Oxford Open Doors

 It's a long ride from Swindon but it's free with the senior bus pass. There were places it might be worth looking inside. I was in good form and had finished the Times crossword just beyond Faringdon, taking care to only fill it in when one wasn't being thrown about by the prolifically pot-holed roads.

Neither of the student guides I asked in St. John's College had the faintest idea where Larkin's rooms might have been and some of the more recent architecture was a bit like that at Lancaster, so not uplifting. I've been in a couple of unprepossessing Oxford colleges before and was hoping for more.

Magdalen is surely that but I might have been expecting too much. The nameplate at the bottom of a staircase presumably indicated the accommodation of a professor that lived there and it brought to mind the dessicated-looking elderly dons who came in to sit at top table for dinner in halls at Downing College, Cambridge, in 1979, taking half an hour from their Herodotus for some bleak sustenance. It was so-so.

The main object of interest was the Painted Room in Cornmarket Street where Shakespeare may or may not have stayed with the Davenants on his journeys between London and Stratford. Not in that room, the guides didn't think, because they thought the Davenants served wine and might not have taken paying guests but William probably stayed at an inn nearby. I decided against enquiring what they thought about the prospects of him having fathered William Davenant while he was passing through. But one wants to see these places when the rare opportunity presents itself. It may not help much but there's a vague sense of feeling slightly more a part of it by having been. For example, I hadn't realized that the Davenant's premises included a branch of BetFred. Had Shakespeare been in Oxford on St. Leger day, he might have had his couple of ducats each way on the 11/1 winner.

But the main action of Oxford Open Doors for me was extra curricular. It was necessary to queue to see the Painted Room, only 15 being allowed in at a time. Time was on my side so I did, disappointed to be 16th in line for the next intake but at least glad to have a bit of wall to lean on to read the Times Saturday Review while I waited.

There appeared, in a blaze of entitlement and extreme self-confidence, a lurid caricature of Bullingdon Club and Brideshead Oxford who, to be fair to him, might not have noticed the 45 minute queue but took alarmingly quick exception to being informed of the procedure by the lady in charge of crowd control, not that such a role ought to be too demanding at such an esoteric attraction.

He immediately asked for the lady's name and she offered a variation of the Sicilian Defence by asking for his. He said that he didn't like her manner.

At that point I looked up from my reading matter and said that she had been perfectly civil to him and it was him that was being rude.

Excuse me, he said, are you reading your newspaper or listening to our conversation?

I said I'd been pretending to read the paper but had in fact been listening to him being rude. His reaction was to push his hand into my face thus causing my hat to fall from my head and onto the ground and then he exited stage left in some haste.

What a man. I'm not sure I've witnessed such outlandish gaucheness in the flesh before. Perhaps not even on telly in the blond Etonian, Bullingdonian, Oxfordian Prime Minister we had a few years ago whose behaviour was consistently boorish. 

I would be glad to renew our acquaintance and perhaps interview him but unless he finds this reference, recognizes himself and makes contact, it seems highly unlikely. I don't want to press charges for assault- that idea hadn't even crossed my mind until someone else suggested it. We had a lorra lorra fun there in the name of Englishness and our cultural heritage. I'd really like to find out more about him.  

What's in a Name?

 Susan Dwyer Amussen, What's in a Name? (Manchester University Press)

No historian thinks that Shakespeare didn't write his own plays. The main reason, in Susan Dwyer Amussen's account is that several of his contemporaries thought he did and none doubted it and it took 150 years for anybody to think otherwise. In a book subtitled How historians know Shakespeare was Shakespeare one might expect a bit more than an argument that is set out in one or two pages but the rest of the text is socio-economic, theatrical and local history that is at best only very loosely required to establish that the Stratford man wrote the plays and poems attributed to him. Or most of them. Not many by now dispute that there was collaboration with other writers involved.

It is interesting material and most books on Shakespeare's life necessarily include some context and background. It's not clear that knowledge of the apprentices rioting in London, for example, help us to establish that Shakespeare rather than Oxford, Bacon or Marlowe was the author of the oeuvre that bears his name. What the accumulated detail does do, more thoroughly than might be required, is show that Shakespeare, with his grammar school education, would have been perfectly capable of producing the work he did without going to university. There were others like him who, had they possessed the requisite talent, might have become similarly memorable. What is so often left out of the debate is the possibility of innate genius.

Susan writes carefully at times, like when only noting that the twins were born to Anne, but can be reduced to banality when reporting such things about London as,

Courtship, sex and marriage were critical parts of the life of the city. 

Not being a biography, the book isn't expected to cover the life in a coherent sweep but its progress surveys its trajectory, understandably concentrating more on the theatre than personal relationships. The recent claims about Anne living in London, based on a letter addressed to 'Good Mrs Shakespaire' are treated without prejudice as being possible without proving anything for certain but she brings the possible date for that forward to as early as 1598-9 and she imagines Shakespeare travelling between London and Stratford more regularly than I do. The purchase of the Blackfriars gatehouse so close upon his retirement from the theatre suggests he intended to retain business interests in London even if he did spend more time in Stratford. While all such possibilities can be considered, it's easy to get lost under a welter of such speculation when we simply don't know and probably never will.

No such biography, though, affects the authorship question. The reasons for thinking that Shakespeare wrote a vast portion of the work that is credited to him are simply stated. It is the far-fetched cases for other candidates put forward by those who think he didn't that are much more convincing that he did. Somebody wrote it all and there isn't a credible case to be made for anybody else. It is a much more unlikely story that such ideas ever gained the credence that they have- with such eminent adherents as Mark Rylance among them- but, as is credited to H.L. Mencken, the idea that one never went broke by underestimating the public is relevant once again.

Susan Dwyer Amussen has provided a well-researched, readable and possibly useful book on Early Modern England but its contribution to the Shakespeare Authorship question, while welcome, could have been presented in an essay. I'm not even sure how much of a question is left. I bought and read the book because it seemed to promise what might be some closure on the subject. Who is the gullible one now?  

 

Shadowy Lives

 It says at the top here, and has done for some time that,

The website is now what it has become, ... It will be about whatever suggests itself. 

I quite the way that from time to time a theme develops, rather than the mere repetition of old opinions and prejudices that have been set out several times before.

