The Life of the Author: William Shakespeare. Anna Beer
wrote the play is irrelevant. Instead, the focus is on deciphering the genealogy of the surviving texts and deciding which is “best” for performance.
In the face of this kind of thing, cautious biographers turn – tentatively – to the plays and – much less tentatively – to what we do know (or think we know) about the world around Shakespeare. James Shapiro has demonstrated, triumphantly, the powerful results of this approach in his two best-selling studies of the years 1599 and 1606. He argues that Shakespeare’s age, friendships, family relationships, location, and finances at any one time must have impacted in some way upon his writing: a new patron, a new king, a new playhouse, a new rival could – and did – change his drama and poetry. By focusing on both Shakespeare’s times in a general sense, and on a specific time in his life, we can get “a slice of a writer’s life.” Shakespeare’s emotional life in 1606, the “year of Lear,” may be lost to us but “by looking at what he wrote in dialogue with these times we can begin to recover what he was thinking about and wrestling with” (2015, pp. 15–16).
Shapiro clusters plays together, challenging simple generic clusterings, teases out their themes and preoccupations, and then maps those onto (the little we know about) Shakespeare’s lived experience or (the considerable amount we know about) the world in which he worked. Grouping plays chronologically rather than generically allows us to see the connections between Henry V and
plays like Julius Caesar or As You Like It, written at much the same time, and with which it shares a different set of preoccupations. Shakespeare himself seems to have taken for granted that ‘the purpose of playing’ was to show, as Hamlet put it, “the very age and body of the time his form and pressure” (3.2.20–24). To see how Shakespeare’s plays managed to do so depends upon knowing when each one was written.
(Shapiro 2005b, p. 10)
And that’s both the virtue of and the faultline in Shapiro’s approach. We simply do not know “when each one was written.” Was 1606 even “the year of Lear”? In the vast majority of cases, it remains unclear when, precisely, Shakespeare wrote individual plays or when a play was first performed. And the challenges don’t end there. It may be hard to date the plays with any precision, but what precisely are we dating? What do we mean by, say, Hamlet?2 Some editors will prioritize the date of a first performance of a play. Others will seek to work out when Shakespeare actually put pen to paper. In fact, there are at least three separate significant dates for any Shakespeare play. The moment when he completed the manuscript (although the idea of completion is misleading, since playbooks were constantly adapted); the play’s first performance (again, performance can and did take many forms); and the first printing. With Hamlet, as Thompson and Taylor (2006, p. 44) point out, we are dealing with not one printed text but three, each of which might have had different performance histories then, and certainly have different performance histories now. There’s more: “behind the printed text there may be more than one ‘completed’ manuscript.” And still more: “it is generally held that there was an earlier Hamlet play, the so-called Ur-Hamlet, either by Shakespeare or by someone else, with its own necessarily different set of dates, and this hypothetical lost play continues to complicate the issue of the date of Shakespeare’s play and indeed the issue of its sources.” And that’s all before we even start factoring in collaboration with other playwrights.
One way out of the textual dating mire is to ask more general questions. Why did this particular moment in our history produce a Shakespeare? How did the commercial theater produce plays of such extraordinary linguistic and emotional complexity? These are the questions asked, and answered brilliantly, by Bart van Es (2013). Shakespeare is special, in part, because of the unparalleled working conditions that he enjoyed, because he worked so well “in company,” and because that “company” was exceptional. Shakespeare is born into the right time, and the right place, for his particular talents to flourish. Other answers to similar questions appeal to the “richness of contemporary language” in Shakespeare’s time, or “the rhetorical treatises of the grammar school curriculum,” both of which both contributed to Shakespeare’s ability to capture “spoken cadences,” his “semantic attentiveness” (Smith 2012, p. 239).
Right time, right place takes us, however, only so far. Why did this moment produce only one William Shakespeare? Maybe we just need to go straight for the notion of “genius.” Jonathan Bate thinks so, thus his The Genius of Shakespeare (1997). For Stephen Greenblatt (writing in the same period) it is Shakespeare’s genius itself that has created a problem for biographers: “[S]o absolute is Shakespeare’s achievement that he has himself come to seem like great creating nature: the common bond of humankind, the principle of hope, the symbol of the imagination’s power to transcend time-bound beliefs and assumptions, peculiar historical circumstances, and specific artistic conventions” (Greenblatt 2000, p. 1). His very ability means that he floats somewhere above material history, somehow ineffable. A less direct route to the same destination is taken by Dutton. “There is, moreover, nothing that we know, suspect or have made up about Shakespeare’s early years that really helps us to explain the achievement of the plays and the poems” (Dutton 2016, p. 5). Once again, the biographical turn fails. It will not – perhaps cannot – explain “genius” and, more specifically, it cannot explain this genius: The Bard.
For some, this failure is a blessing in disguise. As Charles Dickens put it, the “life of Shakespeare is a fine mystery and I tremble every day lest something should turn up” (quoted in Garber 2004, p. 21). What if something turned up and compromised our idea of genius, made the man ordinary, of his time, and not an empty vessel into which we can pour our own vision of the great artist?
There are other reasons not to delve too deeply. What happens if the man we find is not merely ordinary, but unpleasant, even hateful? For many years, a convenient biographical syllogism (here unpacked by Emma Smith with exemplary brevity) kept this kind of thing at bay. “1. Prospero is a good guy. 2. Shakespeare is a good guy. 3. Therefore Prospero is Shakespeare.” But the same syllogism is far more problematic if Prospero is viewed as “irascible, tyrannical, subjecting Caliban to slavery,” or “a distinctly unlikeable, manipulative control freak.” As Smith puts it: “if this Prospero is Shakespeare, we wouldn’t much like Shakespeare” (2019, pp. 312–317). When it comes to his portrayal of women, the novelist Gayl Jones (2000, p. 103) has her character Joan say what a lot of us are thinking: Shakespeare “knows what a man wants, and what a man thinks a woman wants, even the best of women. He’s good at portraying bitches, but even they’re a man’s idea of a bitch. You know, even Shakespeare’s sweet bitches are still a man’s idea of a sweet bitch.”
The reluctance, even now, to countenance an unlikeable Shakespeare informs or suppresses the debate over (Christian, white, male) Shakespeare’s representation of Jewish people, of people of color, of women. Far better to duck a discussion of the writer’s opinions entirely rather than to consider his potential anti-Semitism, racism, or misogyny. Even the superbly clear-sighted Marjorie Garber squirms away. Acknowledging that Shylock would have been portrayed as a “comic butt” (2004, p. 4), that the actors would use the “standard signs of Jewishness on the Elizabethan stage” for laughs, she insists this tells us nothing about the man who created Shylock. For Garber, Shakespeare as a writer (and as a man?) is committed to balance and dialogue. Othello may have a “particularity as a black man and a Moor,” but this is balanced against “a certain desire to see him as a figure of universal humanity” (Garber 2004, p. 6). That “certain desire” is presumably that of the playwright, a man who believes in balance, in a universal humanity – even for a black man and a Moor.
Garber (2004, p. 7) insists that because the plays work “contrapuntally” it is impossible to say “Shakespeare said …” or “Shakespeare believed …” These are, however, two different impossibilities. Yes, we cannot say “Shakespeare said” because we have no documents, no utterances from the man, other than his literary texts. What of “Shakespeare believed”? Surely Garber’s Shakespeare, so wedded to “contrapuntal” drama, so careful to embed dialogue and balance into his plays, might just have believed in these qualities or virtues. Many of those who admire his work seem to accept this almost as a foundational fact. For many