René Weis
SHAKESPEARE REVEALED
444pp. John Murray. £25.
9780719564185
Every biography is two books in one: a record of verifiable facts and a
fiction based on those facts. The problem for the author of a literary
biography is that the biographee has already written much better fictions;
René Weis has realized that the way to make a writer’s life as interesting
as his works is to treat his works as evidence about his life. While the
title Shakespeare Revealed apparently promises a book that will reveal
secrets, Weis argues that it is Shakespeare himself who does the revealing.
Like Byron or Strindberg, Shakespeare writes compulsively in order to make
sense of his life, using his plays “as a vehicle for self-expression”, often
putting real people’s names into them and, as if foreseeing that some day
his authorship might be questioned, filling them with sly allusions to his
private life.
Where Shakespeare Revealed differs from Shakespeare in Love is that it offers
a good deal of research to support its story. In contrast to the cautious,
unromantic approach associated with Samuel Schoenbaum’s William Shakespeare:
A documentary life (1974), Weis is prepared to invest the recorded facts
with emotion – Shakespeare’s emotion. His refusal to dismiss any
biographical anecdote, especially those that are usually rejected as too
good to be true, leads him to ask interesting questions and, sometimes, to
come up with new answers. He is perhaps most useful when asking questions
that still need answers, such as why the citizens of Stratford grew so many
elms on their property, even though they had to pay tax on them; why, at the
time of Shakespeare’s marriage, “the church authorities in Worcester
accepted a bond for a bride who had two different names and two different
addresses”; or why neither Shakespeare nor any of his siblings took any part
in the civic government of the town where their father had been a leading
official for so long.
Though the copy-editor should have caught a few slips, (such as the claim that
Shakespeare “relished his libertarian reputation”), the book is beautifully
produced. It has many illustrations in colour, some of them (like the still
existing mural of Tobias and the Angel from Stratford’s White Swan) quite
unusual. There is also a map of Stratford and a map showing who lived in the
street down which the boy Shakespeare walked every day. Following Michael
Wood’s television series and subsequent book (In Search of Shakespeare,
2003) and James Shapiro’s 1599: A year in the life of William Shakespeare
(2005), Weis not only traces the poet’s footsteps but tries to follow his
gaze as it travels over people and places. Visualizing Shakespeare attending
his brother Edmund’s funeral in St Saviour’s Church, Southwark, for example,
Weis goes on to suggest that he might have noticed the nearby tomb of John
Gower and decided to write a play – Pericles – based on a story in Gower’s
Confessio Amantis. The tomb is no longer near the chapel where the funeral
would probably have taken place, but Weis has established that it was there
once.
This mixture of research and speculation shows Weis’s method at its best. So
does his patient connecting of dots, which results in the discovery of an
impressive network of relationships among the people in the poet’s life.
Weis draws on the resources of the Stratford Birthplace Trust to add to our
knowledge of Shakespeare’s friends and neighbours, and researches his London
connections with equal interest. Most readers will be surprised, for
instance, to learn that Emilia Lanier, Jane Davenant and Marie Mountjoy –
three women who knew Shakespeare well – were all patients of Dr Simon
Forman, and that the man Shakespeare made his executor, Thomas Russell, was
both a friend of the Willoughby whose son published Willoughby His Avisa
(1594), with its apparently coded references to Shakespeare and the Earl of
Southampton, and was also, by his second marriage, stepfather of the Leonard
Digges whose verses on Shakespeare were published in the 1623 Folio. Cordell
Annesley, whose attempt to save her father from being declared insane by her
two married older sisters makes her a possible prototype for Cordelia in
King Lear, turns out to have married Sir William Harvey, who had previously
been married to the mother of the Earl of Southampton.
One interesting fact established here is the comparative closeness of London
to Stratford: a number of people regularly travelled between the two places
and a letter delivered by a messenger could arrive about as quickly as it
does now by the Royal Mail. Weis describes two different routes by which
Shakespeare could have travelled to London; his narrative, likewise,
sometimes hesitates between two routes: that of the cautious researcher and
that of the novelist eager to tell a good story. There are many statements
beginning with “if”, closely followed by further qualifications, such as
“seems to suggest”. Sometimes the results are a bit fuzzy. So Weis makes the
argument that Shakespeare died of typhoid fever, which normally killed
within a month of its onset (in which case, the will he made in January 1616
preceded his last illness, which would have affected only the second draft),
but writes most of the time as if the poet had been ill about four months
before he died (in which case the January will was a product of that
illness).
One of Shakespeare’s most memorable themes is the link between love and folly,
and it is in their treatment of Shakespeare’s love life that most writers
risk making themselves ridiculous. Shakespeare in Love pretends to believe
the always-popular line (much used by young artists with coy mistresses)
that a happy sex life is the prerequisite for successful artistic creation.
The film linked erotic satisfaction with the writing of Romeo and Juliet;
Weis does the same thing with regard to the poetic overkill of Richard II.
