altruistic and generous side to Shakespeare’s nature, an effort by a man conscious of family obligations to provide a suitable home for his dependents in the wake of misfortune” (485).
James Shapiro’s observation in the Hilda House lecture of April 2012 that there was no longer much point in writing a full life of Shakespeare since the broad details are by now well known, but that focusing on a narrow time slot could be productive, like his own 1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare (2005)—and he is at work now on 1606—is belied by Lois Potter’s The Life of William Shakespeare: A Critical Biography (2012), which explores some interesting ancillary areas like Shakespeare’s links with Richard Field, the first publisher of Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece, and Shakespeare’s sympathetic attitude toward Catholicism while himself an Anglican. And Grace Tiffany’s Will (2004), without attempting to define Shakespeare’s personality with any claim to authenticity, is frankly fictional: the book’s jacket describes it as “A Novel.” Yet her re-construction of Shakespeare’s London, its theaters, and the competitiveness among the playwrights of the time, all of the details based on established historical evidence, gives us a striking picture of his emergence as a rising dramatist, his triumphs, as well as the vicissitudes he experienced both in his professional and domestic life. Though Ann Barton, like Shapiro, is opposed to any further quest for biographical clues, Heather Dubrow—in opposition to such an embargo, and invoking Yeats—has pertinently observed in her essay on parental loss in Pericles, “There is a clear and present danger in the current critical climate that the circus animals of cultural history will distract us from the foul rag-and-bone shop of grief” (29-30). Repudiating the assigning of a too clinical stance to the artist—what Stephen in James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man does—and restoring human feeling and sentiment as integral to creativity, Richard P. Wheeler sensitively suggests that the death of the eleven-year-old Hamnet, twin brother of Judith, is transformed in Twelfth Night into the miraculous and deeply moving re-union of Viola and Sebastian in Act 5 (127-33). Wheeler acknowledges his debt to Harold Grier McCurdy’s The Personality of Shakespeare: A Venture in Psychological Method (1953) and to Leonard F. Manheim’s article “The Mythical Joys of Shakespeare; Or, What You Will,” while Stephen Greenblatt, in Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare (2004), interprets Hamlet as a lament over the death of his son, also detecting signs of this grief in Constance’s lamentation in King John.
Concluding this introduction, we return to the question with which we began, how impersonal is Shakespeare the artist? For Harold Bloom, Shakespeare’s personality is entirely appropriated by his craft as dramatist with nothing left over, and is projected most fully and powerfully in his creation of Hamlet, with Falstaff a close second. Hamlet, Bloom feels, “is more interested in the stage than all Shakespeare’s other personages taken together . . . nowhere else in his work can we find Shakespeare risking so deliberate a conflation of life and art” (742-43). Shakespeare, according to Bloom, transmutes his life experiences into his art, and that is the secret of his personality. With A. C. Bradley (355), he believes that Hamlet alone could have been capable of writing the plays (739). Like Yeats and Bloom, Jonathan Bate sees Shakespeare as primarily writer and craftsman whose life and personality are wholly subsumed by his art, his “absence” ensuring the longevity of his plays because they are not shackled to the time and place of their creation.
If in the writings of Charles Knight, James Halliwell-Phillipps, and Sidney Lee, the nineteenth century saw the most assiduous activity in unearthing the factual details of Shakespeare’s life, then to the first decade of the twentieth must go the distinction—in the persons of Charles William Wallace and his wife Hulda—of discovering Shakespeare’s presence as tenant in the upper room of the Mountjoy home on Silver Street in London in 1604/5 while he was working on King Lear (279-307). The absorbing account of the transmutation of the factual details of life into art during this period has been told by Ron Rosenbaum in The Shakespeare Wars: Clashing Scholars, Public Fiascoes, Palace Coups (2006) and in greater detail by Charles Nicholl in The Lodger: Shakespeare on Silver Street (2007). Based on official documents uncovered by the Wallaces, Shakespeare was both go-between and witness at the betrothal ceremony (the equivalent of a wedding in Jacobean England) of the daughter of the Mountjoys and her fiancé Stephen Belott. But shortly after the union, trouble started. Stephen demanded the promised dowry; his father-in-law refused to comply, and Shakespeare, called as a witness, declared that his memory of the matter failed him. Rosenbaum’s interpretation of the proceedings is that Shakespeare’s testimony was ambiguous (110-13). This need not surprise us. If “ambiguity” is not a pronounced feature of Shakespeare’s characters, why have Hamlet, Falstaff, and Shylock—to name just three—remained topics of controversy for over four hundred years? It can be argued that precisely because Shakespeare’s view of life is far from Manichean, neither black nor white, his work has endured over the centuries. Other connections between the details of Shakespeare’s stay as a lodger with the Mountjoy family and the plays come to the surface, but Nicholl calls them “a kind of mist of ulterior meanings, too vaporous—and too personal to the author—for us to catch, though partly recoverable . . . from the recesses of the Belott-Mountjoy papers” (270).
