Shakespeare: A Life (2 page)

Research into the Elizabethans is of such quality today that new
material about Shakespeare, his town, his parents, his schooling, his
friendships, or his career comes to light continually. My aim in this
book is to show in an accurate narrative all that can be known of
Shakespeare's life, at present, and to offer some account of his writing
in relation to his life.

I have
tried to supply a dispassionate, up-to-date report on the available
facts, and to add new and relevant material. I write for the general
public, but think that scholars will find fresh details about
Shakespeare here.

This book differs
from those biographies which imagine for him political roles, sexual
relationships, or colourful intrigues not in the factual record.
Imaginative reconstructions and elaborate psychological theories about
him can be amusing; but, for me, they strain credulity. The attempt to
understand his life is not new -- a start was made with Nicholas
Rowe's forty-page sketch in 1709. Since then, a major effort of
biographers has been to collect what is known about the playwright, to
synthesize it, and in a sense to clean the bones of the ' Shakespeare
documents' or to separate facts from myths and errors. That effort
continues today. Our knowledge of him is refined in new editions of
his plays or in searching performances of them, as well as in
discoveries at Stratford's Birthplace Records Office, at the Public
Record Office or county record offices, or at the great collections of
Renaissance books and manuscripts at the British, Huntington, or
Folger Shakespeare libraries. As data accumulates, so do myths. But
what, surprisingly, emerges is that the factual truth as we piece it
together is more exciting, suggestive, and tantalizing than anything so
far dreamed up about him. What do the facts reveal of Shakespeare's
relations with Marie Mountjoy or Jennet Davenant? Or about the murders
connected with his house, and the brutal killing of a family friend?
If we grant that not all of his work was miraculous, how did he come
to write
Hamlet
? I find such questions more intriguing than

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the suppositions of popular mythology, in which he is involved with
so many Dark Ladies, poor boys, conspiracies, and meetings in taverns
that only a miracle could explain how he found time for the stage.

One cannot escape from documentary facts. Yet it must be said that
biographical forms have had to evolve so as not to distort the
historical record. A whole variety of recent views of history by those
whose approaches have been linked with Fernand Braudel and the Annales
school in France, or with Renaissance studies in Britain and America,
for example, point to the reality of social contexts. And this is the
essential new insight that applies to Shakespeare biography: the
historical document with its pinpoints of light, its 'facts', is an
illusory thing, unless the document is used in conjunction with other
facts in the continuum of its own time. The only way any data from the
Tudor past can validly be used to show what an individual was like is
as the context for a well-researched and more or less linked or
continuous account. It follows that an accurate life of Shakespeare
may require more research today than was thought necessary even twenty
or thirty years ago. Inevitably, a wary piecing together of a factual
Tudor and Jacobean 'historical present' has its own pitfalls. But
only in a contextualized, pertinent, and more or less continuous
narrative will there be a chance to separate fact from supposition.

What is most at stake is the matter of being accurate, or at least
not woefully wrong, about individuals. I comment further on the
Shakespeare biographical tradition in Appendix C, but here -- for a
moment -- let me focus on lapses into untruthfulness. It may seem a
trivial error of a recent writer to state that one day, in the 1570s,
John Shakespeare took his small son William by the hand and led him
over to Coventry to see the Queen's entertainments. But in inventing
that incident (no record supports it) and supposing the father behaved
as modern fathers might, the writer loses his chance to be accurate
about a Tudor family. It is a more serious lapse, in an otherwise
valuable documentary life, to establish almost no historical context
for Shakespeare's schooling, his acting company, or his visits at
Stratford. My point is that the form of a traditional 'documentary
life' only poorly accommodates research into milieux, into changes
over a span of

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time, or into facts about any process or development in the life being
described. Even E. K. Chambers, whose syntheses of the factual
record are admirable, can plunge into the Sonnets for 'glimpses of a
soul-side of Shakespeare' and conclude in part that the poet was 'tired
of life before his time'. Now, I do not know that the creator of
Falstaff and Rosalind was especially 'tired of life', though no remark
by Chambers is to be quickly dismissed. But how are we to judge the
validity of Chambers's intuition without an account of context and
change in Shakespeare's developing life to support it?

It is one thing to ask for a continuous factual account of Shakespeare,
and another to give it. Any new synthesis will have hundreds of gaps.
One must fail again and again to find out all one would like to know
about a problem, but it is not impossible to learn about Tudor social
milieux. The question, I think, is whether what we can know is
susceptible to delicate and accurate use. Thus, for example, we know
something of John Shakespeare's double house at Henley Street, but we
can only say that it was normal in households of the country bourgeois,
in the 1570s, for a boy to rise at one hour in the summer, at a later
hour in winter, and to clean his teeth with a sweetish paste and a
cloth. We cannot say that John's son, young William Shakespeare, did
just that. But to cite a norm in this case is not trivial, irrelevant,
or unfactual. Cleanliness in houses of skilled craftsmen and leading
aldermen in the 1570s is related to notions of 'decorum', and of respect
for the self, the family, and the crafts, which Shakespeare at an
early point unmistakably imbibed. Again, it cannot factually be said
that
this boy
knelt before his father for a morning blessing,
but until we grasp what would have been normal in many households
roughly similar to his own, we can have no context for his youth and
little understanding of anything unique in his development. In Chapter
5, I have used a method of 'alternative narrative' to show some of
the conditions he may have found if he worked briefly for Hoghton and
Hesketh, and if the best-authenticated report about his youth is true.
The evidence, to date, relating to his possible stay in Lancashire is
neither dismissible

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nor certain, and I have tried to show what has come to light about the matter after 400 years.

