William Wordsworth soon spread the word that in the Sonnets, ‘Shakespeare expresses his own feelings in his own person.’ He made this point more memorably in his poem ‘Scorn not the Sonnet’ where he writes, ‘with this key, Shakespeare unlocked his heart’. Wordsworth saw no contradiction between his belief that these Elizabethan poems were thoroughly autobiographical and his admission that he had held off publishing his own auto biographical poem, The Prelude, because it was ‘a thing unprecedented in literary history that a man should talk so much about himself’. He had found a Romantic precursor in this newly minted Shakespeare.
Others scrambled aboard. A contributor to Blackwood’s Magazine confidently claimed in 1818 that the Sonnets are ‘invaluable, beyond any thing else of Shakespeare’s poetry, because they give us little notices, and occasional glimpses of our own kindred feelings, and of some of the most interesting events and situations of his life’. A long piece on the Sonnets in New Monthly Magazine in 1835 – ‘The Confessions of William Shakespeare’ – took things a step further, calling the Sonnets ‘personal confessions’ and breathlessly describing their triangular love-plots. Who could resist such voyeuristic pleasures? With the Sonnets, ‘we seem to stand by the door of the confessional, and listen to the most secret secrets of the heart of Shakespeare’.
Word spread to America, where Emerson, in his influential Representative Men (1850), wondered: ‘Who ever read the volume of the Sonnets without finding that the poet had there revealed, under masks that are no masks to the intelligent, the lore of friendship and of love?’ By the mid-nineteenth century, the critical heavyweights on both sides of the Atlantic – the Schlegels, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Heine and Emerson – had all embraced the position first suggested by Malone. According to John Keats’s close friend Charles Armitage Brown, author of Shakespeare’s Autobiographical Poems (1838), the Sonnets were ‘pure uninterrupted biography’. The Bard’s life was now an open book.
A handful of dissenters struggled, with little success, to challenge this new consensus. Thomas Campbell complained in 1829 that the Sonnets were ‘insignificant as an index’ to Shakespeare’s biography, and rejected the argument that ‘they unequivocally paint his passions, and the true character of his sentiments’. He tried again a few years later, this time more bluntly: ‘Shakespeare’s sonnets give us no access to his personal history.’ His words fell on deaf ears, as did Robert Browning’s rebuttal of Wordsworth’s ‘Scorn Not the Sonnet’:
With this same key
Shakespeare unlocked his heart,” once more!’
Did Shakespeare? If so, the less Shakespeare he!
By 1856, the battle was all but over. As David Masson put it in that year, ‘Criticism seems now pretty conclusively to have determined … that the Sonnets of Shakespeare are, and can possibly be, nothing else than a poetical record of his own feelings and experience.’ There was no longer any doubt that the poems ‘are autobiographic – distinctly intensely, painfully autobiographic’.
Once critics began reading the Sonnets as confessional, they began to turn their attention to the unnamed shadowy figures alluded to in the poems on the assumption that Shakespeare had actual people in mind when the various speakers of the Sonnets complained about dark ladies, young men and rival poets. George Chalmers, an enemy of Malone and a believer in the Ireland forgeries, got this biographical competition off to a strong start by arguing in 1797 that all the Sonnets had been addressed to Queen Elizabeth herself. Countless others soon went about uncovering the identity of the ‘only begetter’ of the Sonnets, the mysterious ‘W. H.’; at least they had initials to go by, and the dedication apparently had a real, if elusive, individual in mind.
Malone himself was among the earliest to hazard a guess as to the identity of that ‘better spirit’ of ‘Sonnet 80’, the talented literary rival ‘to whom even Shakespeare acknowledges himself inferior’. Malone concluded that it had to be Edmund Spenser, and to support this claim devoted over a third of his unfinished biography of Shakespeare to the relationship of the two poets. George Chalmers, who could never bring himself to agree with Malone, did so this time. Others weren’t so sure, and placed bets on Samuel Daniel, Michael Drayton, George Chapman, Christopher Marlowe, Ben Jonson and a host of others. Another insisted that they were all wrong: surely Chaucer was the great rival Shakespeare had in mind.
