One further and potentially more consequential example will give readers a sense of the scope of the problem. From 1571 to 1575 the schoolmaster in the Stratford grammar school was Simon Hunt, who had received his B.A. from Oxford in 1568. He would thus have been William Shakespeare’s teacher from the age of seven to eleven. Around July 1575, Simon Hunt matriculated at the University of Douai—the Catholic university in France—and became a Jesuit in 1578. This would seem to indicate that Shakespeare’s early teacher was a Catholic, a detail that is consistent with a whole pattern of experiences in his youth. But there is no hard-and-fast proof that Shakespeare attended the Stratford grammar school—the records for that period do not survive. Moreover, another Simon Hunt died in Stratford in or before 1598, and it is at least possible that this second Simon Hunt, rather than the one who became a Jesuit, was the schoolmaster. Shakespeare almost certainly attended the school—where else would he have acquired his education?—and the coincidence of the dates and the larger pattern of experiences make it highly likely that the schoolmaster from 1571 to 1575 was the Catholic Hunt. But in these details, as in so much else from Shakespeare’s life, there is no absolute certainty.
Acknowledgments
IT IS A TOKEN of the special delight Shakespeare bestows on everything that even the many debts I have incurred in writing this book give me deep pleasure to acknowledge. My remarkably gifted colleagues and students at Harvard University have been an unfailing source of intellectual stimulation and challenge, and the university’s fabled resources—above all, its celebrated libraries and their accomplished staff—have enabled me to pursue even the most arcane questions. The Mellon Foundation gave me the precious gift of time, and the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin provided the perfect setting to complete the writing of this book. I am grateful for the opportunities I had to try out my ideas at the Shakespeare Association of America, the Bath Shakespeare Festival, New York University, the Lionel Trilling Seminar at Columbia University, the Leo Lowenthal Memorial Conference, Boston College, Wellesley College, Hendrix College, the Einstein Forum, and, on multiple occasions, Marlboro College and the Marlboro Music Festival.
The idea of Will in the World originated years ago during conversations I had with Marc Norman, who was then in the early stages of writing a film script about Shakespeare’s life. The script was the germ of a celebrated movie, Shakespeare in Love, but my own project lay dormant until my wife, Ramie Targoff, gave me the sustained encouragement, intellectual and emotional, to pursue it. Crucial advice and assistance came from Jill Kneerim, and my friends Homi Bhabha, Jeffrey Knapp, Joseph Koerner, Charles Mee, and Robert Pinsky each gave me more of their time, learning, and wisdom than I can ever hope to repay. I have benefited too from the help and probing questions of many other friends, including Marcella Anderson, Leonard Barkan, Frank Bidart, Robert Brustein, Thomas Laqueur, Adam Phillips, Regula Rapp, Moshe Safdie, James Shapiro, Debora Shuger, and the late Bernard Williams. Beatrice Kitzinger, Emily Peterson, Kate Pilson, Holger Schott, Gustavo Secchi, and Phillip Schwyzer have been tireless and resourceful assistants. With exemplary patience and insight, my editor, Alane Mason, continued to work on the manuscript of my book through the course of her pregnancy, and, by something of a miracle, she somehow managed to finish on her due date.
My deepest and most richly pleasurable debts are closest to home: to my wife and my three sons, Josh, Aaron, and Harry. Only the youngest, by virtue of being a toddler, has been spared endless conversations about Shakespeare and has not directly contributed his ideas. But Harry, who came into the world 104 years after the birth of his namesake, my father, has taught me how breathtakingly close we are to lives that at first sight seem so far away.
Bibliographical Notes
ALL BIOGRAPHICAL STUDIES of Shakespeare necessarily build on the assiduous, sometimes obsessive archival research and speculation of many generations of scholars and writers. The long history of this enterprise is the subject of Samuel Schoenbaum’s Shakespeare’s Lives (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970) and Gary Taylor’s Reinventing Shakespeare: A Cultural History from the Restoration to the Present (New York: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1989). Schoenbaum delights in chronicling the mythmaking extravagances and absurdities of Shakespeare biography, but there is at least as much to admire as to ridicule.