He thinks the Sonnets tell a true story, and that the other characters
involved in it are the Earl of Southampton, Emilia Lanier (the Dark Lady),
and Marlowe (the Rival Poet). He also suspects a further adulterous liaison
with Jane Davenant, whose son, the dramatist William Davenant, may have been
the poet’s godson, or even more than that. At times it is not clear whether
“if” is being used as a mere suggestion or an algebraic equation: “If
Southampton, Shakespeare, and Emilia Bassano-Lanier had their counterparts
in Bassanio, Antonio, and Portia, it may be that Antony and Cleopatra were
Will Shakespeare and Jane Davenant”.
Frank Harris, whose The Man Shakespeare and His Tragic Life Story (1921) in
some ways anticipates Weis’s book, had no doubt about the existence, and
desirability, of artistic self-revelation: “As it is the object of a general
to win battles, so it is the life-work of the artist to show himself to us,
and the completeness with which he reveals his own individuality is perhaps
the best measure of his genius”. The question is what exactly we mean by
“himself”: Nietzschean self-realization or the encoding of minute personal
foibles. Harris’s Shakespeare is a composite of what Harris felt was
specifically personal in the dramatist’s characterizations: he couldn’t hold
his liquor, had trouble sleeping, spent extravagantly, and had “passionate
sympathy with all those who had failed in life”. Weis also looks for
physical evidence and suggests, engagingly, that in The Comedy of Errors
Shakespeare makes fun of his own premature baldness (which would indeed be
funny, provided that he was actually playing Antipholus or Dromio of
Syracuse).
Weis also thinks, with Edward Capell and Walter Scott, that Shakespeare’s
references to lameness in the Sonnets are real, not metaphorical. He
introduces the idea cautiously, admitting that none of Shakespeare’s
contemporaries say anything about his lameness (he has already quoted John
Aubrey’s hearsay evidence that the poet was a “handsome, well-shaped man”).
At the same time, he develops the hypothesis in ways that have enormous
implications for the book’s argument, and especially for its sense of
Shakespeare as an actor. Molière exploited such accidental qualities as his
own cough and the lameness of one of his actors, though only in comic
situations. Weis argues, however, that Shakespeare not only refers to his
lameness but casts himself in roles where he can capitalize on it – though
the most famous limping hero role, Richard III, is known to have belonged to
Richard Burbage. Thus, Weis assigns the actor-dramatist not only the two
parts assigned to him by confused and shaky traditions (old Adam in As You
Like It and the Ghost in Hamlet) but also the Nurse in Romeo and Juliet,
whom Juliet impatiently calls “lame” because she is late in returning home,
and Edgar in King Lear, who in the first Quarto text calls himself “a most
poor man, made lame \[the Folio says “tame”\] by fortune’s blows”.
If Shakespeare’s range as an actor could encompass both the Nurse and one of
the most demanding parts in King Lear, he must have been second only to
Burbage as a performer, and Weis rightly says that this view would require a
complete reassessment of his acting career. While I would be delighted to
think this, since I’ve never understood the general assumption that a
successful writer has to be a mediocre actor, it is hard to accept any of
the evidence on which it is based. At least one of Weis’s quotations, “Speak
of my lameness, and I straight will halt” (Sonnet 89) depends on a
misunderstanding, since the line clearly means that the speaker is not lame
but will pretend to be in order to justify his friend’s accusation. Then, it
seems odd that other characters speak of the Ghost in Hamlet in terms of his
“martial stalk” and “slow and stately” movement, unless we assume that this
movement was meant to camouflage a limp. The theory is strained to breaking
point when applied to Edgar in King Lear. If Shakespeare wrote the role for
himself, he must have been aware of the difficulty involved when a character
with a recognizable limp assumes a disguise; the fight with Edmund in the
last scene, moreover, must have resembled the end of Richard III, with the
outcome reversed.
But there is more. Having argued that Iago’s references to the cod’s head and
the salmon’s tail in Othello are not only a bawdy joke but a reference to an
obscure district of Old Stratford called both Salmon Tail and Salmon Jole,
Weis makes the following salmon-like leaps: “If Shakespeare was indeed
playing with the consonance between a Stratford locality and a common bawdy
idiom of the period, he was presumably aware that it was included for his
own personal satisfaction. This, in its turn, seems to suggest that he
himself planned to play Iago – intellectually manipulative, ever
orchestrating, pulling strings, deviously destructive, consumed alike by
envy and sexual obsession”. Thus, in the final scene of Othello, the hero’s
bewildered search for the villain’s cloven hoof (“I look down at his feet –
but that’s a fable”) becomes his horrified reinterpretation of the reason
why Iago/Shakespeare has been limping throughout the play.
Shakespeare as Iago? No one else has ever suggested this casting. Yet Weis’s
account of Shakespeare’s life suggests that Iago might indeed have been the
right part for him. According to this remarkably ugly story, the dramatist,
having conducted passionate affairs with the Earl of Southampton and Emilia
Lanier, then indicated the end of that episode in The Merchant of Venice by
making Antonio hand Bassanio over to Portia. If this was a private
working-out of a personal problem, what followed was anything but private:
Shakespeare went on, in Troilus and Cressida, to satirize the relationship
of Essex and Southampton in his unsympathetic depiction of the homosexual
Achilles and Patroclus – this, according to Weis’s chronology, at a time
when Essex had just been executed and Southampton was under sentence of
death in the Tower. He wrote the play, Weis argues, by order of someone in
the Government, as part of a policy of discrediting Essex. As if this
betrayal were not enough, Shakespeare went on to publish the play in 1608,
and then apparently thought he could make it up with his former friend by
publishing the still more incriminating Sonnets. He did it for the money,
Weis explains. Times were bad.