Coming to the end of Katherine Duncan-Jones's Ungentle Shakespeare, it is every bit as impressive as Jesus by A.N. Wilson and is doing a similar thing. Both are shedding highly informed and rational light on lives that have got out of hand in traditional re-tellings and idolatry. Germaine Greer was one who, in her life of Anne Hathaway, scorned the 'bardolaters' for who Shakespeare could do no wrong but even their devotion is paltry and half-hearted compared to that of Christians and their versions of Jesus. Wilson knows the scriptures and reads them with an alert scepticism and Duncan-Jones brings the same intelligence to her interpretation of Shakespeare. Implicit in both of their approaches is an understanding that their subjects are human. If they weren't then their work would have been less likely to be relevant. Wilson is Church of England and maybe his ex-wife was, too, but the C. of E. in recent decades has been quite liberal on belief in God and perhaps they have an inkling that gods are the product of man's imagination.

Where the tradition Sunday School Jesus was meek and mild and suffered little children to come unto him, we come away from Wilson with the impression of a firebrand preacher who wanted Jews to be better Jews, not establish his own church. He was a troublesome political figure crucified by the Roman rulers. Similarly, Shakespeare, on account of his sublime writing, was elevated to the sweet Swan of Avon who charmed everyone who met him and understood the human situation sympathetically. Such an account overlooks the litigious businessman building a portfolio of investments, a misogynist with an ongoing disgust towards women and an obsession with establishing his gentlemanly status. Both built up sizeable followings in their lifetimes while both would surely be astonished not only at their influence over 2000 and over 400 years later but also the myths and legends put about by their subsequent followers that have become so widely accepted.

--

One last aspect of the KDJ book is her setting out of the last part of Shakespeare's career before retirement circa 1613. Throughout her book she has very sceptical about the success of the marriage to Anne and she is consistent in explaining that the purchase of the Blackfriars gatehouse with three trustees was a move to prevent the property being left to her. 

She was writing before the discovery of the letter addressed to 'Good Mrs. Shakespaire' which has been dated to the 1600's. With William living as a 'lodger' in Silver Street from circa 1604, any credence given to that letter might need to be put nearer to 1610. The purchase of the gatehouse is not until March 1613. The incumbent there on Shakespeare's death, John Robinson, could plausibly have been in his service.

Anne being in London circa 1610 fits with the idea of some reconciliation that is reflected in the themes of the 'late plays' that were written from then onwards. But it doesn't look like such a complete reconciliation that such an asset was to be left to her. And the famous difficulties of interpreting what the bequest of the 'second best bed' in the will is meant to mean. None of which makes it impossible to form an idea of what was happening. There is no need to explain away every detail in a convoluted way and come up with a story that fits it all in for the sake of it. We don't know for sure and it's best to say as much.

--

But a third title of the seven shortlisted for Best Book in the House is on a comparable theme. KDJ is quick to correct the often-heard truism that 'not much is known about Shakespeare's life'. Not enough, certainly, but quite a bit. Not all of it reliable, as in the case of Jesus Christ. But much more guesswork and assuming are needed if one wants to imagine the life of Vermeer, another raised to quasi-saintly status on the back of the tremendous legacy left in his work. Due, possibly next up, as I re-read the best books I've ever read, is Benjamin Moser's The Upside-Down World, which isn't a life of Vermeer but alongside Carel Fabritius and Pieter de Hooch, he is one of the foremost in the greatest Golden Age anywhere in any genre, Dutch C17th Painting. Not everybody will agree. There is a time around 1720 when European music was doing especially well. There was 1971 when pop music was very wonderful for the most part.

--

On a slightly less elevated level, I'm most gratified that my mate, Kev, has chosen my poem, Romanticism, to read at an ongoing local event where readers recite poems from memory. I said I could thus attend in support and if one was required to perform I could do Rainyday Woman which I do know. Gladly, in what is a wise guideline, one isn't supposed to do one's own poems and one hardly wants to instigate a celebration of oneself.

What I do like, though, is how people choose poems of mine, when required, that are among the best of them. Over the years that has also included The Cathedrals of Liverpool, Windy Miller and Situation. There is something reassuring about others liking the one's I like best. It would be awful if none of my favourites ever got a mention and people chose titles that, in retrospect, might have been lucky to get into print. There are a few of those.

One thing KDJ says about Shakespeare's late plays is how they are 'backward-looking', partly at his own career, like The Tempest. He was only 52 when he died but he seemed to know he had done enough. Again, not imagining myself quite in the same league, I have been spending some time reviewing the oeuvre, aged 66. Poems rarely came in battalions but single spies and they come less often than ever. But I'd rather have one worth having per year- when it used to be four- than none at all. It isn't over til it's over.    

Ungentle

 Ungentle is what one needs to be in literary studies, or anywhere else. As well as less deceived. It's exactly what Katherine Duncan-Jones is in her Ungentle Shakespeare and the book is not only well worth its place on the shortlist of Best Books in the House, it is putting up a serious challenge to her ex-husband, A.N. Wilson's Jesus to be the best book in the house.

What she brings to Shakespeare biography is 'disinterest', in the way Thom Gunn was once at pains to stress, does not mean 'not interested'. She comes with no motive or need to make Shakespeare hers or in her own image. Behind much such work is an impulse to make him like oneself - like 'happily married', 'virtuous', in line with one's own ideology- anything like that as long as one feels some kinship with the perceived greatness.

Katherine has no ulterior motive in noticing what little part women take in Shakespeare's life. She goes into great detail on many things but where many pass over the pursuit of 'armigerous status', the acquisition of a coat of arms, the issue of achieving 'gentle' status is central here. But that is almost eclipsed by how she describes his cult hero, pop star, standing among the young when at the height of his powers in the early 1600's and maybe feels that the customary tributes paid by other poets to the deceased queen and incoming king are beneath him. She is not only deeply immersed in the culture and lesser known work of the time but good enough to bring insight to bear on it.

Who knew- I didn't even though I've read this book before- that Hamlet has a companion piece in John Marston's Antonio's Revenge as well as Twelfth Night having too much in common with Marston's What You Will. There is a depth to KDJ's scholarship that is not to be found in other generally available Shakespeare biography.

