Shakespeare in clearer focus

Since around 1650, when Sir William Dugdale began rummaging in Warwickshire for Shakespeareana, antiquarians and scholars have been sifting every dusty ledger or packet of bills for traces of the Stratford lad who left for London sometime in the 1580s and became Shakespeare. In “Will in the World,” Stephen Greenblatt has combed these findings to track the strangely light, even effaced footsteps of Shakespeare on history.

It was a time of political quarrels, of surveillance and torture following the Reformation of Queen Elizabeth I’s father, Henry VIII, and the reign of terror of her half-sister Mary Tudor. The theater belonged to an older world, not quite Merrie Englande, but almost -- the vanished past of “rewards and fairies.” But players struggled on, entertaining the crowd with stiff moralities that could sidestep Protestant disapproval. Touring companies of players, like the Earl of Warwick’s Men, visited the countryside around Stratford, and in 1575, when Will Shakespeare was 11, the queen’s favorite, the prodigal Earl of Leicester, put on at Kenilworth a marvelous extravaganza to divert Elizabeth during one of her royal progresses. He took risks, he spent madly (1,000 pounds -- a king’s ransom), but he was rewarded: “Her Majesty laughed well.”

There are enough echoes and imitations in the plays to suggest that John Shakespeare took his son to these pageants. John Shakespeare was a glove maker and a considerable figure in the town, an alderman and a churchman who had helped whitewash the wall paintings of deposed saints in the Guild Chapel. But during Will’s boyhood, his father became embroiled in troubles, for “wool-brogging” (illegal trading) and for not attending church. Why? Greenblatt offers a comparison with Falstaff -- perhaps he liked the sack too well, he suggests.

But “Will in the World” really comes alive when Greenblatt sets aside such psychological speculations and turns instead to the historical context, and specifically the Catholic connection: The family of Shakespeare’s mother, Mary Arden, was Catholic, and John Shakespeare -- in spite of his activities -- left a “spiritual will,” or a declaration of faith, drawn up according to the recommendations of Carlo Borromeo, Cardinal of Milan and one of the presiding forces of the Catholic Counter-Reformation. The “formulary” for this will might have been smuggled into England by one of the recusant priests preaching the pope’s mission against Queen Elizabeth. They formed a “secret sodality of pious, suicidal young men” and included the celebrated scholar, daredevil, orator, wit and martyr Edmund Campion.

Shakespeare might have been hired as a tutor in one of the Lancashire households loyal to the Old Faith; he might even have received communion from Campion himself and if so -- Greenblatt supposes, carried up and away on the wings of “strong imagination” -- “[i]f the adolescent knelt down before Campion, he would have been looking at a distorted image of himself.”

The well-known tale that Shakespeare was caught poaching deer on the estate of the local magnate Sir Thomas Lucy and then slandered him in a ballad only masks the real trouble. Lucy was the official and ruthless scourge of Catholics in Warwickshire and Shakespeare was implicated by association: Edward Arden, a possible cousin (we are still in the insubstantial cloud-capp’d towers of conjecture) was hanged, drawn and quartered for treason against the queen in 1583, two years after Campion, who had been sheltering a priest.

Lining himself up with a growing group of scholars, Greenblatt offers this religious persecution as the crucial background to Shakespeare’s missing years after he left school, as well as his later motive for leaving Stratford. For after such (possible) brushes with high treason, Shakespeare had to melt into the capital and disguise himself through a hundred writerly acts of empathy and dramatic impersonation. Secrecy became a way of life. In a gripping passage, Greenblatt envisions the playwright, now married with three children, arriving in London for his new existence and passing the severed heads of his kinsmen impaled for all to see and fear on London Bridge.

Reading through the father-son relationships in the plays, especially Falstaff and Hal, Greenblatt develops the mysteriousness of John Shakespeare and his circumstances, but he does not make a similar attempt to intuit the currents of feeling between Mary Arden and her son. Like her husband, she could not sign her name. But then, neither could Shakespeare’s daughters after his death, as Samuel Schoenbaum reveals in his unsurpassed study, “Shakespeare’s Lives” (1970). Though widowers predominate in the plays as in traditional fairy tales, mothers are not entirely absent, and it is a little odd that Greenblatt does not treat, for example, the countess in “All’s Well That Ends Well,” or the eloquent scene of Volumnia’s appeals in “Coriolanus,” or examine Shakespeare’s multiple, powerful and often ambiguous metaphors of maternity. In his book, Mary Arden remains erased from the son’s memory as well as from history.

