Contested Will

by James Shapiro

  I left the Globe wondering what mainstream biographers might say in response to Oxfordians who insist that Edward de Vere had a stronger claim to have written Hamlet and Lear, since – unlike the glover’s son from Stratford – he had been captured by pirates and had three daughters. I can readily understand why this is a conversation that Shakespeareans who believe that autobiographical evidence counts are reluctant to have. But refusing to acknowledge that they have been doing similar things in their own books – even if their topical readings are far less fanciful and the author whose life they read out of the works is the one named on the title pages – rightly infuriates those who don’t believe that Shakespeare of Stratford had the life experience to write the plays. I was left wondering whether Shakespeare scholars ignore their adversaries (when not vilifying them) because they share with them more unspoken assumptions about the intersection of life and literature than they care to admit – and indeed, were the first to profess. If they would concede as much, they might well conclude, as Prospero said of Caliban, ‘This thing of darkness I acknowledge mine.’ Perhaps it’s time to shift our attention from debating who wrote Shakespeare’s works to whether it’s possible to discover the author’s emotional, sexual and religious life through them.

  The evidence strongly suggests that imaginative literature in general and plays in particular in Shakespeare’s day were rarely if ever a vehicle for self-revelation. With the exception of confessions of faith and some lyric poetry, autobiography as a genre and as an impulse was extremely unusual. And even in instances when sixteenth-century lyric poets like Edmund Spenser or George Gascoigne speak about themselves, it is in the tradition of the invented persona adopted by Chaucer in his Canterbury Tales or Dante in his Divine Comedy, as characters in their own fictions rather than anything resembling what we now understand as autobiographical. Those who have scoured the period for evidence of autobiographical writing have come up almost empty-handed. In his pioneering study of the origins of British autobiography, Paul Delaney found little in the sixteenth century, and even when he turned to the seventeenth century he could find only two hundred examples, half of which were ‘religious autobiographies’. In her recent and promisingly titled Tudor Autobiography, Meredith Skura has revisited this barren ground, but even with a considerably looser definition of autobiographical writing she located only a dozen or so Tudor writers ‘who found ways to incorporate their lives into a sermon, a saint’s life, courtly and popular verse, a history book, a traveler’s report, a husbandry book’ – everything, it seems, but a play.

  Those who believe that Elizabethan plays were autobiographical ought to be able to show that contemporaries were on the lookout for confessional allusions, as we know some were for topical ones. Yet not a single such contemporary observation survives for any play in the period, including Shakespeare’s; however much on the minds of modern biographers, it doesn’t appear to have occurred to Elizabethan playgoers. It’s hard to avoid concluding that autobiographical details Shakespeare is alleged to have embedded in the plays are a lot like Baconian ciphers: something hidden there for posterity, about which contemporaries were oblivious, but that hundreds of years later brilliant detective work can uncover and decode.

  Even if Shakespeare occasionally drew in his poems and plays on personal experiences, and I don’t doubt that he did, I don’t see how anyone can know with any confidence if or when or where he does so. Surely he was too accomplished a writer to recycle them in the often clumsy and undigested way that critics in search of autobiographical traces – advocates and sceptics of his authorship alike – would have us believe. Because of that, and because we know almost nothing about his personal experiences, those moments in his work which build upon what he may have felt remain invisible to us, and were probably only slightly more visible to those who knew him well.

  It’s wiser to accept that these experiences can no longer be recovered. We don’t know what we are looking for in any case, and even if we did, I’m not at all sure we would know how to interpret it correctly. In the end, attempts to identify personal experiences will only result in acts of projection, revealing more about the biographer than about Shakespeare himself. It’s worth recalling the experience of T. S. Eliot, who was struck by the inability of contemporary biographers to untangle the personal from the fictional: ‘I am used … to having my personal biography reconstructed from passages which I got out of books, or which I invented out of nothing because they sounded well; and to having my biography invariably ignored in what I did write from personal experience.’