After the wide range of explorations into Shakespeare the man just traversed, are there still any facets of his personality that remain undiscovered? Are there enough grounds to justify the sub-title of this book, “New Decipherings”? Fascinating as are the echoes in the plays and poems of what we know of Shakespeare’s life experiences, the absence of letters or other personal memorabilia from his pen severely limits the extent of such equivalences. But, over the past thirty years or so, a new perspective has taken precedence in the form of a shift from attempting to detect “mirror” resemblances between the life and the work to a more comprehensive study of various societal factors in areas like the political, the cultural, or the religious impinging on the decades of Shakespeare’s life span and the kind of impact, or “pressure,” that these may have had on him and his writing. Accordingly, while this collection of essays does take cognizance of striking linkages between the life and the art, these are embedded within the matrix of what may be seen as a wider background, thus employing a New Historicist methodology that includes the circumstances that most probably conditioned his writing as well as his personal life. If this broader canvas seems like a flashback to Polonius’s announcement of the arrival at the court of Elsinore of the players who are “The best actors in the world, either for tragedy, comedy, history, pastoral, pastoral-comical, historical-pastoral, [tragical-historical, tragical-comical-historical-pastoral,] scene individable, or poem unlimited” (Hamlet 2.2.396-400), then to him must be given the credit of having recognized four centuries ago that, for a proper understanding of a drama’s text its wider context, is equally important. Of course Shakespeare wants us to laugh at the old counselor’s prolixitee, but—as Dr. Johnson points out—he is no fool. Both for him and the New Historicists, there is much surrounding detail to enrich the biographer’s search for the author’s identity than would be possible within the narrow scope of equating with the works bits and pieces of the subject’s life experiences.
Thus, Grace Tiffany, in “Shakespeare’s Playwrights,” contextualizes Shakespeare’s works within the frame of his profession as playwright. While agreeing with Richard Ellmann’s observation that the artist “shapes again the experiences which have shaped him” (3), she regards the claim to being able to connect the incidents in the life with characters and situations in the works as simplistic, subjective, and even irresponsible. On firmer ground, she maintains that Shakespeare the man as well as the dramatist must certainly have been influenced by the conditions of his time—for instance, the laws regulating the theaters, the threat of a renewed Spanish invasion of England, or the English military push in Ireland. Looking at Shakespeare the playwright’s relationship with his patrons, his rivals, and his audience, her article focuses on “the plays’ player-playwrights”: Jaques in As You Like It, Pistol in 2 Henry IV, Jupiter in Cymbeline, Vincentio in Measure for Measure, and Prospero in The Tempest. To illustrate her argument in this brief conspectus, consider the appearance of the non-Christian deity Jupiter in Cymbeline. Such a representation could well have been the consequence of the 1606 Act that banned the use in theater of the Christian divinity that in Hamlet shapes our ends, a “pressure” exercised by the authority of the State several years after Hamlet was written and, in fact, the kind of intervention that Hamlet could have had in mind when he exhorted the players that “the very age and body of the time his form and pressure” should be faithfully reflected by them on the contemporary stage.