I have profited greatly not only from recent research, which has painstakingly winkled out some intriguing new details about the playwright’s life and times, but also from nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century studies. These studies came under fierce attack from C. J. Sisson in 1934 in an influential essay, “The Mythical Sorrows of Shakespeare” (in Studies in Shakespeare: British Academy Lectures, ed. Peter Alexander [London: Oxford University Press, 1964], 9–32), but recent scholarship, including Marjorie Garber’s Shakespeare’s Ghost Writers: Literature as Uncanny Causality (New York: Methuen, 1987), Leah Marcus’s Puzzling Shakespeare: Local Reading and Its Discontents (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), and Richard Wilson’s Will Power: Essays on Shakespearean Authority (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1993), has reassessed their significance and usefulness. Foremost among them is J. O. Halliwell-Phillipps’s two-volume Outlines of the Life of Shakespeare, 10th ed. (London: Longmans, 1898). Also useful and suggestive are Edward Dowden, Shakspere: A Critical Study of His Mind and Art (London: Henry King, 1876); Frederick Fleay, A Chronicle History of the Life and Work of William Shakespeare, Player, Poet, and Playmaker (London: Nimmo, 1886); Sidney Lee, A Life of William Shakespeare (New York: Macmillan, 1898); George Brandes, William Shakespeare: A Critical Study (New York: Frederick Unger, 1898); Charles Elton, William Shakespeare, His Family and Friends (London: John Murray, 1904); Charlotte Stopes, Shakespeare’s Warwickshire Contemporaries (Stratford-upon-Avon: Shakespeare Head Press, 1907); and David Masson, Shakespeare Personally (London: Smith, Elder, 1914). Edgar Fripp’s two-volume Shakespeare, Man and Artist (London: Oxford University Press, 1938) is a chaotic treasure trove of valuable information, which I have repeatedly mined.
Among more recent biographies, the most thorough, informative, and steadily thoughtful is Park Honan’s Shakespeare: A Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), which I have frequently consulted. Jonathan Bate’s fine collection of essays, The Genius of Shakespeare (London: Picador, 1997), contains important biographical insights, as does Katherine Duncan-Jones’s Ungentle Shakespeare: Scenes from His Life (London: Arden Shakespeare, 2001). Among the other biographical studies upon which I have drawn are Marchette Chute’s lively Shakespeare of London (New York: Dutton, 1949); M. M. Reese’s Shakespeare: His World and His Work (London: Edward Arnold, 1953); Stanley Wells’s Shakespeare: A Dramatic Life (London: Sinclair-Stevenson, 1994); Eric Sams’s The Real Shakespeare: Retrieving the Early Years, 1564–1594 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995); I. L. Matus’s Shakespeare, In Fact (New York: Continuum, 1999); Anthony Holden’s William Shakespeare (Boston: Little, Brown, 1999); and Michael Wood’s In Search of Shakespeare (London: BBC, 2003), written to accompany a BBC television series.
Though by definition unreliable and often wildly inaccurate, some of the most searching reflections on Shakespeare’s life have come in the form of fiction: Nothing Like the Sun: A Story of Shakespeare’s Love-Life (London: Heinemann, 1964), by Anthony Burgess, who also wrote a lively straightforward biography (Shakespeare [Hammondsworth: Penguin, 1972]); Edward Bond’s play Bingo (London: Methuen, 1974); Marc Norman and Tom Stoppard’s screenplay for the film Shakespeare in Love (New York: Hyperion, 1998); and, above all, the brilliant “Scylla and Charybdis” chapter of James Joyce’s Ulysses.
At the other end of the spectrum from fiction, several important volumes make available the crucial historical documents upon which all Shakespeare biographies are based. These volumes, upon which I have drawn heavily throughout this book, include B. R. Lewis, The Shakespeare Documents: Facsimiles, Transliterations, and Commentary, 2 vols. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1940); Samuel Schoenbaum, William Shakespear
e: Records and Images (New York: Oxford University Press, 1981); David Thomas, Shakespeare in the Public Records (London: HMSO, 1985); Robert Bearman, Shakespeare in the Stratford Records (Phoenix Mill, UK: Alan Sutton, 1994); and, above all, Schoenbaum, William Shakespeare: A Documentary Life (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975; also available in a 1977 compact edition).