The lists of Elizabethan Dark Ladies, Young Men, and those with the initials W.H., H.W., W.S., or some similar combination were even longer. The parlour game that began with Malone is still avidly played, with hardly a year going by without another fresh name trotted out. It would take pages to list them all, the equivalent of an Elizabethan census. The most innocent and metaphorical utterances of the fictive speakers of Shakespeare’s poems were interpreted as biographical fact. Was Shakespeare syphilitic, as hinted at in ‘Sonnet 144’? Did the author of ‘Sonnet 37’ (which speaks of being ‘made lame by Fortune’s dearest spite’) walk with a limp? Did Shakespeare hate prostituting his talents onstage, as Malone claimed he confessed in ‘Sonnet 111’? Who needed to wrestle with the Sonnets’ dense language, when it was possible to make one’s literary reputation unlocking the biographical secrets they contained?
By the mid-nineteenth century, the obsession with autobiographical titbits had all but displaced interest in the aesthetic pleasures of the poems themselves. Wordsworth had famously described the Sonnets as a ‘key’. Coleridge suggested that one of the poems (probably ‘Sonnet 20’, the most explicitly homoerotic) was a ‘purposed blind’. Emerson spoke of these poems as ‘masks that are no masks to the intelligent’. And following the invention of the telegraph and Morse code, a new and ominous metaphor was introduced to describe the way in which Shakespeare deliberately concealed autobiographical traces: for Robert Willmott, writing in 1858, the ‘Sonnets are a chapter of autobiography, although remaining in cipher till criticism finds the key’.
The best contemporary explanation I have come across for this frenzy of biographical detection – and it is worth quoting at length – is offered by Anna Jameson, in her Memoirs of the Loves of the Poets, published in 1829. Jameson was at least honest about her motives, admitting that it’s ‘natural to feel an intense and insatiable curiosity relative to great men, a curiosity and interest for which nothing can be too minute, too personal’. Yet the few facts of Shakespeare’s life left her hungry for more:
I felt no gratification, no thankfulness to those whose industry had raked up the very few particulars which can be known. It is too much, and it is not enough: it disappoints us in one point of view – it is superfluous in another: what need to surround with the common-place, trivial associations, registers of wills and genealogies, and I know not what.
Missing was the only thing that really mattered: that which could connect us to ‘a presence and a power … diffused through all time, and ruling the heart and the fancy with an incontrollable and universal sway!’ The desire to feel that presence, experience a sense of intimacy with Shakespeare, was not going to go away simply because not enough facts about his personal life were known. It was easier for critics who shared that desire to make stuff up rather than admit defeat.
Soon enough, what started with the Sonnets migrated to the plays, though the claim that Shakespeare was speaking for himself through his dramatic characters was more difficult to sustain. John Keats was among the first to do when he wrote that Shakespeare’s ‘days were not more happy than Hamlet’s, who is perhaps more like Shakespeare himself in his common everyday life than any other of his characters’. It was but a short step from here to Keats’s self-identification with both Hamlet and Shakespeare: ‘Hamlet’s heart was full of such misery as mine is when he said to Ophelia, “Go to a nunnery, go, go!”’ Coleridge made the case more simply and directly: ‘I have a smack of Hamlet myself, if I may say so.’ Over-identification on the part of Shakespeare’s biographers had mutated into an over-identification on the part of his readers.
Critics began identifying moments
when Shakespeare accidentally slips out of writing in character and into self-revealing autobiography. Coleridge, for example, was sure that this was the case with Capulet’s lines in Romeo and Juliet:
Such comfort as do lusty young men feel
When well-appareled April on the heel
Of limping winter treads, even such delight
Among fresh female buds shall you this night
Inherit at my house.
(1.2.26–30)
‘Other passages more happy in illustrating this’, he adds, ‘might be adduced where the poet forgets the character and speaks in his own person.’ Coleridge was also the first to suggest that Prospero, the great image of artistic authority in the nineteenth century, ‘seems a portrait of the bard himself’ – a claim that would echo, with increasing volume, through the rest of the nineteenth century.
