An irregular life

In 1796 a young law clerk called William Henry Ireland published a book under the modestly antiquarian title Miscellaneous Papers and Legal Instruments Under the Hand and Seal of William Shakespeare. Ireland’s cache included a letter from Elizabeth I praising the Sonnets, amorous verses written by Shakespeare to “Anna Hatherrewaye”, a usefully explicit “Profession of Faith”, a manuscript of King Lear and promise of books from Shakespeare’s library, “in which are many books with Notes in his own hand”.

Of course Ireland had made it all up, snaffling old bits of parchment, concocting a dark brown ink and reverse-engineering Shakespeare’s handwriting from the facsimile signatures that Edmond Malone had reproduced in his 1790 edition of the plays. If a Shakespearean document is too good to be true, it almost certainly isn’t, but, as the scams prevalent in our own day show us, many of us are still willing to be tricked by impossible promises of what we most desire. The appeal of Ireland’s con was the promise of explanation, its manufactured archive the means fully to understand the works and their author. His genius was to recognize the biographical itches in Shakespeare studies that need a good scratch: his relationship with his wife; his religion, politics and reading; his methods of working. Little new evidence about Shakespeare’s life has come to light since this brilliant attempt to short-circuit the search: the questions remain unanswered. Ireland’s Miscellaneous Papers were themselves a kind of biography, in which speculation and documentation had become confused.

For Margreta de Grazia, in her lapidary book Shakespeare Without a Life, Ireland’s forgeries embody a new energy around documenting the author and symbolize the disappointments of the era’s hunger for new evidence. Malone’s biographical researches also ended in frustration. His posthumously published Life of Shakespeare listed with icy regret many of the antiquaries, actors and others who might have gathered information about the playwright during the seventeenth century. William Dugdale, Anthony Wood, John Dryden, William Davenant and Thomas Betterton are all fingered for their carelessness, even as Malone acknowledges that “the truth is, our ancestors paid very little attention to posterity”.

Malone’s editorial predecessor Nicholas Rowe was the first to attempt a Life of the poet. Appending a forty-page essay, “Some Account of the Life, &c”, to the first volume of his 1709 edition, Rowe suggested that “the knowledge of an Author may sometimes conduce to the better understanding his Book”. De Grazia’s elegant argument shows how Rowe’s anecdotes about the playwright’s life support contemporaneous critical approaches to his work. The Shakespeare who emerges from Rowe’s account is a serial rogue who is banished from Stratford-upon-Avon for poaching, who skirts the libel laws by writing satirical ballads and disobliging epitaphs, and who scarcely obeys even the Queen’s injunctions around the offence caused by his disrespectful representation of the Protestant martyr Oldcastle. What de Grazia does with this familiar material is striking. For her this wayward Shakespeare is constructed by Rowe not as an early, flawed attempt at biography, but as extended literary criticism. It is the plays themselves that break rules, and the same adjectives are attached to his putative behaviour and to his writing: “extravagant”, “unruly” and “irregular”. This first “Life” of Shakespeare offers a post-hoc correlative for the attractively indecorous style of the plays. Rowe’s subject is Shakespeare the plays, not Shakespeare the man.

De Grazia’s book amplifies her work on the historical specificity of ideas and assumptions that become invisible through familiarity. Her investigation into our understanding of time and duration as concealed in the biographical formula “(1564– 1616)” draws on Joseph Priestley’s Chart of Biography, a landmark in data visualization from 1765, which shows a cluster of lifelines identifying significant individuals across many specialisms. (Malone owned a copy.) Her final chapter explores the way in which the Sonnets were repackaged and reimagined to fill the gap left by all those unfound personal papers, becoming themselves the first-hand material so desperately desired by biographers, and falsified by Ireland. That Shakespeare unlocked his heart in his Sonnets became the scholarly compensation for his apparent refusal to do the same in the archive.