On a parallel approach to that of Tiffany, yet addressing a different set of “pressures” on the Shakespeare family by the vicissitudes as well as the successes of daily living, Joseph Candido’s “The History of the Shakespeares and the Shakespeares in the Histories” traces the business profits and subsequent monetary losses of Shakespeare’s father and the impact these must have had on his son as re-inflected in the sequence of history plays from Richard II to Henry V, with special attention to the Bolingbroke-Hal relationship. Haunted throughout his life by the rise and fall of his father from chief alderman in the Stratford Town Council to a debtor under arrest, next by his father’s failure to obtain a coat of arms around 1576 or 1577 when William was twelve or thirteen, and then by the enforced sale of the family’s considerable property due to straitened financial circumstances, Shakespeare is seen by Candido as a man bestriding two separate worlds: an outstanding poet and dramatist, but also a shrewd and calculating businessman determined to redeem his father’s lost reputation. From 1596 to 1597, crucial years in Shakespeare’s life, he renewed his father’s abandoned application for a coat of arms; his eleven-year-old son Hamnet died; his application for the coat of arms was granted, entitling him to the sobriquet “gentleman”; and he acquired ownership of New Place, the second largest mansion in Stratford. This series of events, concentrated as they are on father-son relationships, the recovery of title and legitimacy, on matters of loss and gain, may be regarded as a deeply felt though unwritten “source” for the second tetralogy that helped the dramatist to invest the narrative he found in his historical sources with an emotional intensity that derived from his own experiences as son and father.
The successes and setbacks in Shakespeare’s career from 1592 to 1594, his other “lost years,” are likewise the subject of scrutiny by R. S. White in his boldly speculative yet persuasive “1592 to 1594: Shakespeare’s Other ‘Lost’ Years,” which challenges the too easy assumption that Shakespeare went into a kind of hibernation during the years when the London theaters were closed on account of the bubonic plague. Though only twenty-eight in 1592, he had established himself as a playwright and poet of note with the Henry VI trilogy, Venus and Adonis, and The Rape of Lucrece. Would he have taken a sabbatical from writing for two full years with so promising a career ahead of him? Very doubtful. Conducting what he describes as a “thought experiment” (in the absence of any factual evidence), White styles a Shakespeare who decides to continue writing, not plays nor poems that had a limited readership but a widely popular and money-making literary form, a prose romance along the lines of the immensely successful Arcadia by Sir Philip Sidney, or Diana by Jorge de Montemayor. The narrative of Arcadia, as readers of the work know, is liberally punctuated by poems, songs, elegies, and sonnets. The narrative, in fact, is woven around these. They are the pegs from which the fabric hangs. Might not, then, Shakespeare’s Sonnets have likewise been the scaffolding prepared with such an objective in mind? Despite the brilliance of each individual sonnet, as a sequence the poems appear incomplete and do not cohere. But, alas, Shakespeare never wrote the romance in which, had the sonnets featured, all would have been clear! The plague abated; the theaters re-opened; and Shakespeare went back to playwriting, the form that he knew best suited his talent.
While Tiffany sees Shakespeare’s “playwrights” as disguised projections of himself in his professional role, or of his fellow playwrights in similar roles, and Candido sees imprints of the fortunes and misfortunes of the Shakespeare family behind the dominant characters of the second tetralogy, Mythili Kaul, in “Greene, Harvey, Nashe, and the ‘Making’ of Falstaff,” shows how the creation of the knight emerges out of the vitriolic attacks and counterattacks of Shakespeare’s contemporaries against one another as well as against Shakespeare. Focusing on the Greene-Harvey-Nashe feud marked by bitterness and rancor, she sees Shakespeare too taking revenge, but of a different kind. He retaliates not with petty verbal assaults but by making Robert Greene and Gabriel Harvey characters in his plays, using their own “weapons,” their own works, to caricature them. He writes with a “merciful” hand, he uses all gently, winning the approbation of his peers and earning the epithets “gentle” and “sweet.” Falstaff, Shakespeare’s imaginative creation, is distanced from the men to whom he owes his origin. The genius of a great writer transforms life into art and creates one of the most fascinating characters in literature by imbuing him with superior intelligence, brilliant wit, and a zest for life. The act of imaginative generosity that effects the metamorphosis of Greene and Harvey into Falstaff tells us a great deal not only about Shakespeare the artist but also about Shakespeare the man.
