Shakespeare: A Life

by Park Honan

  At least two nineteenth-century writers, however, are still useful on Shakespeare's life and locales. The antiquarian Robert Bell Wheler History and Antiquities of Stratford-upon-Avon ( 1806), which he reissued abridged but with new data as his A Guide. . . ( 1814), as well as

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  Wheler's thirty-four volumes of MSS now at Stratford's Records Office, have pertinent details. More than an antiquarian, J. O. HalliwellPhillipps ( 1820-89) remains the most productive Shakespeare scholar and biographer so far. His 559 printed works, not all of them on the dramatist, are described in Marvin Spevack useful James Orchard Halliwell-Phillipps: A Classified Bibliography ( 1997). Halliwell also left a sea of scrapbooks, ledgers, letters, and other MSS. Still indispensable is the final version of his Outlines of the Life of Shakespeare, issued in expanding editions from 1881 to 1887 and offering, in its vast, crammed appendices, not only some Shakespeare-related documents printed entire, but a description of nearly every contemporary reference to the playwright's father. Halliwell's boxes of MSS and 120 scrapbooks at the Folger, and some of his numerous MSS at Edinburgh University Library, have useful notes on Shakespeare's career, the actors, about thirty-two towns visited by the troupes, play-performances, other shows (including funerals), as well as on plague, harvests, food stocks, prices, and even the weather in the 1590s.

  Two late Victorian works anticipate later developments. Edward Dowden's sensitive Shakspere: A Critical Study of his Mind and Art ( 1875) in part looks into the plays for the writer's 'personality' and 'the growth of his intellect and character', but, oddly, neglects the theatre itself. A major biography, Sidney Lee A Life of William Shakespeare ( 1898), issued in revised versions until 1925, concerns the plays as well as the life; I find the book full, specific, and readable. Yet its commentary is literal or philistine in quality, and, worse, Lee offers suppositions as facts. Guesses become truths. He claims for example that the poet collaborated with Marlowe, and factually errs in his comments on dramas, taxes, and the poet's income. With simpler matters, as in a chapter entitled 'Survivors and Descendants' (in its full 1925 version) Lee is useful, but his work is mainly as badly dated as Joseph Quincy Adams's bland but not eccentric Life of William Shakespeare ( 1923).

  Twentieth-century biographers have benefited from the work of their predecessors, and also from a tradition in criticism which has enlisted leading writers in every age since the poet's death. One thinks of remarks upon Shakespeare by Ben Jonson and Milton who were alive in his time, or by Dryden, Pope, Dr Johnson, and Boswell, or in

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  the Romantic age by Wordsworth, Coleridge, Landor, Lamb, De Quincey, Hazlitt, and Keats, or among the Victorians (to name only a few) by Carlyle, Arnold, and Swinburne, by Americans such as Emerson and Hawthorne, or in the twentieth century by Lytton Strachey, T. S. Eliot or, later, Ted Hughes, or in the Irish Renaissance by Shaw, Joyce, Wilde, and Yeats, or by Europeans such as Goethe, Schlegel, Freud, Strindberg, or François Guizot and Victor Hugo. The quality of such diverse commentary has helped to ensure a cultural centrality, and this and the enormous prestige of the dramas have whetted interest in the Stratford man. Victorians displayed biographical hunger, too, but the twentieth century's sheer curiosity about Shakespeare has been incessant and all-permitting. The way has been open for 'pop' lives, jeux d'esprit or nutty books about Dark Ladies, or Bacon's or the Earl of Oxford's supposed authorship of the plays, as well as for lightly researched academic works with standard, predictable sections of drama criticism, and for fresher biographies, many specialized studies, works that oppose myths about Shakespeare the man, and for some astute, brilliantly informed syntheses or explorations by writers such as Chambers, Eccles, and Schoenbaurn.

  The twentieth century opened with three 'vintage' decades for background studies. Charles I. Elton Shakespeare: His Family and Friends ( 1904.) is at least apt and delicate on Stratford's common fields, wider landscape, and the local terms for the countryside used by the poet. Although there are useful later appraisals of the evidence, C. W. Wallace's "New Shakespeare Discoveries" (in Harper's Monthly Magazine, 120 ( 1910) ), is still suggestive on the Belott-Mountjoy case and the playwright's legal depositions, which Wallace and his wife unearthed. Joseph Gray Shakespeare's Marriage ( 1905) is sane and scrupulous on the marital documents and remains a nearly definitive study of them.