She wouldn't have been aware of the discovery of a letter addressed to 'Good Mrs. Shakespaire' in London in the 1600's that has been used to claim that Anne moved to London and William lived with her there, thus establishing the happy marriage. It's not for me to dispute the provenance of the letter but it's not only Katherine that has Shakespeare lodging in Silver Street from 1604 onwards, Charles Nicholl has a whole book about the period in The Lodger. I wouldn't have thought the biggest theatrical name of the day would live with his wife in lodgings. Katherine's version of him sees him as almost itinerant in London, like a rock star on tour, while piling up assets in Stratford. 

One doesn't have to answer every question that might arise about the life but one can take the most persuasive bits of likeliness, one of which is that conjugal relations between William and Anne came to an end in the 1580's. 

If you are only going to read one book on Shakespeare's life, it ought to be this one but it might be necessary to read another one before it in order to appreciate how good it is. 

Gone So Soon

 One straightforward way to measure how much one has enjoyed a book is how long it took to read. Michael Henderson's That Will be England Gone was a quick two days. Not necessarily agreeing with it all, and maybe it lays on the lament for bygone days a bit too much in the end, it is nonetheless engaging stuff, Henderson being in a position to namedrop from high, like Simon Rattle and Harold Pinter downwards.

I don't agree that Nottingham is in the north. Henderson uses the Trent to make his north-south divide and says Nottingham feels like the north. I feel no more northern than I do southern but consider myself from the midlands. The West is bounded by Dorset, Wiltshire and Gloucestershire; the East is East Anglia and Lincolnshire; it's around Stratford that the South becomes the Midlands and about Stoke or Sheffield where the Midlands become the North.

I don't agree that Marlowe lived in Shakespeare's shadow. He's been in that shadow since a few years after his death but didn't live in it.

I can sympathize with the view that,

Oasis specialized in rancid stupidity,

but that doesn't mean they didn't make two and a half great albums before Noel ran out of ideas and Liam's gormless swagger became recondite.

I'm not entirely convinced Ian Botham was a 'Somerset man' but he's neither completely a Yorkshireman either, not having been born there, but since publication, he has been awarded the baronetcy Henderson thought him worthy of, ahead of the knighthood, if more for services to Brexit than cricket.  It is Henderson's concern for such gin-swilling, doddering delineations that make one read him increasingly cautiously, realizing that his sympathy for Larkin includes some politics and isn't only literary but in both cases one can appreciate the work while taking exception to some of the attitudes.

And Henderson laces his text with as much poetry as Jeffrey Bernard used to have vodka in his vodka and tonics. It is powerful and engaging and tremendous value for those of us of the right age to 'get it'. But we are of an age just old enough to remember the introduction of the Sunday 40-over bash, the John Player League and remember it fondly. There must have been an old guard in place then who didn't think that was cricket and so, just possibly, we are only in the same position sixty years later in finding the Hundred meaningless. It's only by a matter of degrees that sport is meaningful or meaningless and we are defined in our attitudes by our age as we are by our given names. Not many of those dutifully doing as they are told and taking an interest in the Hundred are called Michael or David.

--

So, onto the next of the shortlist of the recent Best Book in the House survey. Quite remarkably, two of the seven shortlisted authors were married, A.N. Wilson and Katherine Duncan-Jones. The latter's Ungentle Shakespeare is the equal of her husband's Jesus and 'less deceived' rigour. She allows herself some imaginings because Shakespeare biography can hardly do without some but hers are at a level beyond the wish fulfilment with which many furnish their versions, apparently trying to bend Shakespeare into the hero they want him to be. It is deeply impressive and a tremendous thing that, having bought it once, I can read it as many times as I like and look at it whenever I want to. Like now.

--

Already at August 11th, one plays one's way through a summer like Brian Close negotiating the last session of Michael Holding at the Oval. Not as resiliently and ending with fewer bruises but with survival in mind. One knows that September is not so far away but summer is stockpiling its armoury. What happens when there is no more water in one's taps, if it never rains again. I dare say it will. When Aberdeen saw no sunlight for two months earlier in the year and it rained every day, I knew what the story would be six months later. Stig Abell on Times Radio complains about the monotony. Yes, but that's a bit aesthetic, like complaining about Vivaldi all sounding the same; a bit middle-class, as if the weather should entertain us- almost like moaning about wind gathering turbines spoiling a bit of landscape when actually they are trying to gather the power that makes your fridge able to cool your pinot grigio.

If I were called on to construct a religion, I'd make use of water and, if I were a poet worth having, I might fill out a book with a poem that said so even if it wasn't one of my best. 

And truly, I say unto thee

And truly, I say unto thee, if there's a better book than A.N. Wilson's Jesus, then I haven't read it. Absolutely scintillating. I even considered acquiring The Apocryphal Gospels and The Dead Sea Scrolls, in paperback editions, to investigate further but without Andrew's insights and commentary it might not be so enlightening.

He makes the comparison with another thrilling area of biographical mystery and speculation, 

The feelings of the historian about Jesus must be analogous to his feelings about Shakespeare, who managed to achieve fame and wealth and notoriety in Elizabethan London, and who left behind him a body of literary work without parallel, but whose 'personality' remains almost invisible.

Perhaps it's the not knowing that make these two's lives - two of the most famous people that ever lived- so compelling but it's equally potentially irksome that so many myths are put in place to fill the gaps that are allowed to pass as general knowledge. I'm grateful to Andrew for the introduction to the word 'midrash', which is a Jewish term for 'filling in the gaps'. He cites a number of examples pertaining to Jesus that might appear to accommodate Old Testament prophecies after the fact but the job he does in unravelling the likely and the possible from the imaginative is brilliant.

Mary Magdalene and her friends found the tomb empty because other friends had moved the body to a preferred burial place. Subsequent sightings of Jesus, often shrouded in doubt, were of his brother, James, who took up the work that was to prove to be shortlived. Jesus preached only to make Jews better Jews, not to set up a new church. It was Paul that did that.

Another of Wilson's subjects, Tolstoy, is found to be less contradictory in his teachings. Jesus is portrayed as quarrelsome, difficult and unsuccessful in his lifetime despite the vast, misunderstood legacy he left. 

