Contested Will

by James Shapiro

  Malone, who had trained as a lawyer, was, unsurprisingly, convinced that Shakespeare too had legal training, and ‘not merely such as might be acquired by the casual observation of even his all-comprehending mind’. Malone even suspected that Shakespeare ‘was employed, while he yet remained at Stratford, in the office of some country attorney’. The evidence? Not anecdotal reports, which claimed that he had been a butcher or a schoolteacher, but rather internal evidence from the plays, most notably Hamlet. Malone was uncomfortable enough with this line of argument to add that Shakespeare ‘may be proved to have been equally conversant with the terms of divinity or physic’. If others could come along and show that Shakespeare knew as much about religion or medicine as he did about the law, Malone concluded, then ‘what has been stated will certainly not be entitled to any weight’.

  Underlying his reasoning here was the presumption that Shakespeare could only write about what he had felt or done rather than heard about, read about, borrowed from other writers or imagined. The floodgates were now open and others would soon urge, based on their own slanted reading of the plays, that Shakespeare must have been a mariner, a soldier, a courtier, a countess and so on. By assuming that Shakespeare had to have experienced something to write about it with such accuracy and force, Malone also, unwittingly, allowed for the opposite to be true: expertise in the self-revealing works that the scant biographical record couldn’t support – his knowledge of falconry for example, or of seamanship, foreign lands or the ways that the ruling class behaved – should disqualify Shakespeare as the author of the plays.

  Yet another precondition for challenging Shakespeare’s authorship had now been established, one that would be trotted out more often than all the others combined. From now on, consensus would be impossible, and writing the life of the author of Shakespeare’s works a game that anyone with enough ingenuity and conviction could play. When desire outpaced what scholars could turn up, there remained only a few ways forward: forgery, reliance on anecdote, or turning to the works for fresh evidence about the author’s life. The impulse to interpret the plays and poems as autobiographical was a direct result of the failure to recover enough facts to allow anyone to write a satisfying cradle-to-grave life of Shakespeare.

  Malone’s commentary on ‘Sonnet 93’ was a defining moment in the history not only of Shakespeare studies but also of literary biography in general. What has emerged in our own time as a dominant form of life writing can trace its lineage back to this extended footnote. While the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries had seen a handful of literary biographies, the genre didn’t come into its own until the eighteenth century, spurred by an intense interest in life writing, swept along not only by a torrent of biographies and memoirs, but also by great collaborative efforts such as the multi-volume Biographia Britannica of 1747–66. The Biographia Britannica marked a conceptual leap forward, recognising that accurate biographies could act as a check on self-interested memoirs:

  the work before us becomes both a supplement and a key, not only to our general histories, but to particular memoirs, so that by comparing the characters of great men, as drawn by particular pens, with their articles in this Biographical Dictionary, we see how far they are consistent with, or repugnant to, truth.

  William Oldys was one of the principal contributors to the Biographia Britannica. He was possessed of a prodigious memory, an obsession with uncovering biographical facts and a familiarity with the many archives where he might find them. He’d sort his notes into separate parchment bags, one for each biographical subject. His patience and tenacity were rewarded by many biographical discoveries, and he went on to write the lives of over a score of major figures, including William Caxton, Michael Drayton, Richard Hakluyt, Edward Alleyn and Aphra Behn. Oldys was content with just the facts and unearthed a great many of them. But facts alone were not enough to breathe life into his subjects. Writers like James Boswell (in his Life of Johnson) and Dr Johnson himself, who relied heavily on the Biographia Britannica (which covered a majority of the poets treated in his four-volume Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets), understood this, and went on to redefine how lives were written and read.

