The Shakespeare Circle. An Alternative Biography, ed. Paul Edmondson and Stanley Wells (Cambridge University Press)It has been remarked that there is a 'Shakespeare-shaped hole' at the centre of his biography. The man who acted in the plays he wrote most of, was a shareholder in the theatres they were performed in and can be traced through a number of surviving legal documents is elusive and biographers tend to fill in the gap he leaves with suppositions, imaginings and the deductions from their various pieces of detective work. This new volume of essays has scholars working outwards from that hole, providing essays on family, friends and theatrical colleagues, in an attempt to shed some light back in.
In her Afterword, Margaret Drabble notes that, after so much has been written on the subject,
Surely...there can be nothing left to discover.
And yet, there can be new ways of looking at what there is, when minds of sufficient ingenuity are brought to the subject.
Shakespeare's will is a crucial document in understanding much about his life and relationships with others but is notoriously problematic when trying to deduce any such solid detail from it. The single line in which he leaves his second best bed and the furniture 'unto his wyf' has been interpreted at as much length as some of the plays along with the fact that it is inserted, apparently, as an afterthought. But sometimes it is possible to short-circuit generations-worth of debate by suggesting, as Katherine Scheil does, that the insertion might be nothing to do with Shakespeare but merely an omission by the copyist who added it in later.
As has happened before, it's all the lowly scribe's fault and,
Francis Collins, Shakespeare's clerk, was known for producing imperfect and uncorrected wills.
and also, thus, causing much more confusion among biographers over the following centuries than the will as it stands was already going to give rise to. There is often a simple explanation when everything seems complicated and while much of this book seems to open up wider possibilities than some of the generally accepted ideas, it does also sometimes offer the chance to close down labyrynthine debates by simplifying them with revelatory common sense.
Graham Holderness, in his essay on Hamnet Shakespeare, mentions (no more than in passing) the possibility that the boy was,
proof positive of his mother's infidelity.
and then he moves on, still not noticing the further possibility- brought up whenever the chance arises on this website- that he could have been named after Hamnet Sadler, the family friend, as a reminder to all that Shakespeare knew who the real father was. Although it is noted more than once in the book how many children were named William, possibly after Shakespeare, it takes Hamnet and Judith Sadler until their ninth child to do so.
One would have been glad of an essay on Hamnet Sadler, which is an odd omission from this otherwise comprehensive volume in which the mining of contemporary records in Stratford is impressive. We know he was taken to court for having a muckheap outside his house; we know he wasn't at first included in Shakespeare's will but appears to have been added in, perhaps after a late change of heart and some, like me, are admirers of my friend's insightful theory that he was the father of Hamnet and Judith Shakespeare. It's a pity we couldn't have contributed a chapter on Sadler but in such an 'alternative biography' it is a shame to see the old idea that Shakespeare fathered a daughter and then twins still trotted out as unchallenged fact when Don Paterson's book on the sonnets gives his opinion of whether Shakespeare was gay or not as almost not worthy of an answer, 'of course he was'. So it wouldn't be too surprising if, having accidentally fathered a child in an early experiment in heterosexuality, he only dabbled in such conventional congress with a dark lady and other minor skirmishes but really was unlikely to be a prolific producer of progeny like so many of his contemporaries.
Germaine Greer, having made such a convincing case for Anne as a self-sufficient woman in Shakespeare's Wife, here presents a further typically Greerian defence of the much-disregarded daughter, Judith, in which the surviving twin is badly treated by her putative father in the conditions of his will on account of her marriage to Thomas Quiney, the vintner of some disrepute. In her customary and entertaining style, Prof. Greer really wants to stay with the 'alternative biography' theme and does so by finding the best where she can in womanhood and assuming that men are, for the most part, feckless but, as a stalwart contrarian, has to resort to suggesting that the unreliable Quiney, 'might have been fun'. She makes less of the fact that in Holy Trinity Church, alongside the graves of William; Anne; the acknowledged daughter, Susanna; her husband, John Hall, and Thomas Nash, the grandson-in-law, there was no room left for Judith, who is lost in the graveyard somewhere. So perhaps she was just unlucky that she lived until 1662.