I've known plenty of sane, intelligent, well-intentioned people that genuinely believed, 'had faith in' the virgin birth, miracles and the resurrection who sincerely thought that those impossibilities happened. Even circa 1972/3, in our traditionally Christian school, such things as walking on water and the feeding of the five thousand had been rationally explained away but, as ever, people will believe what they want to believe and there ain't nothing one can do about it. I'm sure we all enjoy a bit of mysticism, a ghost story and the way the best poetry conjures something extra from the language but we all know, don't we, that there's no such thing as magic.

Wilson's book maybe ought to be regarded as the truest gospel. 

More Bach, More James

 I understand that marathon runners 'hit the wall' at about 22 miles and struggle on to the end from there. It happened to me once in a 12 Hour bike race, at maybe 10 hours, but it was only about refuelling with whatever food was to be found and I toddled on happily enough. Now that I know the marathon can be done in under two hours, maybe I'll have a go.

I wasn't expecting the same thing in the Complete Bach, though. Not until I arrived at the first disc of A Book of Chorale Settings for Johann Sebastian. It's not awful but, coming after the big oratorios and passions, it was underwhelming, a bit dull and there are a few discs of it. With a number of organ music discs still to go, I'm not going to make a priority of listening to all 172 discs within a year of acquiring them. 

I took refuge in a brilliant set of violin concertos that were vivaldistic- to coin a phrase that I hope will not enter general usage. But then the Brandenburg's were disappointing although if one is familiar with Concentus Musicus Wien/Harnoncourt then most accounts are likely to come across as less charismatic. I will soon be left with a sweeping up job in pursuit of the

complete Bach, not that it is entirely definitive, and it is not going to be onerous but the Uchida Mozart Piano Sonatas arrived today, all impudent and gregarious from the first note, and that sounds like being irresistible. Unless, there being 18 of them, one reaches that stage of enough being enough however good it is.

All the poems that Elizabeth Bishop wrote don't amount to many and if you take out all those that Larkin didn't see into print in his lifetime, he is similarly frugal. They set a fine example. One that I like to think I've tried to follow while readily acknowledging that plenty of mine went into print that wouldn't make the cut into a properly considered, much more selective Collected.

--

Meanwhile, back at The Portrait of a Lady, the way into it finally seemed to be to differentiate between the queue of Isabel's hope suitors and realizing that it was hardly likely to be a novel if she chose correctly. 'Highly Eligible Girl Marries Happily' doesn't make for 600 pages, even in Henry James. And it's equally unlikely that her choice is going to be her only imperfection.

We can take it that Lord Warburton represents money, class and England. Ralph looks like the good guy out of his depth like Giles Winterbourne in The Woodlanders, Mitch in Streetcar or even Horatio, who Ophelia might have been better off with than the self-indulgent, bookish type she found herself involved with. But, no, she marries Gilbert Osmond who, I admit, had seemed okay to me at first.

Until it's too late, of course,

He always had an eye to effect, and his effects were deeply calculated. They were produced by no vulgar means, but the motive was as vulgar as the art was great.

One is not only grateful for prose like that but an old-fashioned, omniscient narrator who tells you as much. Deeply impressive is the insight into the superficially successful man - let's say it was mostly men in those days, that,

Far from being [the world's] master as he pretended to be, he was its very humble servant, and the degree of its attention was his only measure of success.

Henry James is seriously gaining my utmost respect with all this and then, 

His ambition was not to please the world, but to please himself by exciting the world's attention and then declining to satisfy it.

and I'm in sympathy with Gilbert, in his Larkin-like plan, except it's not really an admirable thing. It's art, it's vanity and it is what's wrong with Gilbert Osmond.

Once Isabel is on the way to realizing she is unhappily married, the secondary plot of who is going to marry Osmond's daughter, Pansy, gets underway, with Lord Warburton turning out again to have another go. It recalls how Laertes wants to take revenge on Hamlet in the backwash of Hamlet bungling his own revenge on his uncle.

Henry James has got me right back onside in the second half of Portrait. Maybe it's as good as I'd hoped.   

Shakespeare in Oxford and other stories

 When one's life is one big holiday, time spent anywhere else but at home is only an excursion, not really any more of a holiday than one was having anyway. Not being in favour of travel for travel's sake, I don't go as far as I might but a few days up the road, or railtracks as it was, proved to be time well spent.

Swindon doesn't feature large on the literary map but Richard Jefferies and his museum there turned out to be a rewarding visit. Restless Human Hearts, the early three-part novel from 1875, is highly readable, clearly delineated and with pertinent passages worth quoting that, in due course, I surely will. I knew of Jefferies only from the fact that Edward Thomas wrote a book on him and that he had lived in that place by Coate Water. With the likes of Thomas Hardy for competition, success as a novelist was never going to be easy but he stuck at it with some conviction, it seems, before making more of a name as a nature writer while Thomas progressed from countryside prose to major poetry status. Having reached a suitable place at which to leave Basil Bunting aside, I'll gladly divert to the more likeable Jefferies for the foreseeable.

The bus pass gets one to Oxford and back. I don't know if it was exam time but a number of young people around town in gowns made me wonder if they still wear them while reproducing their versions of Suetonius.

I was reacquainted with the gorgeous Alfred Jewel in the Ashmolean, spent a few minutes with Walter Sickert's Brighton Pierrots so familiar from my front room and don't know why the internet can't find me the de Hooch that I'm sure I saw there in among all the ancient porcelain. But a major personal breakthrough came thanks to the kind lady in St. Michael's Church whose forebearance allowed me to expatiate on some Shakespeare biography.

The font over in the opposite corner. Shakespeare once stood next to it when it was in another church.

Yes, in St. George's.

He stood next to it at the christening of William Davenant, his godson.

Yes.

Who was born to Jane, or Jeanette, landlady of the inn where he stayed on his way from London to Stratford.

Yes.

Good. So can you tell me where that inn was, at no. 5 Cornmarket Street.

And, yes, she could. I'd been counting from the wrong end and finding a shoe shop. If you count from the other end, you find the Golden Cross, set back from the street in a courtyard and exactly the detail I was looking for.

Not only that but if you go on the right day in September, they will show you the room that Shakespeare stayed in.

