Shakespeare, the family man

Enough's enough. I think I've seen it all now. Here is an imagined outline of a day in the life of William Shakespeare, attributed to Sir Stanley Wells,

http://www.bbc.co.uk/timelines/zc46k7h#z2njg82

I hope the link lasts. 

Of course, everybody is entitled to their own version of Shakespeare and nobody should want to deny anybody else their own preferred version. On the other hand, much-vaunted, high profile professors need to do more than indulge their own quaint fantasies.
Ben Elton's Upstart Crow has Shakespeare in Stratford much of the time but that is for a joke.

The Shakespeare that Wells presents, mooching around his provinicial hometown as a happy family man is at odds with the necessity of being in London acting on stage, being a shareholder in the theatre company that makes his fortune, having affairs with a dark lady and perhaps a fair youth but, more than any of that, where are the progeny of this happy marriage when the only offspring we can be sure about was conceived before they were even married. The Sadlers produced 14 children; most couples had children as often as they could because in those days not all were going to survive childhood and William himself was the third of eight.

So, even if we were to withdraw the suggestion that the twins were not really Shakespeare's children, he is still not trying very hard to establish the dynasty, the male line that makes his registering of a family coat of arms worthwhile.

He was in London, making money, writing plays, acting in plays by Ben Jonson, living in Silver Street in the 1600's, investing his fortune back at home in Stratford but not cosily sitting by one of his ten fireplaces writing Othello in the town he had been so quick to get out of in the 1580's.

Anthony Burgess' biography takes all the myths, legends and anecdotes and weaves a most beguiling story from them but it was not offered as scholarship. Wells seems to want to offer us the poet strolling through the Warwickshire countryside admiring flowers. But a writer deals in words and a dramatist deals in plays and a businessman - Shakespeare apparently ever alert to a money-making venture- makes sure he keeps his eye on the business.

I do not only disparage the account that Prof. Wells describes, I refute it and provide the reasons why.