  If we can’t get the autobiographical in Eliot’s poetry and drama right – though there are many still alive who knew him, as well as a trove of letters and interviews to draw upon – what hope have we of doing so with Shakespeare? You would think that the endless alternatives proposed by those reading his life out of the works – good husband or bad, crypto-Catholic or committed Protestant, gay or straight, misogynist or feminist, or for that matter, that the works were really written by Bacon or Oxford, Marlowe and so on – would cancel each other out and lead to the conclusion that the plays and poems are not transparently autobiographical.

  A more serious objection to hunting for the life in the works is that it assumes that what makes people who they are now made people who they were back in Shakespeare’s day. Social historians have shown how risky such an assumption can be. There’s little evidence that the lives of early modern men and women resembled our own. Their formative years certainly didn’t. Childhood was brief and most adolescents, rich and poor, were sent from home to live and serve in other households. As a result, children – even royal ones – didn’t live under the same roof as their parents for very long. Households, far more than families, were the domestic unit people considered themselves part of; these went beyond simple ties of blood or marriage, and one might pass through several households in the course of a lifetime. Despite all this, it’s not easy to break that preconception so central to psychobiography, that the modern, nuclear family and the developmental struggles intrinsic to it were the norm back then too.

  Family dynamics that we find in Shakespeare’s fictions are not necessarily what we find in his world. Likewise we should not assume that people married at thirteen just because Juliet did (both men and women waited, on the average, until they were twenty-five, and a surprising proportion, perhaps as many as one in five, including Shakespeare’s three brothers, never married at all). It’s odd that those who think they have discovered Shakespeare’s life in his works focus so exclusively on his relationships with his father, son, wife and daughters – all of whom he lived apart from for most of his adult life. The whole business is so circular as to be suspect. For all we know (and the point is that we don’t know) Shakespeare’s most meaningful relationships might have been with fellow writers, actors, sharers, patrons, landlords, neighbours, lovers, friends or household members with whom he interacted in the course of the quarter-century in which he was writing, but for which no evidence survives.

  The lives of women within Elizabethan households have been especially misunderstood, when not ignored. Thanks to studies like Germaine Greer’s Shakespeare’s Wife, it’s now clear that many of the documents relating to Shakespeare’s economic activities in Stratford – from processing malt to petty debts – concerned matters that were under Anne Hathaway’s jurisdiction, part of the complicated business of overseeing a household for close to thirty years while her husband was mostly off in London. Here, too, biographers – obsessed with the notion of Shakespeare as malt dealer and unable to imagine Anne Hathaway as anything but a spurned, passive and possibly adulterous wife – have got it wrong.

  There’s also reason to be sceptical about the extent to which early modern emotional responses resemble ours. For one thing, recurrent and devastating outbreaks of plague, death in childbirth, harvest failures and high infant-mortality rates may have taken a toll on social and familial bonds. For another, these bonds didn’t last as long. P
eople lived on the average until their mid-forties. Some, like Shakespeare’s parents and daughters, lived quite long lives. But six of Shakespeare’s seven brothers and sisters didn’t survive past the age of forty-six and he died at fifty-two. Extraordinary claims have been made about Shakespeare’s grief over his young son Hamnet’s death. But there’s a good chance that he only saw his son a handful of times after leaving Stratford-upon-Avon for London not long after Hamnet was born.

  Other imagined constants such as love and marriage weren’t the same then either. Stratford records indicate that Shakespeare’s decision to marry at eighteen was exceptional. Given the late age at which people got married and the extremely low illegitimacy rates at the time, sexual desire must have either been sublimated or found an outlet in non-procreative sex – perhaps both. People didn’t think in terms of modern binaries of ‘heterosexuality’ or ‘homosexuality’ either. Moreover, the degree of personal privacy and hygiene we enjoy today would have been foreign to Shakespeare and his contemporaries, who shared rooms and even beds, and lived at a time when the use of objects like the fork, the handkerchief and the nightdress were only beginning to become widespread.