I said I'm ready to accept that Shakespeare was the real father of Davenant, as later claimed by the boy. There might have been a bit of a trend for actual fathers being designated as god fathers in those days. She said, yes, in those parts it is widely believed to be so.

Without it being classed as a conspiracy theory, in any way subversive or unpatriotic. Just something that happened. And I found that most 'refreshing'.

I didn't want to outstay my welcome and appear any more of a bore than I had been already. Oxford surely has its share of them. So I'm glad I didn't think to ask whether there was any correlative local pride taken in the Earl of Oxford's claim to authorship, or that made on his behalf. Because that is a conspiracy theory, it is nonsense and it's a shame that such low-level rumour-mongering is allowed to pass as some kind of scholarship. Except it makes for a bit of a diversion, cul-de-sac though it turns out to be.

So, yes. Not a holiday but a useful day out and I felt much the better for it.   

Desert Island Books

 For a long time now I've had in mind a feature for here called The Best Book in the House. It would have been one of those 'World Cup' sort of games in which titles would qualify for the later stages from groups like Poetry, Fiction, Biography, Music, Sport, Painting, Philosophy and even Science.

There might, very approximately, be 2000 books in the house. That's not loads but, along with the CD's, space for them is becoming an issue but I like them and rarely part with any of them. But it is assumed I have all the best books I want because if I knew about any others, I'd buy them. Signed editions by Larkin, Auden, Eliot, Rosemary Tonks and Elizabeth Bishop being beyond sensible at the prices they are.

So, to cut the game short, I stood in front of the shelves one at a time and noted down likely contenders. It's a brutal way of doing it but I can't sit down and re-read them all like a Booker Prize judge. It's a competitive game and if something isn't conspicuous enough then it probably isn't a potential winner.

What came of that was a list of 20 that didn't even have Elizabeth Bishop on it. That's how cruel the process was. But the answer hasn't been arrived at yet and there is still time for decisions and revisions that a minute will reverse. In fact, there might not be an answer as such. The closest I might get is a list of Desert Island Books. From the 20, I've put stars against 7 and been left in that awful position of having too many to fit into the standard 8 so the list could well be extended to 10. I lined up the 7 that seemed to have become the essential elements. But I'm not sure.

Not on the team photo are Proust, Camus, Hardy, Hamlet, Rosemary and the copy of Touch signed by Thom Gunn in Cambridge in 1979 because it is the artefact and its significance that matters, too. As yet there are no music books but music is at its best as music and I don't listen to books, I read them, so we will see about that.

But the 7, here lined up in all their glory, are at least among the best books I've ever read.

Dubliners didn't take much thinking about. Of all prose fiction, the outrageously both most artful and most natural. Not just The Dead but the way the other stories expand towards it. James Joyce would have been as much of a hero if that was all he had written. Possibly even more so given my preference for not over-producing.

Religion doesn't feature much in my life. One has to respect that of others while finding it absurd. Jesus Christ had more impact on the world than anybody since, though, and the CofE Conservative, A.N. Wilson, is the ultimate scholar in explaining who he was, in Jesus.

Another life I've taken some interest in is Shakespeare's and it makes one wonder quite high-powered married life can be when Andrew and Katherine Duncan-Jones were husband and wife for many years. Her Ungentle Shakespeare is readily the choice on Shakespeare biography in a wide but often dubious field.

Naturally, the Collected Larkin, I don't mind which. Poetry made sensible, perhaps more than it ever had been before, and the better for it.

Dr. Johnson's Selected Essays. Why. To tell you that, sir, would be no more necessary than to tell you why you breathe. It brings life to you and sustains it.

Not Donne's poems, spectacular though they are but a choice of books about him and them in which John Carey and others are deeply impressive but I enjoyed John Stubbs the most, as I remember.

That's a similar sort of tight choice as when there can't be room for more than one book about C17th Dutch painting but one is overrun with options. So, it isn't Andrew Graham-Dixon's Vermeer or Laura Cumming's Thunderclap. It's not the Vermeer because there's more to it than that and it's not quite Laura because, like Benjamin Moser, she brings herself, and her father into the story. I was enchanted by all three books, almost as much as by the art they take as their premise but Benjamin nicked it by making me wish I lived in Utrecht and so The Upside-Down World it is.

 

It might be best to leave it at this 7 that have seemingly selected themselves rather than not be able to decide on one more and so extend it to 10, then why not 20, 50 or 100. The carnage of any selection process is horrific. What I'd like as the next choice, as ever, is a remedy for the compulsion to want to make lists.

Take a look at the lawman Beating up the wrong guy.

 It's in Life on Mars? that,

    Lennon's on sale again. 

 

And now, it would appear, so am I. Here, 

E-Bay, The Perfect Book 

 

It's remarkable what happens once books go out of print. Prices sky rocket to £4.38 plus p&p. There's always somebody ready to cash in.

Once in a while I google myself - vanity, vanity, all of it vanity- but it's not often there's anything new to be found about such a low profile poet.

It's just slightly saddening that I never took any money for those books and yet someone else would. They are cheap to get printed and I gladly gave them away to good homes. So the e-Bay seller never paid the £5 it says the book cost on the back. I have only the vaguest of ideas of how it might be in Guildford with a book by Maggie Sawkins, also of this parish.

But good luck to them. It might not be that the book was unappreciated. It could conceivably be that a genuine poetry lover has died and their family have less interest in this obscurest of titles.

But there is no need to pay £7.08 for it.

Yes, it is officially out of print but I could probably find you a copy if you wanted one.   

--

Much more dispiriting is what reaction 'twins theory', at Strange Fowl gets when it gets any.

For most it is unthinkable, 'bizarre' and almost, one might think, disloyal to the point of insurrectionist. But we're not like that at all. Mr. Curtis and I are entirely compos mentis and only ask if our modest proposal is disprovable.

Strange Fowl continues to add up, for me, and there are those Oxfordians, conspiracy theorists and much more of a host of those who don't believe in William Shakespeare that I ever imagined. And, distressingly, really, it is the likes of them from who we get some support.

They are welcome, of course. Few campaigns turn away any followers except we are exiled in mainstream, we are among the Stratfordian faithful and have nothing more dangerous to offer than some adjustment in Shakespeare's biography to the number of children he may or may not have been the biological father of.