  Yet even Dr Johnson drew the line at reading individual poems or plays autobiographically. Though deeply interested in writers’ lives, he understood well enough that authorial and personal identity were not one and the same, and he refused to collapse the two. In fact, he went out of his way to ridicule those who did so, as he makes clear in his life of James Thomson. Johnson had read that an earlier Thomson biographer (probably Patrick Murdoch) had carelessly ‘remarked, that an author’s life is best read in the works’ – and pointed out the folly of such a claim. He recalled how the author Richard Savage (friend to both Thomson and Johnson himself) had once told him ‘how he heard a lady remarking that she could gather from [Thomson’s] works three parts of his character, that he was a great Lover, a great Swimmer, and rigorously abstinent’. Savage set the record straight: the lady’s reading of The Seasons as autobiographical was wrong on all three counts – Thomson was not the kind of devoted lover she imagined, was ‘never in cold water in his life’, and ‘indulges himself in all the luxury that comes within his reach’. So much for reading backwards from the works.

  Johnson was even wary of using letters as evidence, mocking the notion that ‘nothing is inverted, nothing distorted’ in writers’ correspondence, and he made little use of them in his biographies. He was no less distrustful of so-called autobiographical poetry, sidestepping the confessional verse of Milton, Otway, Swift and Pope, and saying in reference to the latter that ‘Poets do not always express their own thoughts’, and notes, as an example of this, that for all Pope’s ‘labour in the praise of music’, he was ‘ignorant of its principles, and insensible of its effects’.

  With Malone’s decision to parse the plays for evidence of what an author thought or felt, literary biography had crossed a Rubicon. Fictional works had become a legitimate source for biographies, and Shakespeare’s plays and poems crucial to establishing this new approach. In 1790 Malone had announced that his long-promised life of Shakespeare was well along; he had already ‘obtained at very different times’ a great deal of material, though ‘it is necessarily dispersed’. At ‘some future time’, though, he would ‘weave the whole into one uniform and connected narrative’. He still had faith that Shakespeare’s commonplace book or personal correspondence would surface, which would enable him to flesh out the many lost years and mysteries of the life. As late as 1807, five years before his death, Malone was still reassuring friends that only a third of the Life ‘remained to be written’, that ‘all the materials for it are ready’, and that he even had £300 worth of paper ‘lying ready at the printing house’, to save time when it was ready to be published. It had taken Malone fewer than ninety days to write and publish a four-hundred-page book about the Ireland forgeries. Yet after decades of labour, his Life of Shakespeare remained unfinished, a puzzle still lacking most of its largest pieces. Even the works failed to supply the missing evidence. When James Boswell the Younger was given the unenviable task of gathering the disjointed remains and moulding them into a Life after Malone’s death, he saw soon enough that he was faced not with some tidying up of loose ends but with a ‘chasm’.

  *

  Those who write about the history of Shakespeare studies cast Malone as an early hero and Ireland as one of the first villains of the story. I’ve been trained to think this way too and it’s difficult getting beyond it. It’s easy to see why: Malone, much like the scholars who tell his story, spent much of his life surrounded by old books and manuscripts, strained his vision poring over documents in archives, and struggled to complete his life work on Shakespeare. Ireland cheated, took a short-cut. But in truth, they were in pursuit of the same goal – which may account for the viciousness of Malone’s attack on his young rival. Both were committed to rewriting Shakespeare’s life; one forged documents, the other forged connections between the li
fe and the works. In retrospect, the damage done by Malone was far greater and longer-lasting. He was the first Shakespearean to believe that his hard-earned expertise gave him the right, which he and many scholars have since tried to deny to others, to search Shakespeare’s plays for clues to his personal life. By the time that Boswell brought out an updated edition of Malone’s Shakespeare’s Plays and Poems in 1821, it was already ‘generally admitted that the poet speaks in his own person’ in the Sonnets.

  Malone had failed in his decades-long quest because every thread leading directly back to Shakespeare’s interior life had been severed. Most likely each had been cut for well over a century. Sufficient materials for a comprehensive biography were no longer available. One possibility is that Shakespeare went out of his way to ensure that posterity would find a cold trail. In any case, expectations about what evidence might reasonably have survived were wildly inflated. There may well have been bundles of letters, theatrical documents and even a commonplace book or two that outlived Shakespeare, but if so they have never been found and the extinction of the family line by the end of the seventeenth century and the sale and subsequent demolition of Shakespeare’s home, New Place, helped ensure their disappearance.

