Shakespeare
The Biography
Peter Ackroyd
(Chatto & Windus, 2005)
546 p.
The dearth of historical detail about William Shakespeare has been an occasional source of amusement to me. That the man with a fair claim to be our greatest writer should himself be so unknown, indeed almost invisible, is, on one level, a surprising truth. And yet, on the other hand, it also seems somehow fitting, for, as has been oft remarked, Shakespeare is also not clearly visible in his plays — we rarely, if ever, get a sense of “the author speaking”, but instead he disappears as his characters take the stage. Invisible within his work, and invisible without. What could be more apt?
However, this same dearth of detail poses a certain challenge to an author who sets out to write a biography — excuse me, the biography — of the man. Without any letters, first-hand accounts, or memorable personal stories to draw on, the biographer is, more often than not, thrown back on general descriptions of the times inasmuch as his subject’s experience must, in most cases, have answered to the typical experience of those living in his time and place. In this respect — though not only in this — Peter Ackroyd is a wonderful biographer, for, in his unofficial role of historian of all things English, there can be few men alive who have developed a knowledge of English history as broad and deep as his.
So that, for example, he actually has something to say about Shakespeare’s childhood, which might otherwise be as obscure as that of Jesus. He knows that when he was born, Shakespeare was probably given a spoonful of hare’s brains — a Warwickshire custom. He knows about the curriculum that young Shakespeare would have learned in his local school, a curriculum with a strong emphasis on rhetorical training: “He learned how to pile phrase upon phrase, to use metaphor to decorate an argument or simile to point a moral. He rang changes upon chosen words, and variations upon selected themes. He learned the art of richness and elaboration.” (Mind, we already knew that.) Ackroyd also knows that the traditional English pageants and medieval dramas were performed in the vicinity of Stratford-upon-Avon during Shakespeare’s childhood, and that it is possible, or even likely, that these were his first exposure to stage drama. When, as a young man, he travelled to London to make his way in the theatre world, Ackroyd knows what route he probably took, and what sights and sounds he would have seen along the way. He knows what London looked like and sounded like (and smelled like) at the time, and what the character of Shakespeare’s neighbourhood would have been. All of this background detail adds colour and depth to the story.
Of course, there are gaps. Though we know he married Anne Hathaway at age 18, we don’t know where they were married or even in what rite. We don’t know what he did for a living in his early 20s — Ackroyd speculates that he may have tried school-teaching, or perhaps worked as a law clerk. We don’t know when he first went to London, nor how he got his start in the theatre. (There is a story that he first took a job tending the horses of theatre-goers, and in this way met someone — naturally, we don’t know whom — who gave him his first chance.) We don’t know when he began writing plays, nor what plays were his first. It is possible that he began by revising earlier plays that were part of a company’s repertoire, or collaborating with other playwrights, before he tried his hand at writing his own.
When we do start to find historical references to his plays, there are already several at large: Titus Andronicus was an early hit that enjoyed a long run on London stages, and there were also Two Gentlemen of Verona, Henry VI, and Richard III. There are references to Hamlet early in his career, but what relationship this version has to the version we know is unclear. These plays appear in the historical record almost before Shakespeare himself does, and, especially with a play like Richard III, they seem already the work of a seasoned playwright.
The atmosphere of the theatre world at the time was one of creative ferment. There were numerous theatre companies active in London, and each would normally produce 8 or 10 new plays each season. Most of these plays were no sooner staged than discarded. It was the theatre capital of Europe; it had more theatres, more companies, and more actors. It was a popular art that survived on ticket sales rather than aristocratic or royal patronage, and competition was strong. The rules of playwriting and of acting were still taking shape; there was ample scope for innovation and surprise. The plays were not sacrosanct; they were borrowed, revised, and truncated, perhaps for artistic reasons, but also because of censorship, or in response to other popular plays, or simply because the personnel of the theatre company had changed.
(Indeed, I was surprised to learn that the sudden, and much lamented, disappearance of Falstaff between Henry IV, Part 1 and Henry IV, Part 2 was very likely because Will Kempe, who had played Falstaff, left the company before the second play was written. Similarly, the “fool” characters of Shakespeare’s later plays, such as Caliban, Lear’s Fool, Touchstone, and Hamlet’s gravedigger, were all played by Robert Armin, who replaced Kempe. Interestingly, he also played Iago, and there is some evidence that that character too was originally played as comic! The point here, though, is that Shakespeare was a practical theatre man, and his plays took the shape they did in part because of the actors whom he had available.)
Being an actor (or a dramatist, and Shakespeare was both) was not particularly admirable at the time, and this was most true when Shakespeare was a young man starting out. The theatres were usually located in the suburbs or on the bad side of the Thames, mixed in with bear-baiters and prostitutes. (Hamlet’s reference to “a foule and pestilent congregation of vapoures” may have been quite pungently literal for the audience.) It was a rough world; Christopher Marlowe, Shakespeare’s chief rival in his early career, was murdered under mysterious circumstances. Another contemporary, Thomas Kyd, was arrested and tortured under suspicion of having crossed the state politically. It was not a safe and tidy line of work.