And yet there is more in the news about the authorship question and The Real Shakespeare: Emilia Bassano Willoughby by Irene Coslet who,

comes to Shakespeare as an expert in feminism. She has studied feminism for 20 years and has been involved in the promotion of gender equality in multiple organisations and countries around the world. 

and I'm impressed that she does. But her reading of Shakespeare makes her a perfect fit for the tendency identified by Jonathan Bate that we all make Shakespeare into who we would like him to be, as per Virginia Woolf,

that all Shakespearean biography is veiled autobiography.

 

I'm not at all confident that modest proposals, carefully threaded together by gently thoughtful people, are loud enough to be heard any more. That is by no means a reason to give up on them but it might be a reason to put it in place once and for all and let the world go to bad if that's what it is intent on doing.  

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.  

From Elvis to Cliff via Bach and Shakespeare

 I had no idea how Elvis Costello's career had taken him into the higher echelons of pop music aristocracy and being such good mates with Dylan, McCartney, Bacharach and how, in the end, he,

ended up making four times more albums for DG than...for Stiff Records 

(DG being Deutsche Grammophon, not me).

I'm not saying his talent shouldn't have put him there and he takes his art very seriously but those first albums are so deeply imprinted on me that it doesn't matter how good all that later work is, I'm not going to 'get it' in quite the same way.

--

A section of upstairs ceiling fell in the other day. In the small room of jumbled archives and deep library stock. Twenty years ago when rainwater got into the same area it did more damage to books and manuscripts than this time. The novels from the second half of the alphabet got lucky. And I also got lucky in finding friendly roofers and a plasterer who will shore up the roof and ceiling against my ruin.

Whatever other anxieties there are jostling for my attention, visions of the house falling down around me, like Buster Keaton's did, are the price one pays for a vivid imagination. Maybe it won't come to that.

-- 

Back with lower grade pangs of anxiety, R3's broadcast of Bach's Christmas Oratorio last night put into context the Top 6 Christmas Special, below. Of course it's not Sabrina Carpenter over and above Bach but mine was a 'pop' list although I entirely appreciate that music should not recognize boundaries and maybe shouldn't have been.

--

Gladly, though, the Strange Fowl website has found some support for 'twins theory', the idea that Hamnet and Judith, born to Anne Hathaway, were not biologically Shakespeare's children. It's taken some time to attract any such sympathy, like nine and a half years since it first appeared in print in the TLS letters page. 

Almost inevitably, our sympathizer comes from a radical tradition and sees a lot of things very differently to the traditionally presented and thus generally accepted ways that things are said to be. It's vaguely comparable to Jeremy Corbyn agreeing with an imaginative idea put forward by a couple of commonsense centrists. But, having had nothing but dismissive abuse in what little reaction we've had, it's good to have someone capable of taking the point. It's a point that we don't doggedly defend at all costs but put up as a theory for consideration.

A lot of people seem to think what they think and would rather keep thinking it than adjust their opinion. But, as Cliff sang in Some People, we're

      not like that at all.

   There are worse Cliff songs to leave here over Christmas. 

The Complete Hardy 4: A Pair of Blue Eyes

I diagnose the reason why I don't appreciate Jane Austen as being that I can't tell which aspects of the characters' behaviour are intended as comedy and which are social conventions of Jane's time that she regards as entirely to be expected. A similar problem comes about in A Pair of Blue Eyes in which 32 year old Henry Knight can't accept that his first girlfriend, the 19 year old Elfride, has been kissed before. It's worse than that, though, the widow, Mrs Jethway, blames Elfride for the death of her young son who was also smitten but who received less encouragement previously. And the suitor in between, Stephen Smith, was quite naturally an old friend of Knight. One would never wish a Hardy story to be short of complications and they are only the most of them.

In a way, not being able to be sure quite unworldly Hardy thought his characters to be is in keeping with the ambivalence of how relatively tragic and comic the novel is. The two rivals, both dispossessed of the beloved but equally interested in returning home to Cornwall to relaim her ahead of the other, are surely a hapless double act- and somehow we by then realize they must be- before entirely forseeably neither is the winner.

It is no more absurd or demanding of our suspension of disbelief than any of the later catalogues of twists of fate that make up the framework of Hardy's art and he sets up some memorable set piece situations on it. Perhaps my favourite is Knight and Elfride watching the return of Stephen on the ship, the landbound and seagoing parties watching each other through telescopes but there's a huge amount to enjoy, as ever, in the fabric of the writing and the dynamics of the social relationships involved. 

A note on Hardy's names is also due. Like Shakespeare who never missed an opportunity with even minor characters like Moth, Osric, Bushy, Bagot and Green, in this book - just for one example- Hardy delineates class status with names like Luxellian, Swancourt, Knight, Smith and Worm to leave little doubt about birthrights. 

It's a brilliant book.

-

What remains of the Hardy project are novels I've read before but so long ago that a reminder is overdue but still anticipated with great enthusiasm. The Hand of Ethelberta, Two on a Tower and Under the Greenwood Tree will follow.

Thomas Hardy - An Imaginative Woman

I recorded much of the archive Thomas Hardy material shown on BBC4 recently and it's providing a fine resource for when none of the hundreds of TV channels are showing anything better than an Only Fools and Horses that one is almost word perfect in parts of. 

I've got and have read The Collected Stories if not every single one of the novels but I read them in later life, not aged about 15 or 16 when I read The Woodlanders which I recall in all its detail as if it were yesterday, so An Imaginative Woman rang no bells whatsoever. 

Starring Claire Bloom, it featured a lady somewhat dutifully married who finds herself staying in rooms temporarily vacated by her favourite poet, a Romantic looking sort called Robert Trewe. Now, I've been besotted by the work of a few poets before if not necessarily the poets themselves but never, I think, to such an extent.

The story is in the book upstairs, for sure, but memory of it I had none despite its deeply profound implications and, unavoidably in Hardy, desperate outcome. I cannot recommend it too highly and we will see one day if a re-read puts it anywhere near The Dead at the apex of the all-time prose fiction list.