By contrast, in “Wooing, Wedding and Repenting,” the chapter on Shakespeare’s marriage to Anne Hathaway, the biography explores star-crossed lovers, ill-matched couples, the murderous Macbeth and the lascivious and guilty Claudius with Gertrude, and comes to the darkest possible conclusions about Shakespeare’s feelings for his wife. Notoriously, he left her only “the second-best bed” in his will -- and this phrase was added as an afterthought to a careful document that effectively excluded her, endowing his eldest daughter, Susanna, instead. But Greenblatt adds more poison to this already venomous story: When Shakespeare composed his epitaph -- “Cursed be he yt moves my bones” -- did he mean that he did not want Hathaway to join him in the grave?

No romantic rival is identified, however, apart from the beautiful boy, the Earl of Southampton, for whom some of the sonnets were written to persuade him to marry and secure an heir for his immense fortune. The whirligig of identities and stories around the poems seems to have frightened off this new biographer: not a glimpse of any Dark Lady, old or new. Apart from some perceptive comments on Shakespeare’s use of close-ups in erotic description, Greenblatt has left Shakespeare’s sexuality to others.

From the writing of “Hamlet” on, Greenblatt concentrates his attention on reading the tragedies for clues: After Shakespeare’s son Hamnet’s death, the loss of rituals to lay the dead to rest shocked Shakespeare into his vision of an unquiet ghost (the theme of Greenblatt’s inspired study “Hamlet in Purgatory”). But his insights into “Hamlet,” “Macbeth,” “King Lear,” “The Winter’s Tale” and “The Tempest” don’t illuminate the ostensible theme of the book expressed in the subtitle “How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare.” Rather, “Will in the World” resumes many of Greenblatt’s earlier brilliant ideas about Elizabethan society and Shakespeare’s place within it, and it moves nimbly and lucidly through scrupulously marshaled scraps of material.

He has difficulty, however, keeping to his adopted part as chronicler and often reverts to literary comment -- a chorus role. In the preface, he alludes to this biography’s genesis in a way that reveals perhaps more than he meant to. The book originated in a conversation with screenwriter Marc Norman, who was working on the script that eventually became “Shakespeare in Love.” That film, entrancing as it is, was made of the dream stuff, the fantastical romancing, at the soft center of the Great Artist bio-pic genre and its premise that the work matches the life.

Attempting this approach has led Greenblatt to surprising forms of inattention and to contradiction of principles he has himself refined. For the conventions of celebrity lives in our time clash directly with ways of telling the self in Shakespeare’s, as the New Historicist in Greenblatt knows only too well. To use his own terms, Shakespeare is self-fashioning rather than self-revealing, a man of “double consciousness,” hidden, with immense powers of empathy and self-projection. The current form of biography won’t let him honor those qualities.

Greenblatt also calls attention to the “strategic opacity” of the plays, when Shakespeare cuts out the driving motive of the plot: Iago, Lear, Leontes act without rhyme or reason but rather with what Coleridge called “motiveless malignancy.” The plays dramatize fated stories of metamorphosis, literal (Bottom, Hermione) and figurative, and explore twists and turns, altered states, trance, madness, inconsistencies and conflicts within an individual. Shakespeare really is like Hamlet when Hamlet taunts his friends for trying to play upon him as upon a pipe.

In a story, Jorge Luis Borges imagined Shakespeare appearing before God and telling him, “I who have been so many men in vain want to be one and myself.” God answers him, “Neither am I anyone; I have dreamt the world as you dreamt your work, my Shakespeare, and among the forms in my dream are you, who like myself are many and no one.” This is fabulist romancing too, but it catches Shakespeare’s blurry face in the glass more truly than wild conjecture and ascribed self-portraiture. *