  For the spreading contexts of Shakespeare's life at Stratford, Edgar I. Fripp's books are still essential reading. Fripp's four, fairly brief, preliminary volumes, chiefly on Warwickshire persons and locales, are suggestive, although not quite free of factual error: Master Richard Quyny ( 1924), Shakespeare's Stratford ( 1928), Shakespeare's Haunts Near Stratford ( 1929), and Shakespeare Studies Biographical and Literary ( 1930). A graduate of London University, a pious Unitarian,

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  and a tireless student of town records, Edgar Fripp died in 1931. His major biographical opus, which F. C. Wellstood saw through the press, Shakespeare: Man and Artist ( 2 Vols., 1938), is sentimental, strongly affected by Fripp's moral and religious beliefs, and full of conjectures (not infrequently persuasive, yet often preceded by 'we may believe . . .' when evidence is lacking); but no one has rivalled Fripp's knowledge of Renaissance Stratford; and the latter work has more factual detail on the poet's local milieu than any other biography. Of basic use, too, for formal records of the town and its council in Shakespeare's time (and just before) are the Minutes and Accounts of the Corporation of Stratford-upon-Avon and Other Records, Vols. i-iv ( 1921-30), edited by Richard Savage and E. I. Fripp. These transcribe local records for the years 1553-92; a fifth volume of the Minutes, covering the years 1593-8, has been edited by Levi Fox ( 1990). Other untranscribed MS material on the town, its persons, decrees, landholdings, or other aspects of local history are at Stratford's Records Office. Mark Eccles Shakespeare in Warwickshire does not replace Fripp's studies, but often silently corrects them; Eccles reports on a new Gilbert Shakespeare document and other details, and, in a spare style, gives a dense, accurate assembly of facts relating to the poet, his family, and acquaintances. One of Eccles's stated aims (an aim which few in the tradition since Fripp have taken to heart) was to focus upon the poet's 'friends and associates', 'because knowledge of their lives may some day lead to more knowledge of Shakespeare'.

  As both Fripp and Eccles illuminate Stratford, so E. K. Chambers ( 1886-1954) formidably illuminates the theatre in documentary detail up to the year 1616 in The Elizabethan Stage ( 4 vols., 1923). Though by no means superseded in every feature, Chambers Stage has been valuably supplemented by three works of Andrew Gurr, which concern the actors' working conditions, the nature of audiences they tried to please, and the history of the companies to which the actors belonged: The Shakespearean Stage 1574-1642 ( 1980; 3rd edn., 1992), Playgoing in Shakespeare's London ( 1987; 2nd edn., 1996), and The Shakespearian Playing Companies ( 1996). Modern comment on the Tudor and Jacobean stage is vast, but M. C. Bradbrook The Rise of the Common Player ( 1962) and G. E. Bentley The Profession ofDramatist in Shakespeare's Time, 1590-1642

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  Dramatist in Shakespeare's Time, 1590-1642 ( 1971) and The Profession of Player in Shakespeare's Time, 1590-1642 ( 1984) are good introductions to conditions the poet knew; the last two works, with minor corrections, also appear in one volume ( 1986). A special aspect of his milieu and work is the topic of Kenneth Muir Shakespeare as Collaborator ( 1960). Among its other features, Richard Dutton William Shakespeare: A Literary Life ( 1989) has fresh remarks on theatre censorship, and Peter Thomson Shakespeare's Professional Career ( 1992) offers a chronological and useful, if somewhat distanced, view of the poet's working life and his company's problems.

  A scholar cast in the heroic mould of Halliwell, E. K. Chambers, while holding administrative posts on London's Board of Education, had written The Mediaeval Stage (2 Vols., 1903), then taken twenty years for The Elizabethan Stage before writing his authoritative William Shakespeare: A Study of Facts and Problems (2 vols., 1930). That
this text is still indispensable, despite some faults, is proof of Chambers's quality of mind; the work has a fractured form and a narrative of about eightyeight pages. (Its index is poor, and a new double Index which Beatrice White published separately for this work and for The Elizabethan Stage in 1934 is disappointingly incomplete.) Much of volume i of the Facts and Problems in its concern with textual matters is obsolete, but volume ii of the Facts offers, among other features, precise, succinct entries on the 'Records' of Shakespeare's life, 'Contemporary Allusions' to the man or to his work, and 'The Shakespeare-Mythos', or a listing of hearsay or legends about him from c. 1625 to 1862,

