Good Mrs. Shakspaire,

It's a matter of being in the right place at the right time. Like listening to Jane Garvey and Fi Glover on Times Radio yesterday afternoon. They interviewed Maggie O'Farrell ahead of the film of Hamnet. It's a brilliant book, might well make a good film but is imaginative historical fiction rather than scholarly literary history. Maggie is as welcome to her view of Shakespeare biography as anybody else is to theirs but she might have made her moving story from some traditional assumptions that don't stand up very well to further examination.

The Curtis-Green Strange Fowl essay offers a very different reading of events and the one piece of reaction to the interview that Jane and Fi read out was the first time we've heard the idea that Hamnet was really the son of Hamnet Sadler, and not Shakespeare, from anywhere else but ourselves. It would be very interesting to know where their contributor found the idea. But a little bit more of an airing and discussion of it was prompted at The Times online without it quite 'going viral'.

Since the first appearance of our 'twins theory' in the TLS in 2016 and posting it on the internet, the discovery of a letter to Mrs. Shakspaire in London, BBC News , has been presented as evidence that Anne was not left behind in Stratford, that it wasn't an unhappy, shotgun or make-do marriage. Maggie thought this was "thrilling" and "wonderful" and,

that proves of course that they did love each other and probably lived together for some time in London. 

 

But, not so fast. The letter might place Anne in London sometime after 1602 and before 1608 but it doesn't mean she was there for the twenty years before that, during which Shakespeare was making his name and a good living out of the theatre. While a reported sighting of Anne in London comes as some surprise, it fits with the Strange Fowl account as part of the reconciliation described there and that subsequent theme in the 'late plays', like The Winter's Tale. What first appeared to be a potential sticking point is readily assimilated and so the essay will be updated with it, gladly accepting the letter as a part of our account. 

 

If Anne wants to go to London then so she must. It's not for us to say she has to stay in Stratford. And neither do we think the worse of her if she did have children by two different fathers. Jane and Fi seemed somewhat offended that the 'twins theory' idea maligned her character and they compared it to Hollyoaks. It is true that Anne has had a 'bad press' for the most part but I'm not having that. It compares with how the prolific output of children by Boris Johnson and Bob Marley are respectively seen as profligate, irresponsible and incontinent but then an expression of love, creativity and fertility. 

 

Strange Fowl is looking good to me. Exactly what our motivation is in promoting the theory isn't entirely clear but I'd like to think it is a contribution to 'scholarship', a selfless project attempting some clarification of confused issues. And, with the job writing about local music events either in abeyance or even having reached its limit, here's a long-standing, labyrinthine subject that hasn't yet lost any of its appeal.  

The Captain's Daughter

The Captain's Daughter, according to the back cover of Pushkin's Novels, Tales, Journeys, 'has been called the most perfect book in Russian literature'. There will be time to wonder whether there are grades of perfection elsewhere. Not having read the whole of Russian literature, I couldn't say but it's a big claim up against Tolstoy, Chekhov, Turgenev et al. James Joyce told his daughter, Lucia, that Tolstoy's How Much Land Does a Man Need? was 'the greatest story that the literature of the world knows' without saying it was perfect. 

Pyotr gets lucky more than once on his adventures before marrying Marya. The story is like an extended parable from the Bible with sharply delineated good and bad characters, virtue rewarded, the bad punished and thus a happy ending. For me, at least, a bit more ambiguity raising a few more questions might be required for anything to be 'great'. Hamlet is more convincing as a character because we can't be sure if he's a hero beleaguered by difficult circumstances or an indolent student mooching about.

Pushkin's characters often end up in duels, as does Hamlet, and as did Pushkin himself, which can't help but be dramatic but life was lived in primary colours in olden days. I don't hold that against him but in many ways a picture painted from a more subdued or limited palette can offer more subtlety. Coming at the beginning of Russian literature, it's remarkable how cultures like that find themselves such a major figure to follow, like Homer in Greek, Chaucer in English and maybe Dante in Italian. 

There's plenty more to be had in Novels, Tales, Journeys but the biography by T. J. Binyon, much lauded by A. N. Wilson - a fine biographer himself- arrived today so I'll soon be as well informed about early C19th Russia as I once was about the Soviet Union, courtesy of Solzhenitsyn. It might work to read the biography and stop off to read the fiction as and when it is mentioned. My trouble is that I'm not really a leisurely reader. Once I've started a book I like to finish it, as long as it's worthwhile.

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Also upcoming, The Bonfire Party by Sean O'Brien, then Departures, said to be the 'schwanengesang' of Julian Barnes who I'm missing already and, later, Maggie O'Farrell.