  Even the meaning of key concepts, such as what constitutes an ‘individual’, weren’t the same. Writers, including Shakespeare, were only beginning to speak of individuality in the modern sense of ‘distinctiveness’ or ‘specialness’ – the exact opposite of what it had long meant: ‘inseparability’. You can search in vain through the handful of Elizabethan works that even touch on the subject for anything that resembles modern notions of social or psychological development. Henry Cuffe, writing about The Differences of the Ages of Man’s Life in 1600, can’t get much beyond choosing between Pythagoras’ division of life into the four stages of ‘childhood, youth, manhood, old age’ and Aristotle’s tripartite division into ‘childhood, flourishing man-age, and old-age’. Cuffe doesn’t think in terms of individual psychology; people fall into types, and types behave according to imbalances in heat or moisture in their bodies, which, for Cuffe, explains why children can’t reason, fretful ones die young and old men are suspicious. While Cuffe may be dismissed as a stodgy scholar trapped within inherited theoretical categories, someone who would be more comfortable with Ben Jonson’s humour plays than the complex psychology of Shakespeare’s, his work, and that of others like him, suggests that Elizabethans didn’t think of motivation, individuality or behaviour in the ways we do now. Nor did they subscribe to modern notions of coming of age, which define so many cradle-to-grave biographies of Shakespeare, imposing on him sexual, religious or familial traumas, and sometimes all three, for which no substantive evidence, barring that imported from the plays, survives.

  Pre-modern conceptions of self and of one’s place in the world were not identical to our own, and though social historians are still defining the differences, those who view the lives of early modern men and women through the lens of modernity ought to proceed with caution. Moreover, given that this was an age of faith (or at least one in which church attendance was mandatory), religion too played a far greater role in shaping how life, death and the afterlife were imagined. As much as we might want Shakespeare to have been like us, he wasn’t – and biographers lead us astray when they invite us to imagine that he was.

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  A friend recently shared with me a terrific review in the Financial Times by Susan Elderkin about novels set in places that their authors had never visited. Elderkin writes:

  A few years ago on Radio 4’s Front Row, Mark Lawson conducted a memorable interview with the author Sid Smith who had won the Whitbread First Novel award for his book Something Like a House. Set in China during the Cultural Revolution, the novel was widely praised for its evocation of peasant life … Lawson, impressed by Smith’s depiction, asked if he spoke fluent Mandarin. Smith said no, he didn’t speak Chinese. Lawson asked if he had worked in China. No, he hadn’t. At this point Lawson became agitated. ‘But you’ve been to China,’ he said. There was a short pause, followed by Smith’s calm assertion that no, actually, he had never been to China. Lawson was right to be astounded. Something Like a House is full of odd details about life in China that you’d think would take years of first-hand experience to note … What was most enjoyable about the interview, though, was not Lawson’s surprise but Smith’s refusal to be even slightly apologetic. He found his China in the London Library, and from films, newspapers and the internet.

  The same week, while at work in the British Library, I called up one of the two surviving copies of a volume of Elizabethan poetry called Licia, or Poems of Love. It was published anonymously in 1593 and contains fifty-one sonnets, along with an ode, an elegy and an unusual poem about ‘The Rising to the Crown of Richard the Third’, told as if ‘written by himself’. It was just the kind of thing that might have caught Shakespeare’s eye, busy at this time on his own Sonnets and perhaps on his Richard the Third as well. The author of Licia appended a longish preface, in the middle of which is a remarkable sentence that anticipates Sid Smith’s conversation with Mark Lawson by four centuries: ‘A man may write of love, and not be in love, as well of husbandry, and not go to plough, or of witches and be none.’ It’s as apt a description of the author of Shakespeare’s Sonnets, As You Like It and Macbeth as any I know.

