Shakespeare: A Life (69 page)

the Romantic age by Wordsworth, Coleridge, Landor, Lamb, De Quincey,
Hazlitt, and Keats, or among the Victorians (to name only a few) by
Carlyle, Arnold, and Swinburne, by Americans such as Emerson and
Hawthorne, or in the twentieth century by Lytton Strachey, T. S. Eliot
or, later, Ted Hughes, or in the Irish Renaissance by Shaw, Joyce,
Wilde, and Yeats, or by Europeans such as Goethe, Schlegel, Freud,
Strindberg, or François Guizot and Victor Hugo. The quality of such
diverse commentary has helped to ensure a cultural centrality, and
this and the enormous prestige of the dramas have whetted interest in
the Stratford man. Victorians displayed biographical hunger, too, but
the twentieth century's sheer curiosity about Shakespeare has been
incessant and all-permitting. The way has been open for 'pop' lives,
jeux d'esprit
or nutty books about Dark Ladies, or Bacon's or the Earl of Oxford's
supposed authorship of the plays, as well as for lightly researched
academic works with standard, predictable sections of drama criticism,
and for fresher biographies, many specialized studies, works that
oppose myths about Shakespeare the man, and for some astute,
brilliantly informed syntheses or explorations by writers such as
Chambers, Eccles, and Schoenbaurn.

The twentieth century opened with three 'vintage' decades for background studies. Charles I. Elton
Shakespeare: His Family and Friends
( 1904.) is at least apt and delicate on Stratford's common fields,
wider landscape, and the local terms for the countryside used by the
poet. Although there are useful later appraisals of the evidence, C.
W. Wallace's "New Shakespeare Discoveries" (in
Harper's Monthly Magazine
,
120 ( 1910) ), is still suggestive on the Belott-Mountjoy case and
the playwright's legal depositions, which Wallace and his wife
unearthed. Joseph Gray
Shakespeare's Marriage
( 1905) is sane and scrupulous on the marital documents and remains a nearly definitive study of them.

For the spreading contexts of Shakespeare's life at Stratford, Edgar
I. Fripp's books are still essential reading. Fripp's four, fairly
brief, preliminary volumes, chiefly on Warwickshire persons and locales,
are suggestive, although not quite free of factual error:
Master Richard Quyny
( 1924),
Shakespeare's Stratford
( 1928),
Shakespeare's Haunts Near Stratford
( 1929), and
Shakespeare Studies Biographical and Literary
( 1930). A graduate of London University, a pious Unitarian,

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and a tireless student of town records, Edgar Fripp died in 1931. His
major biographical opus, which F. C. Wellstood saw through the press,
Shakespeare: Man and Artist ( 2 Vols., 1938), is sentimental,
strongly affected by Fripp's moral and religious beliefs, and full of
conjectures (not infrequently persuasive, yet often preceded by 'we
may believe . . .' when evidence is lacking); but no one has rivalled
Fripp's knowledge of Renaissance Stratford; and the latter work has
more factual detail on the poet's local milieu than any other biography.
Of basic use, too, for formal records of the town and its council in
Shakespeare's time (and just before) are the
Minutes and Accounts of the Corporation of Stratford-upon-Avon and Other Records
,
Vols. i-iv ( 1921-30), edited by Richard Savage and E. I. Fripp.
These transcribe local records for the years 1553-92; a fifth volume of
the
Minutes
, covering the years 1593-8, has been edited by Levi
Fox ( 1990). Other untranscribed MS material on the town, its
persons, decrees, landholdings, or other aspects of local history are at
Stratford's Records Office. Mark Eccles
Shakespeare in Warwickshire
does not replace Fripp's studies, but often silently corrects them;
Eccles reports on a new Gilbert Shakespeare document and other
details, and, in a spare style, gives a dense, accurate assembly of
facts relating to the poet, his family, and acquaintances. One of
Eccles's stated aims (an aim which few in the tradition since Fripp
have taken to heart) was to focus upon the poet's 'friends and
associates', 'because knowledge of their lives may some day lead to
more knowledge of Shakespeare'.