Examining the year 1599 in which the Globe was constructed, and adding a new dimension to James Shapiro’s research on this particular year, Subhajit Sen Gupta, in “‘Look in the calendar’: Julius Caesar and Shakespeare’s Cultural-Political Moment,” points out that the play, as one of the earliest to be staged there, transforms recognizable cultural practices of the ancient Roman world into familiar ones pertaining to Shakespeare’s own time and place. Among these are the Earl of Essex’s failed expedition into Ireland to crush Tyrone’s rebellion, the anxieties surrounding the succession to the throne, and the creation and cancellation of holidays. As an example of this last mentioned feature, the closing years of the sixteenth century saw a clash between Catholicism and Protestantism, the latter accusing the former of exploiting natural astronomical phenomena to gain political advantage by sowing fear and superstition among the gullible masses. Thus Brutus’s erroneous supposition that “tomorrow” is “the ides of March” (2.1.40) reflects the conflict between the old Julian calendar and the recently introduced Gregorian calendar named after Pope Gregory XIII, which the Queen welcomed but the Protestant bishops resented on account of its Catholic affiliation. Julius Caesar was written when Protestant England was still continuing to recognize the lingering power of the old faith, and the play embodies the double pull that the two religious persuasions exercised upon Shakespeare the man, these influences being further explored in the penultimate and final essays in this collection, by John W. Mahon and Charles Forker, respectively.
In a more internalized kind of inquiry, R. W. Desai’s “‘But I have that within which passeth show’: Shakespeare’s Ambivalence toward His Profession” suggests that Shakespeare’s divided attitude toward the actor’s profession that made him “a motley to the view” (Sonnet 110) and engaged him in “public means which public manners breeds” (Sonnet 111) finds expression in the conflicting attitudes Hamlet has toward “performance” both onstage and offstage, in his castigation of the players for their bombastic style of acting (a criticism possibly aimed at Burbage and Alleyn), his approval of the players’ role as “abstract and brief chronicles of the time,” and his praise for the play that “was never acted” (a strange oxymoron). Such clues, latent in the text of Hamlet Q2, reflect the author’s dissatisfaction with the contemporary theater even though it was this very theater that brought him success, fame, and prosperity. The three tragedies that follow are more extrovertist, providing Shakespeare’s rambunctious audience—“who for the most part are capable of nothing but inexplicable dumb shows and noise” (3.2.11-12)—a more declamatory style of drama that suited their tastes.”
Directing attention to Venus and Adonis, Shormishtha Panja, in “‘Those lips that love’s own hand did make’: Anne Hathaway and Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis,” finds an ambivalence in the writer’s memory of his relationship with the woman he wooed and won with passionate intensity in the pastoral English countryside, and the wife that she became in the congested house on Henley Street into which he brought her. In a close scrutiny of the domestic conditions prevailing therein, which were far from conducive for a continuing romance between the newlyweds, Panja sees re-inflections in Shakespeare’s epyllion that suggest the waning of sexual desire and that significantly deviate from his sources, Ovid and Plato. In addition, she identifies a third previously unnoticed source, Book III of Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene. Further, might not the stanza whose opening line, “More I could tell, but more I dare not say” (805-10), spoken by Adonis/Shakespeare be a hint at a homoerotic attraction toward the young and handsome Henry Wriothesley (Mr. W.H.), the Earl of Southampton and the poet’s patron? Comparing Shakespeare’s dedication in Venus and Adonis to that in The Rape of Lucrece, she detects in the tone of the latter a feeling more informal, more relaxed, even warm, than in the former, perhaps reflecting a growing intimacy between the two men.
In the remaining five essays in this collection, by Lisa Hopkins, Stuart Sillars, John O’Meara, John W. Mahon, and Charles R. Forker, we turn away somewhat from the domain of Shakespeare the dramatist and look closely at his religious sensibility, writing as he was during a period of intense theological and doctrinal debate, checkered by bloody conflict. Lisa Hopkins’ “Shakespeare’s Churches” takes cognizance of churches at Stratford, Oxford, and London that he would have known and attended (since churchgoing was mandatory by law) and their possible intersections with his life and art (particularly with Hamlet). Among others, she speaks of Holy Trinity Church at Stratford, where he was christened in 1564 and buried in 1616; Temple Grafton Church, in which he was married; and, in London, Westminster Abbey and the churches of St. Bishopsgate and St. Olave’s in Silver Street. Her essay also considers two pilgrimage sites, St. Winifred’s Well in North Wales and Walsingham in Norfolk, both of which feature by association in Cymbeline and Hamlet, respectively. Opening up possibilities of associations with, and reflections in, the works, this survey is an example of sensitive and informed speculation.