  It’s unlikely that the identity of Licia’s author was widely known in his own day. Scholars have since learned (from a stray remark of his son) that it was written by Giles Fletcher, who in 1593 was a far cry from the persona of the young lover conveyed by these sonnets: married and middle-aged, father to at least seven children, he was also a veteran diplomat who had recently returned from a dangerous mission to the court of the Tsar. Fletcher had hoped to write a history of Elizabeth’s reign, but shelved plans for that after Lord Burghley refused to approve such a politically sensitive project. So he tried his hand at something completely different – ‘this kind of poetry wherein I wrote, I did it only to try my humour’. He borrows heavily (we might say plagiarises, though the concept would have been foreign to Fletcher) from Latin poetry, especially Angerianus’ Poetae Tres Elegantissimi, with a nod here and there to Sidney’s Astrophel and Stella. And it’s likely that the unusual name Licia is taken from Sidney as well, whose Arcadia, published three years earlier, describes at some length, and a bit tongue-in-cheek, paintings of ‘eleven conquered beauties’, including the ‘Queen of Licia’. Sonnets don’t have to be autobiographical; they don’t even have to be original. Poets assume personae. Mistresses can be fictional (though that didn’t stop a young Cambridge scholar from bragging, after Fletcher’s book appeared, that he had slept with Licia).

  If Giles Fletcher could compose sonnets to ‘try’ his ‘humour’, Shakespeare could have done so too. If Sid Smith could have asked around or read enough to write convincingly about China, Shakespeare could easily have done the same with Venice and Verona. We know that he was voracious in his pursuit of sources: rather than rest content with what he found in one or two books about the reign of Richard II, he managed to get his hands on almost everything written about him. The argument that he could never have had access to so many books unless he was a wealthy aristocrat is nonsense. Nobody asks this question about Thomas Dekker, who in 1599 alone worked on eleven plays (with a dizzying number of printed sources) after his release from prison for debt. How did professional playwrights like Dekker and Shakespeare gain access to so many books? We don’t know for sure. They may have owned some, borrowed others and browsed in London’s many bookstalls in search of additional sources of inspiration. Elizabethan playing companies spent upward of £10 for a single elaborate costume, though only £6 for a finished play. It may well be that they also maintained a stock of comparatively inexpensive books, since it was in their interest to provide dramatists whose proposed scripts they had purchased with the necessary materials to research and write their promised plays.

  Shakespeare’s knowledge of the world was not limited to what he found in books. It was
not difficult in Elizabethan London, where thousands of ‘strangers’ or foreign-born individuals were living, to encounter all sorts of travellers – both those from abroad visiting or living in London, and English merchants or voyagers who had seen a good bit of the world. A curious Shakespeare could have learned everything he needed to know about the Italian settings of his plays from a few choice conversations.

  This obsession with hands-on experience extends to the playwright’s familiarity with hawking, hunting, tennis and other aristocratic pursuits. It would be surprising if, during his years as a travelling player, performing at various aristocratic households around England, Shakespeare hadn’t frequently observed the rich at play. As for the ways of the court: Shakespeare visited royal palaces scores of times and was ideally placed to observe the ways of monarchs and courtiers. Insisting that Shakespeare could only write about what he had felt or done, as Steevens warned Malone two hundred years ago, can lead to some very unsettling conclusions. If the blood-splattered plays are truly to be taken as auto biographical evidence, whoever wrote them had to have unusual access to the mind of a murderer. They are also full of scoundrels, liars, cheats, adulterers, cowards, orphans, heroes, rapists, pimps, bawds and madmen. The plays are not an à la carte menu, from which we pick characters who will satisfy our appetite for Shakespeare’s personality while passing over less appetising choices. He imagined them all.

  One of the most habitual charges made against Shakespeare is that he didn’t have enough formal education to have written the plays – and, some have argued, there’s no record that he received any formal education. What they fail to add is that no evidence survives that anybody in Shakespeare’s day was educated in Stratford, since the records for all pupils at that time have been lost (though we know the names of the schoolmasters and the Tudor schoolroom in the town’s Guildhall survives to this day). Are we to imagine that the London publisher Richard Field, Shakespeare’s age-mate, went uneducated as well because there’s no record of his attending school? Or that the sons of other leading figures in Stratford, some of whom went on to Oxford, were unlettered before arriving at university? Scholars have exhaustively reconstructed the curriculum in Elizabethan grammar schools and have shown that what Shakespeare and Field would have learned there – and for that matter, what the many playgoers who had a comparable education would have been taught in similar schools – was roughly equivalent to a university degree today, with a better facility in Latin than that of a typical classics major.