Equally indispensable is the scholarship of the indefatigable E. K. Chambers: the two-volume William Shakespeare: A Study of Facts and Problems (Oxford: Clarendon, 1930), rich in significant details often buried in footnotes, asides, and appendices; the two-volume Medieval Stage (London: Oxford University Press, 1903); and the monumental four-volume Elizabethan Stage (Oxford: Clarendon, 1923). Geoffrey Bullough’s eight-volume Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare (New York: Columbia University Press, 1957–75) usefully brings together almost all of the known sources of Shakespeare’s plays and thereby provides a suggestive guide to Shakespeare’s wide and restless reading.
The evidence painstakingly gathered, edited, and appraised in Schoenbaum, Chambers, and Bullough is present throughout every chapter of this book. In the bibliographical notes below, I have listed the other principal sources, both primary and secondary, upon which I have drawn. I have, wherever possible, grouped these sources together by topic, in the order in which the particular topic appears in each chapter, so that readers eager to pursue one or another aspect of Shakespeare and his age can find their way through the immense forest of critical resources.
Convenient orientation to contemporary Shakespeare scholarship can be found in two valuable collections of essays, upon which I have repeatedly drawn: A Companion to Shakespeare, ed. David Scott Kastan (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999), and New History of Early English Drama, ed. John D. Cox and David Scott Kastan (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997). Many individual essays in these volumes bear on the topics I have treated.
All quotations from Shakespeare’s works in Will in the World are from The Norton Shakespeare, ed. Stephen Greenblatt, Walter Cohen, Jean E. Howard, and Katharine Eisaman Maus (New York: W. W. Norton, 1997). (Citations to King Lear are from the conflated text version.) The Oxford edition of Shakespeare’s plays, upon which The Norton Shakespeare is based, has an extraordinarily detailed Textual Companion, ed. Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor, which I have found valuable, as I have the individual volumes of the Arden Shakespeare series.
CHAPTER 1: PRIMAL SCENES
On Shakespeare’s schooling, William Baldwin’s bulky two-volume William Shakspere’s Small Latine and Lesse Greeke (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1944) is comprehensive but dull and daunting. C. R. Thompson’s School in Tudor England (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1958) is a helpful introduction. Joel Altman’s The Tudor Play of Mind (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978) suggestively links school exercises and the writing of plays. Roger Ascham’s The Schoolmaster (1570), a key Elizabethan educational text in which the teaching of Latin plays a central role, is available in a modern edition, ed. Lawrence Ryan (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1967).
On the love of verbal display in Elizabethan culture, a classic work is Rosemond Tuve, Elizabethan and Metaphysical Imagery (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1947). On the whole scope of literary production in this period, C. S. Lewis’s brilliant and opinionated English Literature in the Sixteenth Century, Excluding Drama (Oxford: Clarendon, 1954) remains indispensable. Among the immense number of critical studies of Shakespeare’s relation to language, Frank Kermode’s Shakespeare’s Language (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2000) is an illuminating place to begin.
On the mystery plays, see V. A. Kolve, The Play Called Corpus Christi (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1966); Rosemary Woolf, The English Mystery Plays (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972); and Glynne Wickham, Early English Stages: 1300 to 1660, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 1980). Two earlier books, Willard Farnham, The Medieval Heritage of Elizabethan Tragedy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1935), and H. C. Gardiner, Mysteries’ End: An Investigation of the Last Days of the Medieval Religious Stage (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1946), remain particularly valuable. Bernard Spivack, Shakespeare and the Allegory of Evil (New York: Columbia University Press, 1958), and Robert Weimann, Shakespeare and the Popular Tradition in the Theater: Studies in the Social Dimension of Dramatic Form and Function (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978), are useful guides to the “morality” backgrounds of Shakespeare’s plays. Andrew Gurr, “The Authority of the Globe and the Fortune,” in Material London, ca. 1600, ed. Lena Cowan Orlin (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000), 250–67, is illuminating on the magistrate’s power to license plays. On seasonal rituals, see C. L. Barber, Shakespeare’s Festive Comedy: A Study of Dramatic Form and Its Relation to Social Custom (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1959), and François Laroque, Shakespeare’s Festive World: Elizabethan Seasonal Entertainment and the Professional Stage (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993).
Hostility to performances of plays, whether by schoolboys or professionals, is explored in Jonas Barish, The Antitheatrical Prejudice (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981). For a close look at the important traveling company with which Shakespeare may have been associated, see Scott McMillan and Sally-Beth MacLean, The Queen’s Men and Their Plays (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).