There is a tendency to take sides in such issues and it does us no favours. While it is traditional to admire Shakespeare, this side of bardolatry, it would be problematic to assume his better treatment of Susanna in the will was entirely due to his better judgement. She sued against allegations of adultery and may or may not have been quite the idealized daughter she is sometimes thought to have been. But, then again, she might have been recognized by Shakespeare as his only genuine offspring which, given his apparent interest in coats of arms and his dynastic legacy, might be why his grandson-in-law is buried very close to him while Judith is forver lost to posterity.
David Fallow's essay on John, the father, makes a case for not believing in the long-held assumption that he fell upon hard times but that he was very successful as a dealer in wool and the reason we can't see that is because he was so successful in hiding his business affairs from the tax authorities that it is hidden from us as well. It is less romantic to think of William first going to London on business rather than with a group of actors, or in pursuit of such a career but it does fit, for opposites reasons, as an explanation why Shakespeare didn't go to University. Not because he had to stay in Stratford to help out a struggling family business but because he went to London as part of a thriving business. And we must not forget that there's plenty of circumstantial evidence to suggest that, as well as being anecdotally the sweetest and wittiest of company, he was businesslike whenever questions of cash were involved. In either version, he gets himself to London at a tender age and I'm surprised how much this book as a whole assumes regular visits back to Stratford when all his work from the late 1580's to after 1612 went on in London. The Alternative Biography still lingers on family ties when the 'artistic temperament' often 'flies by those nets' (Joyce, not Shakespeare) but, yes, Stratford was always home and where he would retire to once he was tired, his revels were ended and, it has to be said, his writing was out of fashion.
He is spotted in London before the commonly accepted first mention of him as the 'upstart crow' in Greene's Groatsworth of Wit, in references that have made him worthy of mention before1592, and we are indebted to Andy Keeson for telling us that. You need to have been around for a while and made something of a reputation before your peers start to notice you and so I'm delighted to see Shakespeare's arrival in London made as early as possible because not being in Stratford when the twins were conceived, in 1584, would be a very good way for him to know that he wasn't their father.
There is one remaining big question about why Shakespeare's masterpiece (and I know many now say that is Lear, but it isn't, it's Hamlet) is so closely named after the so-called son. Emma Smith steps in to explain that they are two different names, Hamnet and Hamlet. That is helpful in dividing out a three-sided convergence between the family friend, the naming of the boy and the subject of the magnum opus, when two are plenty. I'd be glad of it if it weren't even more apparent that spelling was an approximate art in those days, especially in Shaxpere's day, and that Hamnet and Hamlet weren't closer to each other than several of the variants of Shakespeare's own name. It would be better to point out that the play was based on the old story of Amleth and that the family friend was called Hamnet. And that's all there is to it.
But Shakespeare's circle were no more angelic than any other assembled gathering of humanity and there's no reason to assume he himself was any better than the rest of us either, except when first being satirized for his 'sweet', Ovidian writing and then proceeding to dominate English Literature like none before him or that ever will be able to again. Duncan Salkeld tells us all there is to know about George Wilkins, brothel keeper, hideous man, co-author of Pericles but associate of William Shakespeare who, whoever he was, certainly made a long-lasting name for himself and, apparently, a tidy pile of cash while he was doing it.
This book wouldn't be the place to start if you want an outline of his life. You can go to Anthony Burgess for a shameless summary of all the myths and legends, or somebody like Peter Ackroyd for a sensible account. But, in the same way that much of the science we were taught at school (Jupiter used to have 16 satellites but now has 64 or more) has been updated, the way we understand the life of Shakespeare, if we care to, is forever being modified. This book is a useful step in that direction but we know it's not over yet.
I'm not flabbergasted to read that Shakespeare might not actually have died on his birthday but I am disconcerted that despite my attempts on this website, and my friend's excellent play that extrapolates his original idea, and was circulated to a few theatres and academics, that nobody else can see that Shakespeare fathered one daughter and she, as far as he knew, was his entire offspring.