Coleridge was also the first to take the ultimate biographical leap: reading the trajectory of the entire canon of Shakespeare’s plays as a story of the poet’s psychological development. For as Coleridge himself recognised, he was ‘inclined to pursue a psychological, rather than a historical, mode of reasoning’ (and in doing so, was not only the first to use this new term ‘psychological’ in its modern sense, but also one of the first to engage in psychobiography). In February 1819, Coleridge sketched out before an audience at the Crown and Anchor Tavern on the Strand his theory of the five eras of Shakespeare’s creative life, scrambling the established chronology of the canon to suit this more psychologically compelling biographical narrative. According to Coleridge, Shakespeare began with the late romances (Pericles, The Winter’s Tale, Cymbeline) as well as a few of the comedies (Comedy of Errors, A Midsummer Night’s Dream and, surprisingly, All’s Well), then worked through the history plays, before arriving at his major era in which he ‘gives all the graces and facilities of a genius in full possession and habit of power’ – and this mixed group includes The Tempest, As You Like It, The Merchant of Venice and Twelfth Night. In the end, a triumphant Shakespeare climbs to the ‘summit’, the great run of tragedies, Lear, Hamlet, Macbeth and Othello. Following this great climb is the inevitable descent, ‘when the energies of intellect in the cycle of genius were though in a rich and potenziated form becoming predominant over passion and creative self-modification’ – and to this final stage of Shakespeare’s career Coleridge consigns Measure for Measure, as well as most of the classical and Roman plays: Timon of Athens, Coriolanus, Julius Caesar, Antony and Cleopatra and Troilus and Cressida.
Others would modify or build upon this model, including Henry Hallam, who in 1837 turned this into a more melodramatic story: ‘There seems to have been a period of Shakespeare’s life when his heart was ill at ease, and ill content with the world or his own conscience.’ As ‘the memory of hours misspent, the pang of affection misplaced or unrequited … sank down into the depths of his great mind’, they ‘seem not only to have inspired into it the character of Lear and Timon, but that of one primary character, the censurer of mankind’ – a version of Shakespeare’s self which is projected through a series of characters, from Jaques in As You Like It, up through Hamlet, Lear and Timon.
It wasn’t long before an autobiographical canon-within-a-canon had emerged, with a half-dozen works attracting almost all the attention of those wishing to trace the life in the works, from Shakespeare as lover in Romeo and Juliet and the Sonnets, to the brooding, depressed and misunderstood Jaques, Timon, Lear and especially Hamlet of Shakespeare in the depths, to the triumphant and serene artist, Prospero, whose decision to break his staff and abandon his art prefigures Shakespeare’s own retirement to Stratford. It was a great story and would have a long half-life, even if it didn’t leave much room for characters or plays that couldn’t be shoehorned into this plot, so that Titus Andronicus, Pericles, The Comedy of Errors and a couple of dozen others were left largely untouched by biographical speculators. Scholarship had stumbled off course the moment that Malone used ‘Sonnet 93’ to introduce conjectural readings of both life and work, and the Romantics who followed in Malone’s errant footsteps rapidly and irrevocably transformed how Shakespeare’s poems and plays would be read.
*
Only one thing could have arrested all of this biographical speculation: admitting that a surprising number of the plays we call Shakespeare’s were written collaboratively. For there’s no easy way to argue that a co-authored play, especially one in which it’s hard to untangle who wrote which part, can be read autobiographically. The problem of collaboration has bedevilled Shakespeare studies for over three hundred years, ever since the editors of the second impression of the Third Folio, published in 1664, added seven plays to the thirty-six included in the First and Second Folios of Shakespeare’s collected works: Pericles, The London Prodigal, The History of Thomas Lord Cromwell, Sir John Oldcastle, The Puritan Widow, A Yorkshire Tragedy and The Tragedy of Locrine. Though some readers may have believed that these plays didn’t feel Shakespearean, there was corroborative evidence for at least some of them on the title pages of quarto editions published during Shakespeare’s lifetime.