As ever, it comes with the caveat that we can treat the 'art' and the artist as separate entities and avoid conflating them. The difference between how Hardy treated women in his writing compared to in life is vast but we would have to disqualify an awful lot of a lot of awful people - the majority of them men, I dare say - that produced seminal artworks in all genres that cultural history can't be written without reference to.

I'm not entirely convinced Shakespeare was anywhere near the worst of them, though. Not for writing The Taming of the Shrew, not for the deal his wife got from his will and not even for the disgust at female sexuality one can find evidence of in the plays. They aren't items one wants on one's 'woke cred' CV but they have for the most part been answered. 

Cardenio

 I keep reading Don Quixote with at least the completion of part 1 as a target while waiting for other titles that are likely to be more exciting. It does seem episodic to the point of the same absurdity as its repetitive episodes but the nature of humour changes - or perhaps it doesn't given that the likes of Some Mothers Do Have 'Em and Last of the Summer Wine extended one joke across lots of episodes.

However, the story of Cardenio, the lost Shakespeare play, is in it and one can see how it might have lent itself to such treatment. I think I once read that the lost play might have also been the putative, also lost, Love's Labours Won but unless Cardenio's story is turned around by further chapters, it won't have been.

 

One needs to be reading a book or else such dreariness as dutiful household chores could be allowed to be one's life but a loud noise in the porch at lunchtime announced an avalanche of post that, once sifted for items of interest, revealed Shostakovich Plays Shostakovich in those inestimable Preludes and Fugues that have been top of the playlist in recent days, as well as Purcell's Dido and Aeneas with Kisten Flagstad and Elizabeth Schwarzkopf, as heard as a question on Face the Music the other week. So, although these are further recordings of pieces I already have on the shelves, they are much more essential than having to create further shelf space for Bruckner, Mahler, Wagner, Korngold and maybe even Vaughan-Williams.

I think it's gonna be a long, long time before I see through that Shostakovich piano music. At the moment, guys and gals, Tatiana Nikolayeva is number one and Top of the Pops and it will be of interest how the composer played his own music with remotely expecting him to be better than she was.

The Arden Hamlet and other stories

Chichester's Oxfam bookshop had a copy of the Arden Hamlet whereas I had no such free-standing edition of this play of all plays and so now I have.

Even William Empson, the great footnoter, would envy Harold Jenkins whose 574-page book devotes 260 to the play, where half of each is taken up with small print below, the Introduction being 160 pages and the Longer Notes amounting to 153. And for the most part it is 'more matter with less art'. I thought I knew plenty about Hamlet having once counted about 30 productions of it but some of the greatness of some great things lies in their bottomless quality.

The potential for scholarship is helped in no small part by the need to establish which text we are reading and why with the First Quarto being understood to be made of partially remembered parts taken from actors, the second from the 'foul papers' in which Shakespeare might have blotted lines but copyists, compositors and editors are more usually made culpable and the Folio being what those editors decided to go with. The murky world of the supernatural, the feigned madness, the nocturnal action and all the uncertainties of a 400-year old text are only made more elusive by not having an autograph manuscript certified by the author as his finalised version but in due course we have an artwork to scrutinize.

It had come to my notice already that the revenge theme is not only doubled by Laertes being set up to take revenge on Hamlet for the unwitting murder of his father, Polonius, but is trebled by the whole play being framed by the revenge of Fortinbras on Denmark for the defeat of his father by King Hamlet thirty years earlier. However, in a play constructed so much around 'doublings', Reynaldo is sent to France to spy on Laertes in the same way as Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are employed to fathom what Hamlet is up to, which only augments the atmosphere of suspicion, paranoia and counter-espionage that government in any age is, perhaps necessarily, obsessed with.

That thirty year gap specifically puts Hamlet's age at thirty which is compatible with a dilettante prince with not much more to do than wile away time at university and read 'words, words, words'. That it doesn't seem entirely consistent with one referred to as 'young', Harold Jenkins links in any such possible inconsistencies with the early characterisation of Fortinbras as hot-headed compared to the dignified commander he is presented as in the end as,

a kind of consistency Shakespeare hadn't bothered to supply, 

which looks like the sort of thing one can be excused if you are Shakespeare but wouldn't be in most others.

Jenkins is persuasive in interpreting,

that it is Hamlet that rejects Ophelia's love and not she his,

which is entirely consistent with Hamlet's disgust at the ways of the world, the 'contagion', the 'sterile promontory' he sees it as and, in one of the more important-looking sources, the melancholy of Timothy Bright's Treatise of Melancholy (1586) in which the world, like Denmark, is perceived as a prison. The disgust at procreation, Gertrude's lustful 'incest' with Claudius and all the Get thee to a nunnery diatribe might even, for some biographers, be a clue to Shakespeare's own misogyny. It could be tempting to associate one who was so gifted with words to have a compensating downside in some sort of personality disorder, as could have been the case with Mozart's and Beethoven's inordinate capacities for music but social misfit tendencies. However, if Hamlet is seen as prevaricating, lacking purpose and prone to moodiness, 

the contrast with Laertes is not one by which Hamlet is disparaged,

mostly because,

both meet their deaths because Hamlet is too magnanimous to 'peruse the foils', Laertes mean enough to take advantage of it.

It is in the Murder of Gonzago that poison poured into the ear is where the unlikely murder method comes from but the real life precedent was rumoured to be the murder of the Duke of Urbino in 1538. 

If Shakespeare always found wonderful names for even such minor characters as Moth, Bushy, Bagot, Tybalt and Bottom, the various sources and significances of those in Hamlet are all covered here and most of what one needs to know for a much fuller appreciation than that most of us had to be awarded an 'Advanced Level' qualification many, many years ago. 

Maybe it's too big for 'A' level, as Ulysses or Ezra Pound might also be. Of all the essential lines learnt in order to cite in the exam, to show we'd read it, I don't remember 'Hyperion to a satyr' being one of them but that might be more pertinent to what Hamlet means, more than 'something is rotten in the state of Denmark'. By now it seems that humanity was still a bit too ready to flatter itself that it lay halfway between gods and animal instincts.

But, in the end, presented with so much chapter and verse, I feel retrospectively a bit robbed. It was possibly at my unsuccessful interview to do English at Exeter University that I was asked what Hamlet was about, then. 

Harold Jenkins, given the monumental responsibility of editing the Arden Hamlet, concludes that it is,

the intermingling of good and evil in all life.

