For the first forty or so years of my life I was happy to accept that ‘very little is known’ about Shakespeare’s life and thought no more of it. However, over the last few years I’ve collected numerous books on the biography and even contributed myself in very minor ways. If more were known for certain about the life then there would have been much less written on the subject but the shadowy presence of the great man and the scraps of real evidence plus a large amount of speculation make it a rich area for thought and invention. Everybody wants to have a go at revealing the true Shakespeare from the clues available and they all want to make him their own.
My own interest was started with a late night television programme outlining some of the hidden clues allegedly left by Francis Bacon that caused a sizeable minority of sceptics to believe that Bacon was the author of the plays. Such coded hints are to be found in Love’s Labour’s Lost, in the longest word in Shakespeare’s work, ‘honorificabilitudinitatibus’, which was found to be an anagram of ‘Hi Ludi, Tuiti Sibi, Fr Bacono Nato’, which is Latin for ‘These plays, produced by Francis Bacon, guarded for themselves’. So, you can see how much ingenuity went into some of the research. It is also thought that Shakespeare encoded a message of his own into the King James Bible, a work overseen by Bacon, in which Shakespeare puts the words ‘shake’ and ‘spear’ at the very centre of the work he did on the project to show that it was his work and not Bacon’s.
After I was given one Christmas the big, coffee table edition of Antony Holden’s biography which described how Hamlet was written in grief for the loss of Shakespeare’s son, Hamnet, which cast a shadow over all of the subsequent work and might have induced a loss of faith and a darker view of the world, I bought myself the full version of the book with all the words in it and it was an impressive book.
From there I found a book called Who Wrote Shakespeare by John Michell, which made the Stratford man an uneasy favourite in sizeable field of candidates for the authorship. At that stage, I was led to believe and write on the old website that the Shakespeare works were possibly written by a committee with Shakespeare as a nominal head or editor. But although that remains partially true in as far as there appears to be some collaboration with other writers, I’ve regained my senses enough to believe that the sequence of plays in some sort of chronological order is more or less the work of one man and there’s no sensible reason to doubt that it was the man whose name was printed on the front page of them.
I continued by reading a number of other accounts- Anthony Burgess takes all the myth and legend at face value and writes a beguiling life; Richard Dutton, whose book I had bought because he taught me at University, based his life on theatre studies; Stephen Greenblatt found Will in the World by cross-referencing passages from the plays with the life; James Shapiro concentrated on the seminal year of 1599 with all the political crises and the composition of Hamlet and Peter Ackroyd produced a beautifully written and insightful account.
It was about this time that I spent a winter writing an episodic website feature, eventually printed up as a very limited edition called Brief Candle, in which the major suggestions were that the ‘fair youth’ of the Sonnets was a composite of both Southampton and William Herbert, that Shakespeare and John Donne must have known each other and that although he seemed to keep signing off and retiring, he never really did.
Since then, some of the assumptions taken from the above established works have come to seem a bit glib and it has become clear that the shifting possibilities allowed by the few shreds of real evidence could still give more credence to some of the earliest biographers like Aubrey and Rowe. Great work found in Eric Sams’ book on the early life, Germaine Greer’s detailed research in Shakespeare’s Wife, Charles Nicholl’s The Lodger, Bill Bryson’s sensible, witty and brief best seller has done nothing to undermine confidence in a further re-adjustment of the known facts that makes me hope that one day there might be a further contribution to the slew of books on the subject with my name somewhere among the credits.
Most recently, the inestimable Samuel Schoenbaum has enhanced my collection on the subject with A Documentary Life which, as the title suggests, is based only on known material evidenced by extant documents and the book which, at the time, provided a survey of the whole industry, Shakespeare’s Lives, which is effectively a biography of the subject of Shakespeare biography. And without having read it all yet, it looks like a wildly exciting book.
So, because it is highly unlikely that there will ever be enough indisputable evidence to settle the matter, it does look as if the discussion will go on and on. The anti-Stratfordians, those who think that Bacon, Oxford or some other candidate, actually wrote the works, seem to be in retreat by now. It is left, perhaps for future writers, to continue to scrutinize the theories and worry the less credible of them into submission while there is never a shortage of writers willing to make gorgeous semi-fictions out of the glimpses of Shakespeare we are allowed. William Boyd’s A Waste of Shame was a highlight of the television year not long ago.
The Chandos portrait, pictured here, is thought to be Shakespeare because it could be the same man, at a younger age, as that pictured in the Droeshout engraving used on the first collected edition of the plays, the first folio, in 1623 by people that had known him and represented in the monument above the grave in Holy Trinity Church, Stratford, as well as the fact that it was for a time owned by William Davenant, who was at the very least Shakespeare’s godson and some- including me- think might have been his actual son. But I’m afraid that once you get beyond the bare facts of a few legal documents, that’s how it works. It’s a mixture of dates, a variety of exhibits and then a moderate dash of sensible supposition.
Many of the major writers on the subject, including Auden and Greer, who you’d like to think better of, as well as A.L. Rowse, who never let the evidence spoil a good story, can’t help but let their imaginations run away with them. Some biographers are likely to find aspects of themselves in their subject. One would like to be among the few who could produce a coherent version of events that takes account of all that we know for sure and whose contribution has that bit of imagination that makes sense of it all.
I hope it keeps us going for a bit longer yet. 2009, being so significantly the 393rd anniversary of his death, the 445th of his birth and set to include my own 50th anniversary, it would be a monumental year to publish a ground-breaking essay on the subject. But, just in case we don’t, I think you can quote me on this-
Shakespeare died on 23 April, 1616. He was christened on 26 April, 1564. And thus it has been conveniently supposed that the National Bard must have been born on St. George’s Day but it’s about a 3/1 shot that he was born on 23/04/1564. And, as far as I know, I was the first to point out that although Shakespeare died on his birthday, he probably wasn’t born on it.