As
both Fripp and Eccles illuminate Stratford, so E. K. Chambers (
1886-1954) formidably illuminates the theatre in documentary detail up
to the year 1616 in
The Elizabethan Stage
( 4 vols., 1923). Though by no means superseded in every feature, Chambers
Stage
has been valuably supplemented by three works of Andrew Gurr, which
concern the actors' working conditions, the nature of audiences they
tried to please, and the history of the companies to which the actors
belonged:
The Shakespearean Stage 1574-1642
( 1980; 3rd edn., 1992),
Playgoing in Shakespeare's London
( 1987; 2nd edn., 1996), and
The Shakespearian Playing Companies
( 1996). Modern comment on the Tudor and Jacobean stage is vast, but M. C. Bradbrook
The Rise of the Common Player
( 1962) and G. E. Bentley
The Profession ofDramatist in Shakespeare's Time, 1590-1642

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Dramatist in Shakespeare's Time, 1590-1642 ( 1971) and
The Profession of Player in Shakespeare's Time, 1590-1642
( 1984) are good introductions to conditions the poet knew; the last
two works, with minor corrections, also appear in one volume ( 1986). A
special aspect of his milieu and work is the topic of Kenneth Muir
Shakespeare as Collaborator
( 1960). Among its other features, Richard Dutton
William Shakespeare: A Literary Life
( 1989) has fresh remarks on theatre censorship, and Peter Thomson
Shakespeare's Professional Career
( 1992) offers a chronological and useful, if somewhat distanced,
view of the poet's working life and his company's problems.

A scholar cast in the heroic mould of Halliwell, E. K. Chambers,
while holding administrative posts on London's Board of Education, had
written
The Mediaeval Stage
(2 Vols., 1903), then taken twenty years for
The Elizabethan Stage
before writing his authoritative
William Shakespeare: A Study of Facts and Problems
(2 vols., 1930). That this text is still indispensable, despite some
faults, is proof of Chambers's quality of mind; the work has a
fractured form and a narrative of about eightyeight pages. (Its index is
poor, and a new double
Index
which Beatrice White published separately for this work and for
The Elizabethan Stage
in 1934 is disappointingly incomplete.) Much of volume i of the
Facts and Problems
in its concern with textual matters is obsolete, but volume ii of the
Facts
offers, among other features, precise, succinct entries on the
'Records' of Shakespeare's life, 'Contemporary Allusions' to the man
or to his work, and 'The Shakespeare-Mythos', or a listing of hearsay
or legends about him from
c.
1625 to 1862,

Equally important in documentary studies has been Samuel Schoenbaum (
1927-96), a gifted scholar who taught at midwestern and east-coast
universities in the US and served as a trustee of the Folger Library; he
takes up the 'Mythos'in
William Shakespeare: A Documentary Life
( 1975). With fewer photo-illustrations of MSS but with added data, this appears as
A Compact Documentary Life
( 1977; rev. edn., 1987), and remains useful for its astute narrative
treatment of the major Shakespeare documents. Especially thin on
Stratford and on the theatre, it has questionable remarks (as every
study of the life has); for example, it states as a fact that
Shakespeare 'chafed at the social inferiority of actors' in the
Sonnets; or describes Anne Hathaway at 26

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as 'long in the tooth' for marriage, though women in English towns
(to cite a mean based on parish records) were often about 26 or 27
when they married; or the book overlooks the fact that Hathaways had
settled within a few streets of Shakespeare; or wrongly gives Thomas
Brend a title, endorses myths about John Hall and about the Davenants,
or includes fiction about the 'Widow Burbage'looking on an event
'approvingly'. Yet its factual lapses are minor, and one adjusts to a
format which leaves little scope for actors' lives, or a poet's
development. Schoenbaum did not live to write the full-scale biography
he intended, but in
Shakespeare's Lives
( 1970; rev. edn.,
1991), he offered an acidly amused and valuable history of
biographical works on Shakespeare (to the early chapters of which the
present sketch is indebted). Under 'Pop Biography', shallow works are
listed along with M. M. Reese's more careful
Shakespeare: His World and His Work
( 1953), but Schoenbaum is typically fair with A. L. Rowse
William Shakespeare
('solid middle brow') and other texts.
Shakespeare's Lives
shows each age fashioning a 'Shakespeare' to suit its needs and values. Dispensing with narrative, Schoenbaum
William Shakespeare: Records and Images
( 1981) takes up topics such as 'New Place', 'The BelottMountjoy Suit,
1612', or the 'Shakespeare Portraits' in separate, detailed, and
well-informed sections.

Several
writers bring years of experience, often of a high order, implicitly
to bear in critical biographies which do not feature new archival
'finds', but judge the life mainly through comment on the æuvre. Books
of this kind include M. C. Bradbrook
Shakespeare: The Poet in his World
( 1978), and Philip Edwards
Shakespeare: A Writer's Progress
( 1986), which supplements Edwards's unusual insights into the Sonnets and their writer in
Shakespeare and the Confines of Art
( 1968). The recollections of an actor influence Robert Speaight's posthumously published and casually edited
Shakespeare: The Man and his Achievement
( 1977). Stanley Wells's work as a playreviewer, editor, and scholar,
and his sense of the ambiguities within the subject, and of those
within the beholder, lie behind his
Shakespeare: A Dramatic Life
( 1994), reprinted with an added chapter as
Shakespeare: The Poet and his Plays
( 1997).