  Equally important in documentary studies has been Samuel Schoenbaum ( 1927-96), a gifted scholar who taught at midwestern and east-coast universities in the US and served as a trustee of the Folger Library; he takes up the 'Mythos'in William Shakespeare: A Documentary Life ( 1975). With fewer photo-illustrations of MSS but with added data, this appears as A Compact Documentary Life ( 1977; rev. edn., 1987), and remains useful for its astute narrative treatment of the major Shakespeare documents. Especially thin on Stratford and on the theatre, it has questionable remarks (as every study of the life has); for example, it states as a fact that Shakespeare 'chafed at the social inferiority of actors' in the Sonnets; or describes Anne Hathaway at 26

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  as 'long in the tooth' for marriage, though women in English towns (to cite a mean based on parish records) were often about 26 or 27 when they married; or the book overlooks the fact that Hathaways had settled within a few streets of Shakespeare; or wrongly gives Thomas Brend a title, endorses myths about John Hall and about the Davenants, or includes fiction about the 'Widow Burbage'looking on an event 'approvingly'. Yet its factual lapses are minor, and one adjusts to a format which leaves little scope for actors' lives, or a poet's development. Schoenbaum did not live to write the full-scale biography he intended, but in Shakespeare's Lives ( 1970; rev. edn., 1991), he offered an acidly amused and valuable history of biographical works on Shakespeare (to the early chapters of which the present sketch is indebted). Under 'Pop Biography', shallow works are listed along with M. M. Reese's more careful Shakespeare: His World and His Work ( 1953), but Schoenbaum is typically fair with A. L. Rowse William Shakespeare ('solid middle brow') and other texts. Shakespeare's Lives shows each age fashioning a 'Shakespeare' to suit its needs and values. Dispensing with narrative, Schoenbaum William Shakespeare: Records and Images ( 1981) takes up topics such as 'New Place', 'The BelottMountjoy Suit, 1612', or the 'Shakespeare Portraits' in separate, detailed, and well-informed sections.

  Several writers bring years of experience, often of a high order, implicitly to bear in critical biographies which do not feature new archival 'finds', but judge the life mainly through comment on the æuvre. Books of this kind include M. C. Bradbrook Shakespeare: The Poet in his World ( 1978), and Philip Edwards Shakespeare: A Writer's Progress ( 1986), which supplements Edwards's unusual insights into the Sonnets and their writer in Shakespeare and the Confines of Art ( 1968). The recollections of an actor influence Robert Speaight's posthumously published and casually edited Shakespeare: The Man and his Achievement ( 1977). Stanley Wells's work as a playreviewer, editor, and scholar, and his sense of the ambiguities within the subject, and of those within the beholder, lie behind his Shakespeare: A Dramatic Life ( 1994), reprinted with an added chapter as Shakespeare: The Poet and his Plays ( 1997).

  Late in the twentieth century, attitudes to biography and history

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  changed rapidly. Indirectly the ideas of the Annales school of historians in France, as well as works by America's new historicist critics and Britain's cultural materialists, among others, in effect expanded the territory of Renaissance studies. The 'documentary fact' seemed misleading without the social context which was a part of the fact to begin with; it could be argued, then, that Shakespeare's biographers had neglected Tudor and Jacobean society, interpreted documents in a near-vacuum, and neglected the poet's intelligence by explaining him as a 'miracle'. There appeared to be more to take in than formerly, in new editions of the plays (With new dates for them), in fresh and searching performances, or in historical and critical works which impinge on existing knowledge of the life. Bold reappraisals were in order. David Bevington's Tudor Drama and Politics. A Critical Approach to Topical Meaning ( 1968) illuminates Shakespeare's response to politics and society in his day. A radical review of Tudor and Jacobean comments upon him is the topic of E. A. J. Honigmann Shakespeare's Impact on his Contemporaries ( 1982): 'crucial passages from the records have been misread', states the preface, 'or have been ignored because they clashed with preconceived ideas'. A former pupil of Peter Alexander of Glasgow University, who argued that the dramatist's playwriting began early, Honigmann takes up an 'early start' theory of his own with new, inconclusive evidence of a sojourn among Hoghtons and Heskeths in Lancashire , in Shakespeare: The 'Lost years' ( 1985; 2nd edn., 1998). In élan and exactness, Honigmann's books remind one of J. S. Smart's earlier biographical studies in Shakespeare: Truth and Tradition ( 1928; 1966). C. L. Barber and Richard Wheeler The Whole Journey: Shakespeare's Power of Development ( 1986) and Emrys Jones The Origins of Shakespeare ( 1977) enhance one's understanding of a highly intelligent, psychologically unique poet and his progress. Anne Barton Shakespeare and the Idea of the Play ( 1962), and M. A. Skura Shakespeare the Actor and the Purposes of Playing ( 1993) bear on his attitudes to drama and to acting; and, as we apparently become more realistic, it would seem that we can no longer view social facts only as a 'matrix' or 'background' for a biography. A study linking the Shakespeare documents, while filling in with minimal 'background', may not be close enough to the times to explain its own evidence, let alone account for an individual.