That's not far from what I said but it wasn't good enough for Exeter and I had to take the long hike to Lancaster which wasn't at the time credited with the high achievement it has been in recent years. Week 1 was given over to 'how to write a sentence' or some such given thing, such were their doubts about their intake. But that train has long gone. I'd like to think that the Chichester Oxfam shop continues to fill in some bits I missed. 

They didn't have a Don Quixote last week but that is an Autumn project, now ordered from the Library in the hope I can do 800 pages before it needs renewing. And also, The Scapegoat by Lucy Hughes-Hallett, the story of George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham, Portsmouth's most eminent murder victim. It does begin to look as though one drawback of being privileged is that people will try to kill you and sometimes succeed.

Strange Fowl

Strange Fowl 

 

It is with some trepidation but no little rejoicing that Strange Fowl is released into the world after its extended period of gestation.

It is eight years since its appearance in the TLS letters page after some early mentions here but now it arrives in its fullest version which will be further augmented, edited or amended as we go.

It's hard to know how best to promote it, or how much we'd like to, but it is to be hoped that those with an interest in such things will find it in due course and it's there now, as ready as it will ever be to suffer the slings and arrows of the Shakespeare biography industry.

That's fine. It is a 'modest proposal' and not, we think, an outrageous one.

 

On behalf of the band, I hope we passed the audition.  

Opus 1

It said here a few months ago that Ethel Smyth arrived fully formed with her op. 1 String Quintet. It's been the Beethoven Piano Trios on my turntable for much of the summer, the first of which are op. 1, no. 1 and no. 2. Written in 1793, that makes him 22 when he wrote them. He arrives in mature condition, too. However forbidding he might sometimes appear in portraits or his more strident music, the slow movements in all these trios are anything but and he effortlessly takes on Mozart's legacy throughout.

Mozart's own opus, or Kochel, 1 is a formal exercise for Piano Minuet and if it lacks some of the depth of the Smyth and the Beethoven we might bear in mind he wrote it when he was 5.

So, the question of opus 1 brings with it a few different 'types' of artist. Some know what they are doing from the beginning, or wait until they do before publishing anything- which is a good idea; others develop from a starting point and improve markedly, yet others - perhaps more in pop music or literature than 'classical' music - have a good idea but fail to follow it up with anything as convincing, either trying to repeat the trick with diminishing returns or not finding anything else to compare with their one brilliant idea.

I've seen it suggested that some very successful pop acts can stretch the success of a debut album into a second, the point being that the first contained all their best stuff and the second is the next best plus whatever they've written since. Oasis fell apart when the third album was only half any good and that's what they were ever after. Charles Shaar Murray was wheeled out by a tabloid newspaper to review Be Here Now, heralded as a major cultural event, but he was in the minority in believing the hype and, basically, got it wrong. 

It might not be entirely correct to make The Catcher in the Rye Salinger's op. 1 but it might as well be for all that his other work is read by any beyond his devotees. Such early success so readily achieved can be a burden and the apprenticeships served by the Beatles in Hamburg, Handel in Italy, Bach in Lubeck and perhaps T.S. Eliot with Ezra Pound look like sound investments.

But, however impressive it is to arrive with a mature opus 1, one can't remain at square one without it soon becoming 'samey'. One possible way of differentiating the genuine artist from the box office provider is the capacity to move on and do the next things equally well. Beethoven did that and I might have found a reason to put him above Handel who delivered awesome opera and oratorios and a grand style but some might say without having Beethoven's range and depth. Once we are at that level, though, fault finding starts to look a bit over fussy.

Arvo Part could be said to have had two, or maybe three, careers or phases moving with fashion, up to a point, until finding the music that he is now famous for. Shakespeare did not turn up with his best work first, whether we think that was Titus Andronicus or Henry VI, and that ought to be Quod Erat Demonstrandum. If Beethoven had his Mozart, Bach his Buxtehude, Handel his Corelli, where would Shakespeare have been without Kit Marlowe.

Nobody just turns up and does it. Everything comes from something else.

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.

Eureka Moment

On Tuesday I picked up Shakespeare, The Player, a Life in the Theatre by John Southworth in the ever worthwhile Oxfam Bookshop in Chichester. It's not as if I don't have plenty of books on Shakespeare biography already but one never knows what might come out of the next one. In this one, the life as an actor is pieced together with the usual makeshift methods of applying conjecture and supposition to a few established details but Southworth has a healthy disregard for some of the myths, legends and hearsay and has done more of his own original research to support his version of events. He has the dates of which theatre companies visited Stratford and when as well as noting a number of echoes in early Shakespeare plays from parts in Marlowe and Thomas Kyd that might have crept in from lines he had learnt.

All such work depends on the reader accepting the author's reasoning and many won't if the theory doesn't align with what they want to believe but some authors come with more credibility and cogent case-making than others and Southworth is more persuasive than most. I don't ask for much more than I already have in life but one thing I have been in search of is 'evidence' or something like it that Shakespeare wasn't in Stratford in 1584 at the time he needed to be to father the twins his wife gave birth to in February 1585. And this account has Shakespeare joining up with Worcester's Men, aged 16, and thus touring with them for an apprenticeship that would last seven years.

While he necessarily has William in Stratford when he needs to be to be because he assumes he is Hamnet and Judith's father, that is only because he thinks it is necessary but it is getting Shakespeare out of Stratford so early that is significant. It's what I've always wanted. It's nothing to do with poaching deer or going to teach in Lancashire, it's the move into the theatre with enough time to learn all about the business before beginning to provide the industry with plays of his own. This is very much the missing link required by Strange Fowl, the essay that has been so long a work-in-progress and a few paragraphs inserted will make it look so much better.

Of course it will not convince those who don't want to be convinced. It is a theory, not even originally my theory, but I can't find fault with it and nobody else has yet successfully done so either. This 'discovery' feels very like that significant jigsaw moment when a crucial piece fits in and it makes me much happier that it perhaps ought to but it is like finding something that one wasn't even sure was there to be found. I will return to Strange Fowl in due course with renewed enthusiasm. As with poems, or music, it matters less what anybody else makes of it - one can't help that- but I am the boy who got just what he always wanted.