Shakespeare is the most famous writer the western world has produced. His words are quoted more frequently, even
by people who don’t know that he wrote them, than any other literature apart from the Bible. Despite this, the man himself remains a shadowy figure. Although he was a celebrity in his own time, winning the patronage of monarchs and making enough money from his writing to invest successfully in real estate, he left nothing behind in the way of correspondence or personal diaries. Although there is strong evidence that he was famous among his contemporaries and that he mingled with writers of the calibre of Christopher Marlowe and Ben Jonson, no-one thought to write personal memoirs about him.
These materials are the usual tools of biographers. Their absence has not deterred countless speculative attempts over the centuries to write his life story mainly depending on spurious inferences about his character from the material in the writings.
Stephen Greenblatt’s book is better than most of these fantasies, although, like many modern biographers, there is a great deal of use of phrases such as ‘let us imagine’ and ‘perhaps’. He is a Harvard professor, founder of the school of writing that has come to be known as the New Historicism. He constructs a vivid picture of the world Shakespeare inhabited in the years between 1564 and 1616. There is a lot of material in the archives about the reigns of Elizabeth I and James I. The Tudor and Jacobean eras were times of thorough record-keeping and many of those records have survived, including those relating to the facts about Shakespeare’s life.
We can say with some confidence that he was born in April 1564 and that his father, John, was a glover and local dignitary in Stratford-upon-Avon. In the late 1570s, William’s father, fell into debt. In 1582, 18-year-old William married the 26-year-old Anne Hathaway. She was three months pregnant with their first child, Susanna. Twins, Hamnet and Judith, were baptised on February 2 1585. Hamnet died at the age of eleven. Judith married Thomas Quiney, of whom Shakespeare seems to have disapproved because he struck him out of his will. Quiney was a ne’er-do-well who caused a scandal by fathering, out of wedlock, a child that died; the mother, Margaret Wheeler, also died in childbirth.
By 1592 William was in London, and by the mid-to-late 1590s had become a partner in a theatrical group, the Lord Chamberlain’s Men. In 1597 he bought New Place, one of the smartest houses in Stratford. By 1605 he had invested the huge sum of £440 in buying leases of tithes from the Stratford Corporation, which would ensure a steady income for himself and his heirs.
Greenblatt legitimately and sensitively explores William’s family background in an attempt to discover what made him the towering genius he undoubtedly was. Sometimes he speculates too far on scant evidence. The records do substantiate Greenblatt’s narrative about John Shakespeare’s meteoric rise in wealth and status and his decline during William’s childhood when he ran into debt and lost his wealthy wife’s lands. It is reasonable to surmise that this contributed to William’s aspirations to gentility that caused his fellow playwrights to ridicule him for applying for a coat of arms (Jonson mangled the motto ‘Not without right’ into ‘Not without mustard’). It is tenuous to suggest, as Greenblatt is the first writer to do, that John Shakespeare was an alcoholic. He might well have been, but the only evidence Greenblatt can offer from the real world is a remark by a contemporary that he was ‘merry cheeked’. The rest of the ‘evidence’ he presents relates to references to drinking in the plays.
No one knows what Shakespeare was doing in the ‘lost years’ between c.1585 and 1592 and Greenblatt speculates that he was a tutor in the households of wealthy Catholic families in Lancashire and that he might have met and had philosophical discussions with the Jesuit martyr, Edmund Campion, and that Shakespeare himself was a Catholic during a dangerous time when Catholics in Elizabethan England were being horribly tortured, disembowelled and thrown to the mob. Shakespeare’s Catholicism is neither provable nor plausible. Nowhere in any of the plays is there anyone remotely like a person willing to suffer and die for religion.
One might argue that looking for evidence to support theories about Shakespeare’s own character or life in his writings is a fallacious enterprise akin to the procedures of the 19th Century Romantics. That is a fallacy that Greenblatt himself falls into. There are many stimulating analyses of the plays in this book but too often Greenblatt succumbs to the temptation offered by literary market forces to provide readers with trite correspondences between fiction and life, such as the suggestion that in Hamlet Shakespeare is brooding on the death of his son and anticipating the death of his father.
It would be pedantic to make too much of these points. This is not a conventional biography. Greenblatt wears his immense learning lightly and writes elegantly and interestingly enough to stimulate the general reader to look further into Shakespeare scholarship and to return to the plays with fresh eyes.