  Then again, if one goes through Francis Meres’s list of the best English dramatists in 1598 one quickly discovers that commonplace books and early drafts of published plays don’t survive for any of these popular Elizabethan playwrights. The memorials best befitting Shakespeare’s stature and accomplishments were in fact created and preserved by those who honoured his legacy: a monument and a gravestone in Stratford’s church; and, seven years after his death, a lavish collection of his plays, prefaced by commendatory verses and his portrait. At the time, no English playwright had ever been posthumously honoured with such a collection. Clearly, this was the way his fellow players thought fitting, and sufficient, to remember Shakespeare.

  Shakespeare had no Boswell – but neither did Marlowe, Jonson, Webster or any other contemporary dramatist. While there had been ‘Lives’, there were not as yet full-length literary biographies. For that reason it’s especially unfortunate that one of the earliest efforts in this genre – The Lives of the Poets, Foreign and Modern – doesn’t survive. It was written (or at least contemplated) by Shakespeare’s fellow dramatist Thomas Heywood, and had been mentioned in 1614 and then again in 1635; but it was either left incomplete, lost or never published.

  Assuredly, there had to have been witnesses to Shakespeare’s daily life, including boy actors born before the turn of the century who may have lived until the 1670s or 1680s, and who had acted for the King’s Men and worked with Shakespeare before he retired from the company around 1614. Immediate family members, had they been interviewed, might also have cast considerable light on his personality. Shakespeare’s sister Joan lived until 1646. His elder daughter Susanna died in 1649 and his younger one, Judith, was still alive in 1662; a local vicar with an interest in Shakespeare made a note to seek her out and ask her about her father, but she died before this conversation could take place. Nobody thought to seek out Shakespeare’s granddaughter Elizabeth, who was eight years old when Shakespeare died; she was the only one of his four grandchildren to live past the age of twenty-one or wed, but she bore no children in her two marriages and the family line ended with her death in 1670.

  There were family friends and in-laws, too, who might have been questioned, including Thomas Combe, to whom Shakespeare bequeathed his sword and who lived until 1657. Stratford neighbour Richard Quiney was alive until 1656. His son, Shakespeare’s son-in-law Thomas Quiney, who married Judith, lived until 1663. Both men knew him well. So did Shakespeare’s brother-in-law Thomas Hathaway, who could have been questioned until the mid-1650s. Shakespeare’s nephew William, his namesake, became a professional actor in London and may have been privy to wonderful theatrical anecdotes; he died in 1639.

  One of the most tantalising lost connections to Shakespeare’s personal life was through his son-in-law John Hall, who married Susanna in 1607. The two men seem to have been close: Hall had travelled with Shakespeare to London and had been appointed by him as co-executor of his will. Hall was a prominent physician in Stratford who kept notes in abbreviated Latin on those he treated. After Hall’s death, Dr James Cooke sought out his widow about Hall’s books, and Susanna was willing to sell him some (he called on her at New Place, which she and her husband had inherited). Cooke’s interests were medical rather than literary, so he apparently did not ask Susanna about her father or his books – and he subsequently published a translation of one of Hall’s medical notebooks. Among the patients Hall treated was Shakespeare’s fellow playwright, the Warwickshire native Michael Drayton. Unfortunately, Hall’s other notebook was lost before its contents could be transcribed or printed and unless it turns up some day we will never know whether it contained any information about his father-in-law.