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  Biographies such as Russell Fraser Young Shakespeare ( 1988) and Shakespeare: The Later Years ( 1992), and Dennis Kay Shakespeare: His Life, Work, and Era ( 1992) hardly advance our knowledge of contexts, but involve respectable tours through the plays. Jean-Marie and Angela Maguin William Shakespeare ( 1996) -- 821 pages in French -lucidly gives theatrical orientation but is slight on the life. Ian Wilson Shakespeare: The Evidence ( 1993) presses the evidence rather too hard to depict the poet as a crypto-Catholic; but a similar view had been argued in Peter Milward intelligent Shakespeare's Religious Background ( 1973). Jonathan Bate The Genius of Shakespeare ( 1997) assesses the origins of the poet's modern reputation with verve and point while asking the reader to imagine, without proof, that Southampton was the Young Man of the Sonnets, and John Florio's wife was the Dark Lady.

  Though books compete, Shakespeare biography might be seen as a flawed, co-operative project in which useful works take a modest place in a large tradition starting in 1709 with Rowe's forty pages, and, perhaps, as a project with a fair future. The project values or discards what is offered, without needing to crown or exalt any contributor. Our collective picture of the poet's life is surely best when many people test it, doubt it, discuss it, or contribute to it, and when we are not under the illusion that it is to be finished.

  The main repositories of MSS relating to Shakespeare's times are at the Folger, the Huntington, and the Newberry libraries (respectively, in Washington, DC, San Marino, California, and Chicago); at the Public Record Office and the British Library in London, and at the Birthplace Trust Records Office in Stratford. Other county record offices begin to yield new kinds of discoveries. In a sense, the study of Shakespeare in his age is only beginning; relevant material comes to light year by year, or often month by month, and the study of his mind and life is bound to last as long as he is valued.

  Three brief guides to MS records of the life, or to what the first Folio tells us, are unusually rewarding. These are: Peter W. M. Blayney The First Folio of Shakespeare ( 1991); David Thomas Shakespeare in the Public Records ( 1985) and Robert Bearman Shakespeare in the Stratford Records ( 1994).

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  NOTES

  Unl
ess otherwise stated, the place of publication is London. In addition to short play-titles, the following abbreviations are used in the notes:

  Bearman Robert Bearman, Shakespeare in the Stratfbrd Records

  ( Stratford-upon-Avon, 1994)

  Diary Henslowe's Diary, ed. R. A. Foakes and R. T. Rickert ( Cam-

  bridge, 1961)

  EKC, Facts E. K. Chambers, William Shakespeare: A Study of Facts and

  Problems, 2 vols. ( Oxford, 1930)

  EKC, Stage E. K. Chambers, The Elizabethan Stage, 4 vols. ( Oxford, 1923)

  Gurr, Companies Andrew Gurr, The Shakespearian Playing Companies ( Oxford,

  1996)

  Lost Years E. J. Honigmann A, Shakespeare: The 'Lost Years' ( Manches-

  ter, 1985)

  M∧A Minutes and Accounts of the Corporation of Stratford-upon-

  Avon and Other Records 1333-1620 vols. i-iv, 1553-1592, ed.

  Richard Savage and Edgar I. Fripp ( Oxford, 1921-30); vol. v,

  1593-1598, ed. Levi Fox (Hertford, 1990)

  ME Mark Eccles, Shakespeare in Warwickshire ( Madison, Wis.,

  paperback edn., 1963)

  MS BL Manuscripts in the British Library, London

  MS Bodleian Manuscripts in the Bodleian Library, Oxford

  MS Edinburgh Manuscripts in the library of the University of Edinburgh

  MS Folger Manuscripts in the Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington,

  DC

  MS Lancs. Manuscripts in the Lancashire Record Office, Preston

  MS Oxford Manuscripts in the Oxford City Archives

  MS SBTRO Council-books, wills, and other manuscript records at the