Nothing that is 'new' in the present book is more central than the
complex evolution in Shakespeare's mind and being that it tries to
show. In ten years of work, I have examined every known source for his
life, and though I use manuscripts I have not hesitated to draw on
past studies of the Shakespeare documents and a wide range of other
works. For their relevance to his life, I begin with sudden changes at
Tudor Stratford after its more or less sedate and secure 400 years of
civic life. Similarly, I have tried to relate later developments in the
Midlands town, in London, and in the varying fortunes of
Shakespeare's main acting company (the Chamberlain's or King's men) to
documentary facts about himself. Fresh details about his youth show
that he did not leave home unprepared for his career. Evidence of his
mother's quick intelligence and familiarity with a quill pen, new light
on his father's managerial work and troubles and on schooling at the
time, neglected evidence about the social revolution of the 1570s, and
fresh details about the Hathaways of Shottery all give us a fuller
picture. New, or recently discovered, information about the house where
he was born, the illegal activities of acquaintances such as Sturley
and Quiney, about Shakespeare's investments, and about his relations
with his own relatives sharpen our picture.

Further, we know more about his milieu and working conditions in
London than formerly, as well as about theatres such as the Rose, the
Globe, and Blackfriars, and Shakespeare's reactions to the children's
companies. In a continuous narrative one has a chance to see what he
learned and how he thrived, whom he imitated and at least some of the
factors that set him apart as a person. The inner theatre of his
development is a deep, wonderful story, of which his colleagues, his
rivals, his company, his Ovidian poems, his plays, and even Stratford
grain-speculators give us varying glimpses. That development occurred
in an England in which communal instincts and divisions of social rank
were almost unimaginably stronger than today, and where

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terms such as 'homosexual' and 'bisexual' and certain other modern
categories did not exist. I have tried to sketch briefly the homoerotic
world of his patron Southampton's friends, some attitudes expressed
in the sonnet vogue, and to say what Shakespeare's sonnets may suggest
about him. I include material on Hunsdonand Howard's theatrical plan,
also on Shakespeare's access to books, on his reactions to changing
modes in plays and to dilemmas of his company, and again on his
relations with individual actors, poets, or the Revels Office so far
as these can be known.

In a biography one may only touch upon great, textually unstable,
works which have elaborate stage histories and critical histories of
their own, and which will surely evolve or seem fresh in many new ways
in the future. Without distortion, I hope, I have 'used' the plays to
suggest, for example, what is known today of Shakespeare's processes
of writing: of his imitativeness or response to rivals, his awareness
of a troupe's needs at particular times, and his self-mockery, limited
satire, and topicality. I offer no separate sections of 'literary
criticism', but have not eschewed interpretation. Having read dozens
of articles, books, and reviews of the dramas for thirty-five years, I
make no plea for my originality, but I criticize in my own right and
have tried to signal a debt when I can recall the creditor. I look into
Shakespeare's apparent uses of memory and of locales that he knew,
his reflection of changing theatrical conditions and of implicit
criticisms of his work (as in the Poetomachia, or Poets' War), his
varying attitudes to history and to sources, and some of his deepest
exploratory interests in life.

As
for the topic of Shakespeare's personality, I have meant it to be the
implicit subject of every chapter, and yet he is to be no more fully
defined and categorized, finally, than any of his sonnets or plays. At
the end of the book I have offered a family tree for central figures
appearing in this narrative, a tree for descendants of the poet's sister
Joan Hart who are alluded to in Chapter 18, and a sketch of the
Shakespeare biographical tradition and useful and relevant sources.

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The notes and the third appendix will signal my chief debts to persons
and sources. Yet notes many times as lengthy could not acknowledge
what I have learned from others about Shakespeare. My interest began
even before I brashly proposed, fresh out of the army, to write a
thesis on his tragedies, decades ago, at University College London.
Before a supervisor sent me on to my friend Paul Turner, James
Sutherland told me, over sherry, to look into other writers 'first'.
Cause and effect in a life are less neatly related than one may think,
but, for a few decades, I looked into biographical problems involved
with Browning, Arnold, and Jane Austen, and have not regretted that
experience, as oddly preparatory as it may seem. Colleagues invited me
to lecture at Birmingham,s Shakespeare Institute off and on, over
fifteen years, before my teaching in Renaissance literature began at
Leeds.

I owe a large debt to modern
Shakespeare scholarship, criticism, and performance. I gladly
acknowledge fellowships at the Huntington Library and at the Folger
Shakespeare Library, and grants from the Leeds English School and the
International Shakespeare Association. I have been especially helped at
the Huntington, the Newberry, and the Folger, at the Birthplace
Records Office in Stratford, at Worcester, Tewkesbury, and the
archives of Birmingham, Edinburgh, Leeds, and at those county record
offices mentioned in the notes. Stanley Wells asked to read this work
in draft, and I am deeply grateful for his and Ernst Honigmann's
comments on the manuscript, and to Martin Banham, Inga-Stina Ewbank,
David Hopkinson, and Douglas Jefferson for comments on parts of it.
Kathleen Tillotsonand Paul Turnerhelped in many ways; I have turned
repeatedly to Andrew Gurr for generous advice and debate, and to
Gerald and Moira Habberjam in matters of genealogy and palaeography. I
am also glad to acknowledge the help of Robert Bearman, J. W. Binns,
Michael Brennan, Susan Brock, Martin Butler, H. Neville Davies, R. A.
Foakes, Donald Foster, Levi Fox, G. K. Hunter, Jeanne E. Jones, D. P.
Kirby, Sir Ian McKellen, Tom Matheson, Peter Meredith, Richard
Pennington, Roger Pringle, Elizabeth Williams, Ian Wilson, and Laetitia
Yeandle. The late Fredson Bowers, Kenneth Muir, Lawrence Ragan, and
Samuel Schoenbaum advised me more than once, and I am grate-

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