  There’s one more story about Hall and Shakespeare, less well known than it ought to be, though James Orchard Halliwell-Phillipps reported it over a century ago. On 22 June 1616, two months after his father-in-law died, John Hall paid a visit to the registry of the Archbishop of Canterbury, located near St Paul’s in London, to prove Shakespeare’s will. Among the documents he produced was ‘an inventory of the testator’s household effects’ – that is to say, a list of Shakespeare’s possessions. Whatever valuable books, manuscripts or letters Shakespeare owned and was bequeathing to his heirs would have been listed in this inventory rather than in the will itself (which explains, as Jonathan Bate has observed, why the surviving wills of such Elizabethan notables as the leading theologian Richard Hooker and the poet Samuel Daniel fail, like Shakespeare’s, to list any books at all). Had the inventory that John Hall brought with him to London survived – or if by some miracle it ever surfaces – it would finally silence those who, misunderstanding the conventions of Elizabethan wills and inventories, continue to insist that Shakespeare of Stratford didn’t own any books and was probably illiterate.

  By the time those in search of Shakespeare finally made the pilgrimage to Stratford in the mid-seventeenth century, led by Thomas Betterton, John Aubrey and Thomas Fuller, all that remained were secondhand anecdotes. We’ve learned from these that Shakespeare had apprenticed as a butcher. That he drank heavily. That he poached deer. That he didn’t enjoy carousing and wasn’t a company keeper. That he died of a fever after a bout of drinking with Ben Jonson and Michael Drayton. That he died a Catholic.

  The eighteenth-century editor Edward Capell was the first to recognise that a biography about Shakespeare’s private life – rather than his public and professional one – was a lost cause: ‘those who alone had it in their power’ to record what Shakespeare was like had failed to do so. Further efforts to unravel the mystery of Shakespeare were pointless: ‘our enquiries about them now must prove vain’, and ‘the occurrences of this most interesting life (we mean, the private ones) are irrevocably lost to us’. The search may have been over for Capell, but for others it was just beginning.

  ‘With This Key’

  In his own day, and for over a century and a half after his death, nobody treated Shakespeare’s works as autobiographical. But after Malone did so a mad dash was on, and by the 1830s it seemed like nearly everyone was busy searching for clues to Shakespeare’s life in the works. The Sonnets, long ignored, suddenly became popular. Unlike Shakespeare’s other major poems – Venus and Adonis and Lucrece – the Sonnets had never been reissued during Shakespeare’s lifetime, and there are surprisingly few allusions to them following their publication in 1609. In 1640 they were finally reprinted by John Benson, who cropped the prefatory material, changed the gender of pronouns where he saw fit, invented titles and freely rearranged and combined 146 of the 154 sonnets into seventy-two or so longer poems, then mingled Shakespeare’s poems with those of others falsely attributed to him in the 1612 edition of The Passionate Pilgrim. But even these modifications failed to generate much interest in this outdated ge
nre, and while Shakespeare’s plays went through four Folios in the course of the seventeenth century, the Sonnets remained largely inaccessible to new generations of readers. When available, it was almost exclusively in Benson’s version – a situation that remained unchanged until Malone published them in his Supplement as they had first appeared. If Steevens thought that he could squelch Malone’s autobiographical approach by excluding the Sonnets from his next Shakespeare edition in 1793, he was wrong. Still, he tried his best, declaring ‘the strongest act of Parliament that could be framed, would fail to compel readers into their service’. ‘Had Shakespeare produced no other works than these,’ Steevens added, ‘his name would have reached us with as little celebrity as time has conferred on that of Thomas Watson, an older and much more elegant sonneteer.’

  Shakespeare and Anne Hathaway, unknown artist, c.1860.

  German critics were among the first to seize on the potential of Malone’s approach. August Wilhelm von Schlegel took the English to task in his Viennese lectures of 1808 for never having ‘thought of availing themselves of [Shakespeare’s] Sonnets for tracing the circumstances and sentiments of the poet’ and for failing to recognise that they contained the ‘confessions of his youthful errors’. His equally famous brother Friedrich von Schlegel seconded and extended this view: ‘It is strange but delightful to scrutinise, in his short effusions, the character of Shakespeare.’ Heinrich Heine would confirm that the Sonnets are ‘authentic records of the circumstances of Shakespeare’s life’.