Cape £20 pp430
Stephen Greenblatt’s 1980 book Renaissance Self-Fashioning inaugurated the school of literary criticism called New Historicism. At the time “theory” was all the rage. It was agreed (at least, by theorists) that language could not transmit meaning, and that only a simpleton would expect an author’s writings to express his thoughts. In this atmosphere new historicism was a conservative option, perhaps reflecting Greenblatt’s Oxford education, since it reverted to the well-tried technique of putting literature into its historical context. Practitioners made it look up-to-date, however, by derisively highlighting the racism, colonialism, sexism and other failings that made past ages so inferior to their own.
Greenblatt’s biography of Shakespeare would seem, to any self-respecting 1980s new historicist, so old-fashioned as to be feeble-witted. It does not disdain the past. It does not twist Shakespeare’s plays to make them mean what they patently cannot (except in the case of The Winter’s Tale, where Greenblatt unaccountably believes that Hermione really dies and is revived by necromancy). It openly acknowledges its indebtedness to Victorian scholars. It combs Shakespeare ’s plays for evidence of his interests (his many mentions of gloves reflecting his father’s trade as a glover, for example), very much in the style of those venerable image-studies that used to collect canine references to discover whether he liked dogs.
The result is probably the best one-volume life of Shakespeare yet, and a testimony to old-style scholarship, much of it culled by Greenblatt from previous researchers, but some his own. His most brilliant moment is just the sort of thing that could have appeared in an early issue of the antiquarian journal Notes and Queries. He has noticed that the entertainment the Earl of Leicester put on for Elizabeth at Kenilworth in 1575 included a large mechanical dolphin floating on the lake, a firework display that could be seen 20 miles away, and a singer representing Arion, the mythical Greek poet, who sat on the dolphin’s back. In the event the singer had a sore throat and could not perform, explaining, to the Queen’s amusement, that he was not Arion but honest Henry Goldingham. All this irresistibly recalls A Midsummer Night’s Dream, written 20 years later, where Oberon’s compliment to Elizabeth refers to a singer on a dolphin’s back and stars shooting “madly from their spheres”, and Snug the joiner announces that he is not a lion but plain Snug. Shakespeare, Greenblatt plausibly surmises, saw the Kenilworth junketing as a boy of 11, and never forgot it.
As original, though lacking any evidence, is the idea that Laertes’s anger over Ophelia’s scanted funeral in Hamlet reflects Shakespeare’s father’s wish that Shakespeare’s son Hamnet, dead four years previously, had been buried with Catholic rites. But the book’s strength lies in broader insights that seem obvious once Greenblatt has formulated them. It has often been noticed that, around the time Shakespeare was 13, his father’s career took a disastrous downturn. John Shakespeare was a prosperous tradesman who climbed the municipal ladder, becoming chief alderman in 1571. Then things went wrong. He absented himself from council meetings, got into debt, and sold off his wife’s inheritance. Other aldermen sent their sons to Oxford, but Shakespeare had to leave school early and find work. As Greenblatt sees it, this pattern of events deeply affected his art. From The Comedy of Errors right through to The Tempest, his plays persistently rehearse a dream of restoration — a shipwreck or calamity and then, at the play’s end, a reversal when losses are recovered and families reunited. What went wrong with John Shakespeare is not known. But repeated references to drunkenness in the plays, plus the portraits of two sots, Sir Toby Belch and Falstaff, lead Greenblatt to suspect alcoholism.
The other formative event was Shakespeare’s own fault, not his father’s. At 18 he married a local farmer’s daughter Ann Hathaway who was 26, probably illiterate, and three months pregnant with their first child. Four years later twins were born to them, but after that Shakespeare moved to London and lived apart from Ann for the rest of his working life. There seems to have been deep animosity. His will left everything to his elder daughter and did not so much as mention Ann. The slighting bequest of his “second-best bed” was added later. This unhappiness, Greenblatt argues, marked the plays indelibly. For all the flirtation in the comedies, there is scarcely a pair of lovers who seem inwardly suited. The degree of intimacy husbands and wives achieve is small, and almost the only happy marriages — the Macbeths’ and Gertrude and Claudius’s — are sinister. Adjurations to premarital chastity recur, and those who flout them, like Claudio and Juliet in Measure for Measure, come to grief.
But the most remarkable thing about Shakespeare, Greenblatt concedes, is how little we know of him. What he did between leaving school and turning up in London some 10 years later, how he started as an actor and playwright, how he came to be on intimate terms with the magnificent Earl of Southampton — these are mysteries. We have no access to his thoughts about politics, art or religion. Some of the plays are Christian, some pagan, some, like King Lear, apparently godless. His opinion about, say, the use of torture, common at the time, is obscure. The blinding of Gloucester in Lear is a horror, but the imminent torture of Iago at the end of Othello seems condoned. No books with Shakespeare’s name in them have survived, no letters to or from him, no scraps of conversation. This is not true of other writers such as Jonson or Donne, and it can hardly be chance. It seems to reflect an ingrained habit of secrecy. Both his parents were, almost certainly, Catholics, belonging to a persecuted minority for whom hiding or destroying evidence was second nature. Shakespeare inherited it.
As Greenblatt sees it, the habit spread to his art, with momentous results. For he learnt to conceal crucial evidence about his creations, just as he did about himself. Why does Iago hate Othello? Is Hamlet mad or only pretending? Why does Lear set up the love-contest? Whatever is going on in the sonnets? These and other unanswerable questions are inseparable from what we think of as Shakespeare’s depth. They represent the inscrutability of real human beings, and relate, if Greenblatt is right, to his own anxious privacy.
But his self-effacement went even further, and further than we can understand. For this greatest of playwrights did not care whether his plays survived or not. He made no effort to publish them and did not bother to correct or proofread those his acting company printed. He would not have minded, it seems, if they disappeared for ever. What he really cared about was money. He accumulated real estate in London and Stratford, avoided paying taxes, and sued debtors even for small sums. How can we square this with our notions of a great creative artist? Matthew Arnold wrote of him, “Others abide our question, thou art free”, meaning he was incomprehensible. In the end Greenblatt’s ingenious, exploratory book agrees.
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