The principal accounts of Elizabeth’s royal progresses are found in John Nichols, ed., The Progresses and Public Processions of Queen Elizabeth, 3 vols. (London, 1823). Robert Langham’s letter describing the Kenilworth festivities is available in a modern edition by R. J. P. Kuin, Robert Langham: A Letter (Leiden: Brill, 1983).
CHAPTER 2: THE DREAM OF RESTORATION
On Shakespeare’s provincial environment, Mark Eccles, Shakespeare in Warwickshire (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1961), provides a brief, yet surprisingly rich initiation. C. L. Barber and Richard Wheeler have suggestive psychoanalytic reflections on Shakespeare’s relation to his father in The Whole Journey: Shakespeare’s Power of Development (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986) and in “Shakespeare in the Rising Middle Class,” in Shakespeare’s Personality, ed. Norman Holland, Sidney Homan, and Bernard Paris (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989). On the presence of technical vocabularies in Shakespeare, see David Crystal and Ben Crystal, Shakespeare’s Words: A Glossary and Language Companion (London: Penguin, 2002). On the pattern of loss and recovery in Shakespeare’s late plays, see Northrop Frye, A Natural Perspective: The Development of Shakespearean Comedy and Romance (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1965).
L. B. Wright’s Middle-Class Culture in Elizabethan England (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1935) is a classic, if contested, guide to Elizabethan social structures, as is Lawrence Stone’s The Crisis of the Aristocracy: 1558–1641 (London: Oxford University Press, 1986). See also Felicity Heal and Clive Holmes, The Gentry in England and Wales, 1500–1700 (Basingstoke, UK: Macmillan, 1994), and Joyce Youings, Sixteenth Century England: The Penguin Social History of Britain (London: Penguin, 1984). On yeomen, the social class from which Shakespeare descended, see Mildred Campbell, The English Yeoman under Elizabeth and the Early Stuarts (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1942). On the wool trade, see Peter J. Bowden, The Wool Trade in Tudor and Stuart England (London: Macmillan, 1962). On Stratford, see Minutes and Accounts of the Corporation of Stratford-upon-Avon and Other Records, 1553–1620, ed. Richard Savage and Edgar Fripp (Dugdale Society, 1921–30), supplemented by a volume of the same title edited by Levi Fox (Dugdale Society, 1990).
Prices and wages in Shakespeare’s time are difficult to weigh in relation to the modern world, but for an initial glimpse, see the royal proclamation governing London wages, reprinted in Ann Jennalie Cooke, The Privileged Playgoers of Shakespeare’s London: 1576–1642 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981). E. A. J. Honigmann and Susan Brock produced an edition of wills by Shakespeare and his contemporaries in the London theater,
Playhouse Wills, 1558–1642 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1993).
CHAPTER 3: THE GREAT FEAR
On the struggle between Catholics and Protestants in the sixteenth century, see Patrick Collinson, The Birthpangs of Protestant England (Houndmills, UK: Macmillan, 1988); Debora Shuger, Habits of Thought in the English Renaissance (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990); and Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England c. 1400–c. 1580 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992); all provide useful and usefully different points of orientation.
On the religion of Shakespeare and his family, there continues to be lively debate. Against the claim by Fripp, in Shakespeare, Man and Artist, that Shakespeare’s father was a Puritan, Peter Milward’s Shakespeare’s Religious Background (London: Sidgwick and Jackson, 1973) summarizes arguments for his Catholicism. That John Shakespeare was a Catholic would seem to be confirmed by his “spiritual last will and testament,” but the original is lost and its authenticity has been challenged. There are useful articles by James McManaway, “John Shakespeare’s ‘Spiritual Testament’” in Shakespeare Survey 18 (1967): 197–205, and F. W. Brownlow, “John Shakespeare’s Recusancy: New Light on an Old Document,” in Shakespeare Quarterly 40 (1989): 186–91. The case against authenticity is summarized in J. O. Halliwell-Phillips, Outlines of the Life of Shakespeare (1898), 2:399–404 and has been vigorously resumed by Robert Bearman in “John Shakespeare’s ‘Spiritual Testament’: a Reappraisal” in Shakespeare Survey 56 (2003): 184–203, but most recent scholarship has cautiously tended to confirm its authenticity.
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