That Shakespeare imbibed consciously or unconsciously the rhythms and syntax of the Elizabethan translations of the Bible and the Book of Common Prayer, and that these are powerfully and hauntingly echoed in his writings is the subject of Stuart Sillars’ “Shakespeare and the Rhythms of Devotion.” The importance of these texts as spoken constructions, designed to be read aloud, may be gauged from the meeting at the Stationers’ Hall, where the translators of the King James Bible assembled and read their versions for comment and improvement. Further, the paper turns from the verbal to the visual, to the physical movements prescribed, almost as stage directions in the Prayer Book, which find their parallel in Hamlet’s refusal to kill the kneeling Claudius while in prayer.
Using Waddington’s well-known identification of Hamlet with Martin Luther as a starting point, John O’Meara’s “Outbraving Luther: Shakespeare’s Final Evolution through the Tragedies into the Last Plays” addresses the issue of Hamlet’s recoil from libido present not only in himself (“it were better my mother had not borne me” [3.1.123-24]), in his mother (“Why, she would hang on him / As if increase of appetite had grown / By what it fed on” [1.2.143-45]), in Ophelia (“Ha! ha! are you honest?” [3.1.102]) but also, and most reprehensibly, in his adored father (“Cut off even in the blossoms of my sin” [1.5.76]). Tracing Hamlet’s disgust with human depravity back to Luther’s conviction that “nothing can cure libido,” the author detects similar elements of abhorrent sexuality in Othello and King Lear. However, as O’Meara demonstrates, Shakespeare did not remain entrapped in this well of despondency; his escape is to be seen in the romances, where evil is not only combated but overthrown.
John W. Mahon’s “Shakespeare among the Jesuits” is a tautly argued description and assessment of theories pertaining to, firstly, direct evidence in Shakespeare’s works of his involvement with the Jesuits; secondly, their possible influence on him as indicated in his writings; and thirdly, the evidence available of possible, or probable, personal connections with them. Examining with sensitivity and skepticism the various approaches to the three areas of Jesuitical interaction with Shakespeare, Mahon sheds fresh light on the Porter’s “equivocator” speech in Macbeth and on Shakespeare’s admiration for Edmund Campion (1540-81), who was initially an Anglican but subsequently became a staunch Catholic committed to the tenets of the Jesuit order as well as being an outstanding scholar and teacher at Oxford University, finally suffering martyrdom for his religious convictions. In addition, Mahon’s paper examines Shakespeare’s careful reading of Robert Southwell’s works, as is clear from striking passages in The Merchant of Venice and King Lear that echo his language. And what was Shakespeare’s own religious conviction? He was probably a Protestant conformist while remaining inwardly a Roman Catholic. Mahon’s conclusion carries a touch of whimsy: “When we meet Shakespeare in heaven, we may at last learn just what he believed.” Meanwhile, in expectation of that devoutly-to-be-wished-for consummation, we occupy ourselves with attempts to pluck out the heart of Shakespeare’s mystery.
The teasing question as to Shakespeare’s religious leaning has been controversial for long, and Charles R. Forker’s “Was Shakespeare a ‘Church Papist’ or a Prayer Book Anglican?” covers the ground with an immense wealth of knowledge and insight into the traditions and theology of the pre-Reformation church. Shakespeare’s family background and literary-theatrical associations present a mixture of likely Catholic and Protestant influences, but his familiarity with and persistent echoing of the Prayer Book, reflected continuously throughout his writings (as also noted by Sillars) suggests a voluntary and inclusive attraction to Anglican liturgy and beliefs in their more formal and majestic expression as represented by clerics such as Richard Hooker and Lancelot Andrewes. At the same time, nostalgia for practices of the “old religion” come out prominently in the history plays and tragedies, while comedies such as Twelfth Night remind us of the close cultural relationship between theatrical entertainment and the liturgical calendar. A survey of Shakespeare’s portrayal of clerics on the stage tends to confirm his respect for friars whose habits mark them as humble Christian priests, but, on the other hand, the Puritans come in for debunking. With judicious balance, Forker sees Shakespeare drawn to the “old religion” for its inspirational ambience while at the same time welcoming the Queen’s “high church” preferences in religious belief and practice, probably attending services at Westminster Abbey and the Southwark Cathedral, where a more Catholic and ceremonial style of public worship was practiced.
The objective in bringing out this volume is to raise questions and suggest answers regarding the man behind the works, the probable workings of his mind in the midst of a plurality of discourses that marked the Renaissance and the Reformation. Can we isolate the man from his works? Is he, as dramatist, like James Joyce’s Stephen, “indifferent, paring his fingernails” (Portrait 215)? The authors featured in this volume think otherwise.
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