Paul Menzer’s tone, in William Shakespeare: A brief life, is witty and informal: “Shakespeare was mad for Ovid all his life”; Shakespeare “was the tortoise to Marlowe’s hare”; perhaps William Davenant was fathered during “a layover in Oxford”. This is a biography of Lear written by his Fool (or perhaps by the comic actor Robert Armin). The writing is full of pithy summaries and paradoxes: “Turns out the Elizabethans did have a word for the love of a man for another man and that word was ‘love’.” On occasion the sound runs away with the sense. A paragraph listing Shakespeare’s siblings cautions against seeing them echoed in his plays, given the popularity of William, Henry and John as Elizabethan boys’ names. The added parenthesis “(every Tom, Dick and Harry in England was named Tom, Dick or Harry)” is unhelpfully glib, since it’s not the same names that have already been listed as popular.

One of Menzer’s chief biographical investments is in Shakespeare of Stratford. He smartly points out that authorship sceptics often identify as “anti-Stratfordians”, “as though they doubt the place, not the poet”. But his narrative of the life is of a circle, from Stratford to Stratford, with visits in between. Menzer is excellent on some fossilized assumptions, as when he asks why history – and William Henry Ireland – call Shakespeare’s wife Anne Hathaway rather than Anne Shakespeare (“Is there some reluctance to couple Shakespeare? Must singular men remain single?”), or remarks that it would be more accurate to call the company the Lord Chamberlain’s Servants, rather than the Robin Hood-ish fellowship implied by “Men”. His observant eye makes details zing: Shakespeare must have been busy at the theatre in the afternoons, so probably wrote in the mornings, therefore the east-facing aspect of his Silver Street digs would have been appealing. His comparisons lift familiar facts off the page, as when he observes that the population of the Elizabethan City of London was probably lower than the capacity of a football stadium (although, for the teams he mentions, neither Anfield nor the Emirates can accommodate the 75,000 people he estimates). He is good on the silences of the record, but makes his own suppositions too. It is “likely” that Shakespeare joined the Queen’s Men, mainly because he found himself drawn to their repertory – not that he would have acknowledged the influence. Here is not a Shakespeare much concerned, intellectually, emotionally or practically, with collaboration: he was “a member of a circle of writers of which he was the only one”.

Sometimes the tone is a little hard to parse. Surely Menzer is being ironic when he encourages us to think of Shakespeare’s final moments as his “heart beat one last iamb” on a visit to the gardens of New Place: ‘”Just possibly, in his last lucid moments, just before he passed from earth to eternity, he gave a rueful smile, since he realized he alone had the perfect words to describe it”? It’s almost a parody of biographical writing. Perhaps all Shakespearean biography is now meta-biography, but Menzer’s, even as it addresses itself to novices as part of the Arden fourth series stable, is both a biographers’ biography and a biography written by a reluctant biographer. Many of its best lines require prior knowledge to appreciate: “One of the crueller ironies of literary history is that Ben Jonson’s best known line is a compliment”; “Shakespeare’s sonnets are often complicated but not complex while Donne’s are the opposite”.

What remains unclear from Menzer’s brio is the relationship he proposes between the works and the life. Occasionally he glosses a moment in Shakespeare’s life with a quotation from his work (son-in-law John Hall is “a kind of Puritan”, like Malvolio) or sees a glimpse of his commuter experience in Gratiano’s comparison of his new wife’s apparent infidelity to the untimeliness of “the mending of highways / In summer”. There are some terrific asides about the plays, especially a reading of Twelfth Night as a riff on Hamlet. Menzer notices how Malvolio enters the stage alone and begins, knowingly, “To be …”. He notes the difference in tones – “the one antic, the other attic” – between The Merry Wives of Windsor and Troilus and Cressida, written five years apart. What kind of context might account for the difference – historical, psychological, biographical, theatrical, political – is not broached. When Menzer writes that “After Elizabeth’s death, Shakespeare like Hamlet may have lost all his mirth. He never wrote another funny play”, the prose is too whip-smart, too condensed, to explore whether this is causation or correlation.

