I thought it might be interesting to have a quick look at some thoughts on the discipline of Shakespeare biography by the pre-eminent scholars, Paul Edmondson and Prof. Stanley Wells. The General Introduction to the fine volume of essays edited by them, The Shakespeare Circle, begins with this paragraph,
Imagination is needed if we are to bring the information we have about another human being to life. When the subject is Shakespeare, although we may continually lament that the facts we most desire do not exist, we may decide to broaden the scope of how to use what is available the better to imagine what his life was like.
Okay. Let's have a look.
Imagination is needed, is it. Rather than 'evidence'. That's fine, although we are already risking putting our imagination ahead of anything that we can prove, but we can live with that because it might be all we can do.
Then it says, the facts we most desire do not exist.
That's not quite right, is it. The facts do exist, it's just that we don't know them. It is a problem with much of history that it is written by people who weren't there at the time and even those that were there might be telling their version of events. But facts do exist.
And then Edmondson and Wells assert that we may decide.
Who are the 'we', there, I wonder. Is it them or us. Are they, even sub-consciously, saying that Edmondson and Wells may decide or that the ongoing debate the better to imagine what his life was like is something that anybody can take part in.
At first it looks like a harmless opening, just two careless sentences that appear to say nothing more than something ostensibly inoffensive. But close reading has its virtues.
The paragraph above is likely to be quoted again here, and possibly elsewhere, in due course.
I don't want to spoil anything, like any further items on the subject of Shakespeare biography, or dismay readers who have heard enough about it already and would prefer that I write about something - almost anything- else but if the big boys want to play, then we will give them a game.
David Green
- David Green (Books) is the imprint under which I publish booklets of my own poems, or did. The 'Collected Poems' are now available as a pdf. The website is now what it has become. It keeps me out of more trouble than it gets me into. I hope you find at least some of it worthwhile.