The behaviour described here – a betrayal of artistic talent, of friendship,
and of love – is far more despicable than the extramarital love affairs to
which the book devotes so much attention. I don’t think it happened: it is
hard to believe that anyone would have been happy with Troilus and Cressida
as a vindication of Elizabeth’s treatment of the Essex rebellion, and if it
was performed only privately, presumably in front of those already
antagonistic to the Earl, it wouldn’t have done much good (having preachers
declaim against Essex was much more effective). But if it really happened,
and if everyone read the Sonnets as autobiographically as Weis does, the
whole episode ought to have filled Shakespeare’s contemporaries, and
Shakespeare himself, with disgust. Someone might even have commented on his
cloven hoof.
Yet one reason why this astonishing story has remained unknown for so long is
that no one ever said anything about it. The only repercussions Weis
imagines are a coolness between the poet and Southampton, and the poet and
his wife, after the publication of the Sonnets. Why would Shakespeare, if he
did indeed write in order to make sense of his life, spend so much time
rehashing his love affairs, rather than trying to exorcize his much more
serious crimes: his betrayal of his artistic talent and of his former
friends in a play, and his readiness to damage the reputations of his wife
and of his former lover in order to make money from the Sonnets? Weis sees
the end of The Winter’s Tale, with Hermione’s ambiguous silence, as an
indication of the uneasiness in the Stratford household. I suggest that he
also look again at Coriolanus, a play of ingratitude and multiple betrayals.
He sees it as a simple encoding of Shakespeare and his mother in the
relationship of the Roman son and his mother. What, instead, if we look at
the final scene, and perhaps see signs of inner turmoil in its confusion as
to whether Coriolanus wants to escape the hostility of his former allies,
the Volscians, or provoke them into killing him? On some level, Shakespeare
may have thought he deserved both fates.
This idea, based on Weis’s fiction, is as much a fiction as those that he has
created, and I don’t think I’ll use it in the biography that – I had better
confess – I too am writing. But that book will be equally full of fictions,
and will have the same difficulty in creating an interesting story from
limited external evidence and internal evidence with virtually unlimited
possibilities. What I would like to discover in Shakespeare is something
more like Shaw’s view of Hamlet: “a man whose passions are those which have
produced the philosophy, the art, and the statecraft of the world, and not
merely those which have produced its weddings, coroners’ inquests, and
executions”. This, I’m sure, is what Weis also wanted to find. Reading his
acknowledgements, with their generous appreciation of the friendship and
intellectual support of most of the great minds in twenty-first century
Shakespeare scholarship, not only makes me wish myself “like him with
friends possessed”; it also reminds me that it takes a lot of support to
write a Shakespeare biography. The real interest of the enterprise – the
reason we want to write such books, and to read them – lies in the greatness
of Shakespeare’s talent; yet the result of all research into his life – and
this would be equally true if we assumed that someone else had written the
works – is a mass of petty details, many of which can be read in more than
one way, but which remain petty.
The desire to find greatness somewhere in this story perhaps explains the
book’s apparently inconsistent treatment of the current controversy about
whether Shakespeare might have been a Catholic. Weis notes that the poet
wouldn’t have needed to go all the way to Lancashire to live among members
of a disaffected Catholic underground, since there were plenty of recusants
in Stratford, but he concludes reluctantly that Shakespeare was probably not
a Catholic or even a Catholic sympathizer. Yet the narrative gives a
surprising amount of space to the activities of English Jesuits,
particularly Father John Gerard, who seems never to have met Shakespeare.
The fascinating account of Gerard’s escape from the Tower of London provides
a context for Edgar’s account in King Lear of his inability to escape from
Britain in a time of heightened security, but the episode does not really
deserve so much attention, compared, say, to the effect on Shakespeare’s
company of their evolving role as the King’s Men. Weis may have started out
to argue for Shakespeare’s involvement with the Counter-Reformation and then
found evidence against it, as others have (see, for instance, the TLS for
March 16, 2007, and subsequent correspondence). Or it may be that the story
of Father Gerard, clearly an extraordinary man with unshakeable convictions,
is an implicit reproach to Shakespeare, whom Weis finally describes as “an
ordinary man with an extraordinarily timeless voice”. We are left with the
usual paradox about the ethical responsibility of the artist, memorably
summed up in Tom Stoppard’s Travesties. The narrator dreams that he is
cross-examining James Joyce and asks triumphantly, “What did you do in the
war?”. “I wrote Ulysses”, Joyce replies. “What did you do?”
Lois Potter is Professor of English at the University of Delaware. She
is the author of Shakespeare in Performance: "Othello", and the
editor of the Arden edition of The Two Noble Kinsmen.
