Who Was Shakespeare?

A distinguished Shakespeare scholar of my acquaintance, engaged in writing a critical work on the plays, was troubled by a recurrent dream. As he sat typing in his campus office, he heard footsteps slowly approach his door. Suddenly there stood Shakespeare himself, who pierced the scholar with a merciless gaze and intoned, “Lies--all lies.” Could any other canonical authors be imagined to rise from the dead and seize the meaning of their works from the living? Would Keats or even Milton--let alone Jane Austen or George Eliot? My colleague’s dream springs from the bardolatry that holds us all in its grip, a grip that would have us venerate rather than interpret a genius who is said to beggar all interpretation.

At the same time, public appetite for knowledge of Shakespeare as a human being persists. (Witness the success of Hollywood’s “Shakespeare in Love.”) How did he come to marry a woman eight years his senior? Why did he leave her the second-best bed in his will? What was he doing in those so-called lost years after he sired his twins and before he became known as a London playwright? Was he really in love with the Mr. W. H. to whom his sonnets are dedicated, or with the Dark Lady, or with both? As Park Honan and Ian Wilson attest, even in postmodern times the idea that pure biographical “truth” about Shakespeare exists is alive and well. A biographer can still claim, as does Wilson in his “Shakespeare: The Evidence,” that he will “penetrate through all the mysteries . . . to the real man” or that he offers “a dispassionate, up-to-date report on the available facts,” as does Honan in “Shakespeare: A Life.” Wilson delivers considerably less and Honan considerably more on that promise.

But whom do we mean when we say “Shakespeare”? Given the paucity of documentation pertaining to his life, what can we know of the real man apart from his writings? We can prove that he was christened, married and died; that he was actor and shareholder in a playing company; his name appears on title pages and contemporaries refer to him. But we have no manuscript undoubtedly written in his hand, no letters that he wrote. Moreover, given his talent for creating lifelike, compelling characters behind which he seems to disappear, what can we learn about him from his writings? And how can any biographer, critic or common reader see through the nimbus of idolatry that marks this writer as the preeminent genius of English literature, in Ben Jonson’s phrase, “not of an age, but for all time”? As the scholar David Willbern comments, “Shakespeare has become the critical occasion for idealization. . , the mirror in which we see our idealized selves.”

A Shakespearean biographer must steer between the Scylla of available facts and the Charybdis of inference and speculation while seeking to satisfy a reader’s desire for a believable story about a genius made nearly unbelievable by centuries of adulation. Both biographers pay tribute to Samuel Schoenbaum’s “Shakespeare’s Lives,” a richly ironic history of Shakespeare biography from its beginnings in Nicholas Rowe’s 1709 account. Schoenbaum’s title sums up his argument: There is no single authoritative biography of Shakespeare. Biographical evidence does indeed exist, but it is scanty, fragmentary and sometimes misleading. Occasionally it is faked, and part of it disappeared centuries ago. Moreover, it is tainted by error, hearsay, legend, speculation, self-projection and idealization. Like any evidence, it is subject to interpretation, which means that biographers, like critics, are inevitably guided by the theories and tastes of a given era.

Thus Shakespeare is reinvented periodically in biography and also in scholarship, classrooms, theaters, the movies. Nineteen ninety-eight brought us not only Harold Bloom’s “Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human,” an over-the-top, old-fashioned humanistic paean of adoration, but also “Shakespeare in Love,” a witty, irreverent fiction of the poet as novice writer down to his last shilling, promising scripts he can’t deliver in the dog-eat-dog world of 16th century London theater. For all its self-evident fantasy, though, the movie gets it right because it closely approximates the conditions of Shakespeare’s working life as centuries of research have revealed them.

Precisely because Honan’s “Shakespeare” looks outside the life of the playwright to situate him within the collective life that nurtured him, it shares with the movie a certain down-to-earth realism. Honan’s Shakespeare bears no resemblance whatsoever to Bloom’s godlike inventor of “the human.” Rather, he begins as a glove-maker’s son, cradled in the intricate friendships and hostilities of village life. No solitary genius rising to meteoric fame, he lived and worked in London within “a close, hierarchical fraternity” of fellow actors. Without the entrepreneurship of James Burbage, who built the Globe and procured a novel indoor playing space at the Blackfriars, or the friendship of Burbage’s son Richard, who acted many of the playwright’s leading roles, Shakespeare would have lacked a stable artistic environment and the reliable (eventually generous) income it supplied.

In engaging detail, Honan conveys the beleaguered state of the theater, which was attacked by religious authorities and shut down by civil ones during plague times. Protected but also regulated by the crown, it “often existed precariously, at the edge of [financial] ruin.” An acting company needed 15 or 20 new plays a year. With as many as five companies hungry for scripts and competing for audiences, the milieu in which Shakespeare learned, and earned, his artistry was characterized by “rivalries, suspicions, a knockabout atmosphere . . . a nerve-racking pressure.”

