Eureka and After

John Southworth's Shakespeare, the Player, was a major find (as below) if only for its very useful dating of Shakespeare leaving Stratford exactly when I wanted him to. I've not seen anybody else do it and he does it with such good reason. He continues to be original throughout, often dismissing traditional anecdotes and replacing them with commonsense explanations based on evidence and circumstances although he is reluctant to question the idea of Shakespeare as uxurious which looks to me highly dubious.

It is a life based on the theatre, though, via detailed scrutiny of cast lists and tour schedules and the main thing that brings out is that much of the life was spent on the road and less in London that might be usually imagined. He would have been familiar with Ipswich, Gloucester, Bristol and other places in the southern half of England.

The other main  'revelation' from this close reading of the parts in the plays and the actors available is how Southworth matches them up and, most tellingly, makes Shakespeare a major player, with Richard Burbage, rather than the bit-part Ghost in Hamlet or older men elsewhere that most credit him with. He is, in this account, a player-manager, often on stage at the beginning of plays and at the end and overseeing the drama he has devised at first hand, like a harpsichord player directing a baroque orchestra.

I don't know to what extent the author claims to establish his findings as facts but, as with so much Shakespeare biography, it succeeds or fails in proportion to how credible it is and it rates among the very best of Shakespeare biographies for scoring highly on that.

To most readers it will be how the theatre groups worked that will be of most interest and Shakespeare leaving Stratford in 1580 won't matter to them quite as much, interesting though it is on its own account, but it matters to me and I haven't been so grateful for anything for quite some time.