On the new-books shelf at the library the other day, I came across Contested Will by James Shapiro. Being mildly interested in seeing "Anonymous" sometime soon, I took this home with me, although it is not about the authorship controversy as such, but about the history of it, when it first started being mooted, who were the major proponents — and their nominees, as it were — how it has developed over the years, and by way of wondering why there is such debate about the authorship of the plays, how an increasing, and increasingly insistent, belief that an author's life will inevitably be reflected in great detail in his works.
Shapiro says right off that he believes that Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare, but he maintains a fairly level-headed fairness throughout, only seeming a bit baffled at times how someone as intelligent as, for example, Freud, would become so obsessed with proving that someone else wrote the plays. Shapiro's book is very readable — it could in fact have been a bit more academic, and have included more than just a "bibliographical essay" at the end, especially since on this topic there are so many people who will argue and counter-argue about particular points apparently until Doomsday.
(Why, why, why, do publishers think that readers of non-academic works are not interested in footnotes?)
So, anyway, I got interested in reading a biography of Shakespeare, so tottered down the street to the public library, and picked out two of the most-recent on the shelf, starting with Anthony Holden's Shakespeare : the Man Behind the Genius. Now, I have had a fairly high opinion of Anthony Holden for many years, admiring his biographies of Prince Charles and Princess Diana, but I found this book, while comfortably readable, to be superficial and filled with speculation presented as fact. He blithely states one one page that there is no evidence that Shakespeare attended the Stratford grammar school, as the registers for the period have not survived, and then almost on the next page is writing as though it were fact, "In 1571, the year of William's arrival in the senior school…" which I find really shoddy scholarship. He does lots of things like this: "Capitalising an intial letter, second only to moving a comma as the nicest of nicities among textual emendations, could see 24-year-old Shakespeare on the road with the Queen's Men in 1588. 'I sick withal the help of bath desired / and thither hied a sad, distempered guest …' What does this mean? An out-of-sorts actor-poet in need of a hot bath? Capitalise the 'B' of Bath in Sonnet 153, and you have a sick player — no doubt after some post-performance over-indulgence with his fellows at the local inn — seeking solace in the waters of the West Country spa, already renowned for their medicinal properties. The Queen's Men made a documented visit to Bath in 1588. Was the hungover actor a new recruit, enjoying one of his first forays out of London?" It's a short step from "could have" and "might have" to "did": "[Shakespeare's] brief, half-hearted attempt at retirement to Stratford had made him realise how bored he would be in his native rural backwater, for all his fondness (tinged with guilt) for his daughters." Three assumptions presented as fact in one sentence! four, if you count the parentheses. And he does not hesitate to assume the validity of sources who must be taken with at least a grain of salt. There was it seems an old tradition that Shakespeare kept his own half-pint mug at the local inn, “out of which he was accustomed to take his draught of ale at a certain public house in the neighbourhood of Stratford every Saturday afternoon.” “Our source for this engaging vignette,” Holden writes guilessly, “is, for once, as respectable as a Treasury man, James West, who ‘assured’ George Steevens of this solemn truth in the 1770s.” The 1770s! I ask you.
I went back to the library after that, and borrowed Peter Ackroyd's Shakespeare : the Biography. I admit that reading this hard on the heels of Holden's book may have made me look on it with a kindlier eye, but I liked this one much better. The two make almost exactly the same points — regrettably, judging by the respective bibliographies, neither did much original research — but Ackroyd is a better writer, and his chapters on London are vivid and fresh.
That said, Ackroyd also does allow himself reams of speculation — I found it both amusing and frustrating that he can say things like "Shakespeare had been writing 'The Winter's Tale' in the preceding year, and its overwhelmingly pastoral setting has suggested to some critics that he wrote it at New Place in Stratford. The same reasoning would suggest that he wrote 'The Tempest' while temporarily residing on an island in the Mediterranean," and yet in another place, "As a boy Shakespeare had passed [New Place] every day on his way to school, and it impressed itself on his imagination as a most desirable residence. It represented his childhood dream of prosperity," assigning motives that he has no way of authenticating.
And perhaps I notice this more because of my interest in genealogy and thus church records, but over and over again Ackroyd assumes, it seems (because he doesn't footnote his sources), that Shakespeare was the godfather of various children in Stratford and London simply because the boys were called William — a possibility, I will agree, but to say it with certainty is misleading, since the baptismal records of the time included not even the name of the mother, let alone the godparents. (On a somewhat related note, I find his assumption that Shakespeare attended various Stratford funerals rather sentimental. He says at one point that the journey from Stratford to London took four days on foot or two days on horseback. If the average time between a death and the resulting funeral is two or three days, then if you allow two days for the news to get up to London, and two days for Shakespeare to travel down to Stratford, he's already at least a day late, less if the death was from an infectious disease.)
And almost no footnotes!
But as I say, Ackroyd is a good writer, and I enjoyed reading his book — perhaps his eye for detail allowed me to forgive his lapses, although obviously not the more egregious ones.
And I thought it would be appropriate to include with this post some of the portraits alleged to be Shakespeare. At the top is the famous Chandos portrait. This is thought to have been painted somewhere between 1600 and 1610, although on what grounds I don't know. It was thought for many years to have been painted by Richard Burbage, Shakespeare's contemporary and fellow-actor, and also something of a dab hand at painting; it is now thought that the painter John Taylor is equally if not more likely to be the artist. An expert from the National Portrait Gallery notes that in addition to damage from over-cleaning, the hair and beard have been lengthened at some point. Next is the so-called Grafton portrait, alas somewhat more discredited these days than it was a few years ago. The resemblance to the more-iconic portraits is tentative at best, but this of course assumes that those portraits are accurate representations. I personally would very much like to believe that this boy would go on to write all of those wonderful plays. Third is the Soest portrait, which even to my eye looks at least a hundred years too late to be from life, but it's a lovely doublet. Just above is a relatively new contender, the Sanders portrait, with a label identifying it as Shakespeare and having been painted in 1603. The smile is certainly unusual in portraits — although frankly I see it as more of a smirk, and find it in fact slightly unpleasant. The collar is interesting and unusual — I wonder if any period-clothing experts have weighed in on the dating. And below is the Cobbe portrait, claimed by no less an authority than Stanley Wells on behalf of the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust to be a portrait from life to be dated 1610. A nice portrait — the beard is especially well done. Is it Shakespeare? Are any of them Shakespeare? Will we ever know?