The Elizabethan stage presents a counter-example to the claim that the arts require state support or freedom of expression in order to be vital and valuable. All of the plays produced in London at this time had to satisfy a highly censorious regime. In 1599 the Archbishop of Canterbury actually issued a ban on all satire in verse (a dictate that one expects was more honoured in the breach than the observance)! Moreover, in his early career Shakespeare seems to have faced personal criticism from other playwrights; these critiques were issued in cheap pamphlets and expressed in an allusive and cryptic style, but Ackroyd discerns numerous references to Shakespeare in this controversial ephemera. Robert Greene, for instance, in one of the more obvious examples, complained of “that only Shake-scene” who “supposes he is able to bombast out a blank verse as the best of you”.
But Shakespeare thrived under these circumstances. His theatre company, the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, was one of the most successful in the city. New plays continued to flow from his pen, and to be performed. He was himself one of the actors, and it is instructive to remember that he likely played one or more roles in each play; which one? According to Dryden he played Mercutio in Romeo and Juliet, although he is also supposed to have played the Friar. People have speculated — based on what evidence, I don’t know — that he likely played the lead role in Henry IV and Julius Caesar, the ghost in Hamlet, the Duke in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Lest one think that he gave himself the best roles, consider that one member of his acting company, Richard Burbage, premiered the characters of Lear, Hamlet, Othello, Macbeth, Coriolanus, Prospero, and Henry V — surely the most illustrious list of roles any actor has ever had the good fortune to create. And good fortune of another sort came to Shakespeare too, for in 1597 he purchased the grandest house in Stratford for his family, and in 1599 his company opened a new theatre, the Globe, on the south-side of the Thames.
*
Commentary on the plays themselves does not belong, strictly speaking, to the art of biography, but Ackroyd nonetheless gathers together quite a number of observations about them. We know that he did not often invent a story or plot; his was a realizing imagination. He could combine inspiration from different sources — he loved especially to turn to Ovid, Plutarch, to Italian novels of the day, to anthologies of romance, and even to Spenser and Chaucer. The Bible was the central book informing both his language and his imagination. His particular genius was in the creation of character; he had the ability to clothe himself with characters and inhabit them, giving them an inner energy that is almost unique. He himself could disappear into his characters. “I am not what I am,” is not only a recurring Shakespearean motif, but could be the motto of his authorship. His dialogue, and especially his monologues, develop organically, like living things. “In Shakespeare one sentence begets the next naturally,” said Coleridge, “the meaning is all inwoven. He goes on kindling like a meteor through the dark atmosphere.” He was the first English playwright to make song an integral part of his dramas. He was known, then and since, for his strategy of introducing comic elements into otherwise tragic or violent material. He loved wordplay, being much more given to toying with words than his contemporaries. He loves doubleness, and the play of opposites. In his dialogue one view strongly expressed very often elicits the opposite view as well, and so a natural drama develops. His plays sometimes consist of a set of variations on a theme in which multiple characters follow analogous character arcs. His dramas are frequently concerned with families. In his plays we see represented many relationships between fathers and daughters, but few between mothers and daughters. In his collected works there are more than twenty-five references to the story of Cain and Abel. From his verse it is evident that he knew a great deal about falconry, about hunting, about gardening, about fishing, and about the law. Do we learn something about him from these facts? Perhaps we do, but the approach is oblique.
*
Among the things we don’t know is what religion he practiced. He lived at a time when conflict between Catholicism and the new Church of England was heated. Being a Catholic was a distinct handicap, socially and professionally, and could be dangerous. Ackroyd is quite interested in the question of where Shakespeare’s allegiances lay in this dispute, which pleased me, because it’s a question that interests me as well.
That Shakespeare moved in Catholic circles is well-supported by the historical record. Within his own family there are numerous signs that Catholicism was preferred: a “spiritual testament”, much like that promoted by St. Edmund Campion was found in the rafters of Shakespeare’s childhood home in Stratford; his father was several times listed as a recusant — that is, one who refused to attend Church of England services; his father was mayor of Stratford in William’s youth, but abruptly relinquished the position when there was a crackdown on Catholics in public office; his mother, Mary Arden, was from a recusant Catholic family; William’s daughter, Susannah, was also cited as a recusant; his other daughter, Judith, married into a staunch recusant family. That’s a surprising number of recusants under his own roof.
