Shakespeare and Tolstoy

 The film All is True will not be news to most people but, not being a film-watcher, it was to me when shown on TV the other night. I may not watch many films but I am a Shakespeare biography addict. One can put this film straight in at the top of Ben Elton's finest work with Branagh, Judi Dench and Ian McKellan enacting an insightful if ultimately far-fetched account of Shakespeare's retirement back in Stratford, 1613-16.

There are all the usual biographical motifs to include, like beds mentioned in wills, Shakespeare's concern for his social status and the death of the boy, Hamnet. I also realized that surely Shakespeare is by now surely a character in more works of historical fiction than he wrote himself.

Central to the film is Shakespeare's 'realization' that Hamnet didn't die of plague as he does in Maggie O'Farrell and as he is assumed to have in nearly every biography. Shakespeare notices that there were only five infant deaths in Stratford in 1596, three of which were newborn. In a line worthy of the man himself, Elton gives him, 'the plague is a scythe, not a dagger' that takes out swathes of lives and doesn't pick them out one by one. I wonder how verifiable that figure is because it shifts our understanding a little bit if it's true.

What is much less likely is the alternative explanation that Judith pushed him into the pond out of jealousy and he drowned. That Shakespeare had favoured Hamnet on account of his attempts at poetry but that they had really been written by Judith who, being a girl, helped in the kitchen is not going to be given much credence as a biographical possibility but it made for yet more fine fiction from the fertile material of the shadowy life.

It gives us the very outside possibility that it produced the lines,

There is a willow grows aslant a brook, 

That shows his hoar leaves in the glassy stream

but I'm not buying that any more than I think Hamnet's death resulted in the lines from King John,

Grief fills the room up of my absent child, 

Lies in his bed, walks up and down with me, 

Puts on his pretty looks, repeats his words,

 

That ain't necessarily so.

---

We're dealing with big guns at present.

Moving from Anna Karenina to A.N. Wilson's biography of Tolstoy one is struck by how much of one is in the other. One can read the one without knowing about the other. It is, in fact, more of a distraction from either to open up a whole new area by comparing the two.

Wilson is scholarly and entertaining and sends one diligently to his back catalogue to see what else there is among his novels, Dickens and Victorian work having been so hugely impressed with his Jesus and his Betjeman.

I couldn't help but notice his passage on the C19th biographers of Jesus, including,

The most notorious and radical of their theologians, David Fiedrich Strauss, had brought to the study of the New Testament a whole package of scientific and philosophical presuppositions which enabled him to examine the Gospel stories in the same sceptical spirit which would have governed a scholar's reading of, say, Plutarch's 'Lives'. 

which is very much what Wilson himself does so he wasn't the first to do so but the latest in an honourable line.

Having also read Claire Tomalin's Thomas Hardy- The Time-Torn Man recently, the litany of great writers in difficult marriages insists on compiling itself before one's very eyes. Tolstoy, Hardy, Dickens, Shakespeare...it begins to look like a pattern. Do great writers become great writers as a result of unhappy marriages or are the unhappy marriages due to them being great writers.

That looks like an easy one to me.