Things got even messier when editors began to question Shakespeare’s authorship of some of the plays that Heminges and Condell had published under his name, and his name only, in 1623. The first to do so was the Restoration dramatist Edward Ravenscroft, who in his 1678 adaptation of Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus wrote that he had ‘been told by some anciently conversant with the stage, that it was not originally his, but brought by a private author to be acted, and he only gave some master-touches to one or two of the principal parts or characters’. When the poet Alexander Pope brought out a major edition of Shakespeare’s plays in 1725, he rejected as spurious all seven of the plays that had been added to the Third and Fourth Folios – and admitted to doubts even about some of the canonical plays: ‘I should conjecture of some of the others (particularly Love’s Labour’s Lost, even The Winter’s Tale, Comedy of Errors, and Titus Andronicus), that only some characters, single scenes, or perhaps a few particular passages were of his hand.’ Pope concluded that these plays long attributed to Shakespeare ‘were pieces produced by unknown authors’; posterity had assigned these bastard offspring to Shakespeare much ‘as they give strays to the Lord of the manor’.
For a while, at least, the canon continued to shrink. Lewis Theobald questioned the legitimacy of Henry the Fifth in 1734. Thomas Hanmer did the same with Two Gentlemen of Verona in 1743. Two years later Samuel Johnson deemed Richard the Second suspect and soon after Richard Farmer rejected The Taming of the Shrew. The Second and Third Part of Henry the Sixth were challenged as well, with some, like Capell, excusing them (and King John) as ‘first drafts’, while others, like Bishop Warburton, urged that they be excluded from the canon. While editors at this time knew from the title pages of a handful of mostly Jacobean plays that some non-Shakespearean drama had been jointly written, the thought never seems to have occurred to them that Shakespeare could have willingly collaborated with other playwrights. Disputed plays, then, were either in or out, Shakespeare’s or someone else’s.
Malone, like every other editor in his day, was keenly interested in authorship and attribution. He published a dissertation in 1787 on the Henry the Sixth plays in which he concluded that the early versions of these plays that survive in quarto – The Contention and The True Tragedy – were probably written by Robert Greene and George Peele respectively. Committed to examining the disputed plays in a thorough way, he edited and republished for the first time the seven disputed plays appended to the Third Folio. His objective was to distinguish the counterfeit from the real Shakespeare: ‘Though nearly a century-and-a-half have elapsed since the death of Shakespeare, it is somewhat extraordinary, that none of his general editors should have attempted to separate his genuine poetical compositions from the spurious performances with which they have been so long intermixed.’ The works were mixtures then, not compounds, easily separated into what was Shakespeare’s and what was not. Inclus
ion in the canon should be based on a principle of how much could be deemed Shakespearean. Pericles was included, since ‘if not the whole, at least the greater part of that drama was written by our author’, while on similar grounds, Titus was definitely out, since Malone didn’t believe a single line of it to be Shakespeare’s.
Malone stood head and shoulders above his predecessors in his response to the challenge posed by disputed plays – at least until 1790, the year he published his first solo edition of Shakespeare’s works. For in that year, just as he was submitting final pages to the press, the greatest discovery ever made about the Elizabethan stage fell into his hands: the records of Philip Henslowe, owner of the Rose Theatre. Henslowe’s Diary contained almost everything we now know about the staging of plays in Shakespeare’s day: how frequently the repertory changed, how many plays a company bought and performed every year, how much was spent on costumes, even how long it took to write a play. It was an amazing document, and nobody knew it better than Malone, into whose hands it was delivered from Dulwich College, where it had been discovered. The most significant revelation contained within the Diary concerned the collaborative nature of Elizabethan playwriting, at least for the rivals of Shakespeare’s company, the Admiral’s Men, for the overwhelming majority of plays were co-authored, by two, three, four or more playwrights working together.
Contested Will Page 7