Late in the twentieth century, attitudes to biography and history

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changed rapidly. Indirectly the ideas of the Annales school of
historians in France, as well as works by America's new historicist
critics and Britain's cultural materialists, among others, in effect
expanded the territory of Renaissance studies. The 'documentary fact'
seemed misleading without the social context which was a part of the
fact to begin with; it could be argued, then, that Shakespeare's
biographers had neglected Tudor and Jacobean society, interpreted
documents in a near-vacuum, and neglected the poet's intelligence by
explaining him as a 'miracle'. There appeared to be more to take in
than formerly, in new editions of the plays (With new dates for them),
in fresh and searching performances, or in historical and critical
works which impinge on existing knowledge of the life. Bold
reappraisals were in order. David Bevington's
Tudor Drama and Politics. A Critical Approach to Topical Meaning
( 1968) illuminates Shakespeare's response to politics and society in
his day. A radical review of Tudor and Jacobean comments upon him is
the topic of E. A. J. Honigmann
Shakespeare's Impact on his Contemporaries
( 1982): 'crucial passages from the records have been misread',
states the preface, 'or have been ignored because they clashed with
preconceived ideas'. A former pupil of Peter Alexander of Glasgow
University, who argued that the dramatist's playwriting began early,
Honigmann takes up an 'early start' theory of his own with new,
inconclusive evidence of a sojourn among Hoghtons and Heskeths in
Lancashire , in
Shakespeare: The 'Lost years'
( 1985; 2nd edn.,
1998). In élan and exactness, Honigmann's books remind one of J. S.
Smart's earlier biographical studies in
Shakespeare: Truth and Tradition
( 1928; 1966). C. L. Barber and Richard Wheeler
The Whole Journey: Shakespeare's Power of Development
( 1986) and Emrys Jones
The Origins of Shakespeare
( 1977) enhance one's understanding of a highly intelligent, psychologically unique poet and his progress. Anne Barton
Shakespeare and the Idea of the Play
( 1962), and M. A. Skura
Shakespeare the Actor and the Purposes of Playing
( 1993) bear on his attitudes to drama and to acting; and, as we
apparently become more realistic, it would seem that we can no longer
view social facts only as a 'matrix' or 'background' for a biography. A
study linking the Shakespeare documents, while filling in with
minimal 'background', may not be close enough to the times to explain
its own evidence, let alone account for an individual.

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Biographies such as Russell Fraser
Young Shakespeare
( 1988) and
Shakespeare: The Later Years
( 1992), and Dennis Kay
Shakespeare: His Life, Work, and Era
( 1992) hardly advance our knowledge of contexts, but involve
respectable tours through the plays. Jean-Marie and Angela Maguin
William Shakespeare
( 1996) -- 821 pages in French -lucidly gives theatrical orientation but is slight on the life. Ian Wilson
Shakespeare: The Evidence
( 1993) presses the evidence rather too hard to depict the poet as a
crypto-Catholic; but a similar view had been argued in Peter Milward
intelligent
Shakespeare's Religious Background
( 1973). Jonathan Bate
The Genius of Shakespeare
( 1997) assesses the origins of the poet's modern reputation with
verve and point while asking the reader to imagine, without proof,
that Southampton was the Young Man of the Sonnets, and John Florio's
wife was the Dark Lady.

Though books
compete, Shakespeare biography might be seen as a flawed,
co-operative project in which useful works take a modest place in a
large tradition starting in 1709 with Rowe's forty pages, and, perhaps,
as a project with a fair future. The project values or discards what
is offered, without needing to crown or exalt any contributor. Our
collective picture of the poet's life is surely best when many people
test it, doubt it, discuss it, or contribute to it, and when we are
not under the illusion that it is to be finished.

The main repositories of MSS relating to Shakespeare's times are at
the Folger, the Huntington, and the Newberry libraries (respectively,
in Washington, DC, San Marino, California, and Chicago); at the Public
Record Office and the British Library in London, and at the
Birthplace Trust Records Office in Stratford. Other county record
offices begin to yield new kinds of discoveries. In a sense, the study
of Shakespeare in his age is only beginning; relevant material comes
to light year by year, or often month by month, and the study of his
mind and life is bound to last as long as he is valued.

Three brief guides to MS records of the life, or to what the first
Folio tells us, are unusually rewarding. These are: Peter W. M. Blayney
The First Folio of Shakespeare
( 1991); David Thomas
Shakespeare in the Public Records
( 1985) and Robert Bearman
Shakespeare in the Stratford Records
( 1994).

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