The difficulty of bringing the life and the works together in a meaningful way is the precondition of Tiffany Stern’s stimulating Shakespeare, Malone and the Problems of Chronology. Her investigation develops in a carrel adjacent to de Grazia’s: each takes up Malone’s substitution of the documentary life he could not find in his archival searches, with a different Shakespearean timeline, a chronology of his works. Fixing when Shakespeare wrote what, Malone had three attempts at this, in 1778, 1790 and 1821, and this flux shows how willing he was to take on new information and revise his estimates.

While there is now a broad consensus about the dates of Shakespeare’s plays, this may be a self-perpetuating fiction rather than anything more secure. Twelfth Night, for instance, was not printed until 1623. Malone put it at 1614 in his first two chronologies. His late date was based on specific evidence: he thought the play’s use of the term “undertaker” tied it to the “parliamentary undertakers” who were managing that year’s elections. This apparent lexical fix corresponded to Malone’s sense of the polish of the play, which he suggested was due to the leisurely circumstances of its composition, when Shakespeare had returned to Stratford. Different kinds of evidence – historical and lexical, personal and aesthetic – whirl around the dating. Later Malone reconsidered, dropped the retirement angle, suggested that “undertaker” was used in a general sense and redated the play to 1607, this time emphasizing its apparent references to contemporary works by Dekker and Marston. It was not until 1831 that John Payne Collier (part scholarly detective, part forger – like Malone and Ireland) discovered a diary from 1601–02, later confirmed to be by John Manningham, that described a production of Twelfth Night at Middle Temple in February 1602. This evidence settled the play in its now-traditional place in the canon, at the end of the comedies, close to Hamlet. Chronology has become the standard way to present Shakespeare’s works, with the implicit assumption that some form of biography emerges from considering the plays in the order in which they were written.

Stern’s expert contribution to this account combines clarity about Malone’s contradictory methodologies with a cutting-edge sense of how theories of revision and revival challenge singular or linear notions of chronology. Yes, Manningham saw a Twelfth Night in 1602, but the musical play of the Folio seems more at home in the Blackfriars or at Whitehall, where the play was performed in 1618. Would the King’s Men have handed to Jaggard’s print shop in 1622 a play precisely matching the one performed at Middle Temple two decades previously? A thorough chronology would need at least two and maybe more entries for Twelfth Night. Stern’s other provocation is to point out how much of Malone’s muddled method for determining dates is still operative. While we, like Malone, have dropped “undertaker” as a date tag, chronologies of Macbeth still cite the supposed echo of this Folio play’s “equivocation” with the trial of Henry Garnett and the Gunpowder Plotters in early 1606, even as we acknowledge, grudgingly, the input of Thomas Middleton in the surviving text. Macbeth still tends to be seen as an early Jacobean play rather than a later one. Further, descriptions and appreciations of individual works tend to confirm their chronological placement: the apparently objective or quasi-factual distribution of works along a timeline comes to seem a version of, rather than a precursor to, their literary analysis. Chronology is interpretation rather than apparatus. Stern suggests that we abandon the aim of producing a single date for a play and clarify whether we are hoping to secure a date, or dates, of composition, of performance or of print.

Malone’s Life of Shakespeare broke down when his subject apparently arrived in London, where documentary evidence failed him. His chronology of the plays was pasted in, as a version of a life that was all about writing. From Rowe onwards the biography of Shakespeare we have always needed is of the works, not the life. Those fabulous, tricksy, multiple, living works are undated dispatches from a past that does not want to be found. Tiffany Stern reminds us that most plays are palimpsests, not dates. The same is true of that elusive biographical subject “Shakespeare”.

Emma Smith teaches English at Hertford College, Oxford. Her most recent books include The Making of Shakespeare’s First Folio, a revised edition of which was published this year

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