Remarkably, Honan avoids idealizing Shakespeare. Because he stresses the social and economic riskiness of putting on plays, evaluates the writer’s early weaknesses and later experiments dispassionately and charts carefully the limits of Shakespeare’s success in his own time, Honan portrays all the more plausibly just how extraordinary Shakespeare’s life work was. As an actor playing in repertory six days a week, the poet might have taken a hundred small parts in a season. He couldn’t afford “the luxury of writing to suit himself,” but he wrote about two plays a year for half his career, one a year for the rest, some of them masterpieces. At the beginning, says Honan, “[i]n Henry VI he writes as if he could hardly see below the heads of nobles; his social contexts are surprisingly weak, vague, or thin.” In a few years, with “Hamlet,” “he takes enormous risks for the popular theatre and an easily baffled public,” imbuing the crowd-pleasing revenge theme with philosophical depth, satirical bite and an emotional intensity that came “from within his own experience of . . . a family’s emotional ties.” Honan speculates perceptively about those ties. As an eldest son born in plague times, he suggests, Shakespeare must have enjoyed his mother’s “watchful, intense love,” which could account both for his artistic confidence and for the profoundly contradictory attitudes toward women central to “Hamlet” and many other works as well.

Throughout, Honan summons up Shakespeare’s material world so we can understand both its ideological structure and the resources it offered a poet. For example: “Streets were encoded with a thousand symbols of rank, trade, and profession, with heraldry on flags and even on shop signs. One saw the badged coats of liveries, ecclesiastical and civil robes, now and then the black gowns of students or magistrates, and many blues of apprentices.” Both the strict, inescapable sense of rank that undergirds Shakespeare’s explosive tragic conflicts and his vibrant, precise visual imagery are implied here. Honan also extrapolates from myriad details a touching psychological portrait of the man who could have been Shakespeare. Modest, open, yet self-protective, aloof even as he blends into the group, he is dogged by “an obscure, residual . . . self-contempt.” No extrovert, he possesses “the inwardness of a writer of great intelligence . . . who had learned to protect and save himself among egotists.”

In contrast to Honan’s sustained critical equilibrium, Wilson rides a hobby horse: Shakespeare, he believes, was in some sense a Catholic. Impelled by his own “liberal Roman Catholicism,” Ian Wilson has scanned every piece of information tenuously related to Shakespeare’s life and writings to find a whiff of Rome. He tracks down even the most coincidental Catholic connection: The owner of New Place, the impressive Stratford house Shakespeare purchased, happened to have been a Catholic imprisoned for his faith, so Wilson calls it “a Catholic house.” Fond of hypothetical premises followed by conclusions that slip into certainties (If . . . then . . .) and expert in crafting rhetorical questions (Could he . . . ? Might he . . . ? Did he . . . ?) into thundering insinuations, Wilson relies on inference and speculation, failing to put into context and interpret the shifting, ambiguous place of Catholics in a newly Protestant England.

Take, for example, his treatment of a booklet handwritten by one John Shakespeare, which was discovered in 1757 above the rafters of the house in which Shakespeare may have been born. Modeled on a formulation that Jesuit missionaries were using in England by 1581, this “spiritual testament” affirms the writer’s Catholic faith. Yet we can’t be sure that the John Shakespeare of the testament was in fact the poet’s father, and whether he was Catholic or not really depends on what “Catholic” or “Protestant” meant. Over the course of the 16th century, the official state religion of England changed three times. Misleadingly, Wilson treats Catholics as a consistently identifiable and homogenous group always under threat of persecution, which imparts an air of sensationalism to his biography but fails to show how Shakespeare’s alleged faith might have shaped his works. Wilson lacks Honan’s awareness that evidence isn’t evidence until it is placed into historical context and made legible in the grammar of its time.

Whether or not Shakespeare told his beads in the privacy of his lodging, of two things we can be sure: He knew the Bible well, for he heard it often in the English liturgy that supplanted the Latin Mass, and he drew on Catholic doctrine when he thought it might be dramatically effective. The ghost of old King Hamlet comes from Purgatory, a Catholic place indeed, but he demands a vengeance that no Christian of either persuasion was supposed to endorse.

It’s unlikely that new “evidence” of Shakespeare’s life will turn up. As these two biographies demonstrate in different ways, however, we can continue to mine rich veins of research into the material and political culture of the English Renaissance to learn more and more about the world that fed Shakespeare’s writing. As the hero of “Shakespeare in Love” strides down a teeming London street, he hears a preacher shouting, “A plague on both your houses!” to audiences streaming into rival playhouses. That line, of course, winds up in “Romeo and Juliet.” The incident slyly plays on the profound opposition of the church to the relatively new form of secular entertainment that put sermons in competition with plays. But it also suggests the poet’s cannily opportunistic borrowings from the profoundly oral world he lived in and, more generally, the extent to which he was indeed “of an age.”