His family’s social circles in Stratford were also liberally salted with Catholics. In the immediate neighbourhood of his boyhood home lived several families who had sons who became fugitive priests, or who were imprisoned for recusancy. William’s school-teacher abandoned teaching in order to become a priest of the Douai seminary, which was the primary training ground for English priests; his subsequent school-teacher had been taught at Oxford by none other than St Edmund Campion; the teacher after that had a brother at the Douai seminary, and one of Shakespeare’s classmates likewise left England to enroll.
The connections with recusants continued when Shakespeare became an adult. His early patron, the Earl of Southampton, was a Catholic whose spiritual director was the Jesuit poet, and later martyr, St. Robert Southwell. A list of his known acquaintances contains the names of six men who suffered death for their adherence to the old faith. Certain of his plays, such as Pericles, are known to have been performed in the homes of recusant families. In his will he left money to a man who had been imprisoned for sheltering a priest in his home.
All of this evidence is circumstantial. It tells us that he moved in recusant circles, but does not tell us about his own beliefs or religious practice. The closest we get are two arguments from absence — one: we do not know where he and Anne Hathaway (also from a recusant family, incidentally) were married, but we do know it was not at their local Church of England parish; two: his name is not found in any “token books” which recorded who received communion in Church of England parishes — and hearsay testimony — it was reported by the Archdeacon of Coventry, no friend to Catholics, that Shakespeare “dyed a papist”.
Though this evidence falls short of being decisive, perhaps it impresses you, as it does me, by its suggestiveness. Set against it, though, we must consider a few countervailing facts. We know, for instance, that as an infant Shakespeare was baptized in the Church of England. As an adult he was registered at his local parish (which may have been simply for taxation purposes, however). And late in life he stood as godfather in an Anglican ceremony, and he could not have done so without conforming, at least outwardly, to the official church. We also find no record of him being listed as a Catholic recusant himself.
So the evidence is indecisive. We can say that he had a Catholic upbringing and retained an unusually large number of ties to recusant Catholics, and it would be natural to think that the old religion was part of his imaginative world, if not his belief. (This has, indeed, been frequently suggested based on evidence from the plays.) He may have been a so-called “church papist”, a recognized category at the time describing someone who outwardly conformed to the state church but who secretly remained a Catholic. Ackroyd’s view, that he was “a man without beliefs” seems, if not impossible, at least unnecessarily extreme.
*
Of hard historical evidence about his life we have, as I’ve said, surprisingly little. There are some legal documents related to property ownership and a few cases in which he stood as a witness. An accountant’s note about a 1594 payment to his acting company is the sole historical document that connects him with the stage — apart from those copies of his plays that survive. These were originally published as single-play editions, fairly cheaply done and disposable. In the early days they didn’t even give his name as author, perhaps reflecting the understanding that the play was a collaborative effort between the author and the actors, and was primarily something realized on the stage, not on paper. Later in life his authorship was foregrounded, but it doesn’t seem his own fame eclipsed his works in the popular mind. The plays were the thing.
Well, mostly. I was surprised to learn that his most popular work during his lifetime was his narrative poem Venus and Adonis, which is rarely read today. (His most popular play during his lifetime? Henry IV, Part 1, judging from the number of extant copies.)
I was curious to learn what Ackroyd would say about the sonnets, which, it so happens, I’ve been reading alongside this biography. The early sonnets, plainly addressed to a man in amorous terms, which I’ve seen cited as evidence that Shakespeare had homoerotic tendencies, Ackroyd attributes to a probable commission from a female patron. To read them as Shakespeare’s self-disclosures is to misread them: “No one would have read such a sequence for autobiographical revelations — they were quite foreign to the genre — and at this late date it would be anachronistic to look for any outpouring of private passion or private anguish.” He points out that we know of no-one at the time who read them as personal expressions of love. He also notes that George Herbert thought them indecent, which does not surprise me.
Throughout the book Ackroyd reverts to unmodernized spelling when quoting from historical documents, including the plays, and this was for me both entertaining and instructive. In modern editions it can be relatively easy to think of Shakespeare as a “modern”; sure, his syntax is sometimes thorny and his diction is sometimes unfamiliar, but basically he’s speaking our language. It is easy to forget that he was much closer in time to Chaucer than he is to us, but a restoration of the original spelling reminds us, so that we read, for instance, about:
The undiscouer’d country, from whose borne
No trauiler returnes…
(Hamlet)
and experience a shock of unrecognition. Likewise, when we are told that
Some are borne great,
Some atcheeue greatnesse,
And some haue greatnesse thrust vpon them
(Twelfth Night)
we might enjoy a little thrill of the strange. Spelling was notoriously lax in this period, of course (as it was for Chaucer too). Ackroyd remarks that in surviving documents from the period or shortly after we have over 80 different spellings of Shakespeare’s name! “Sakspere, Schakosper, Schackspere, Saxper, Schaftspere, Shakstaf, Casper, Shasspeere, …” Even the man himself wasn’t overcareful; in his own last will and testament his name is spelled in several different ways, and his multiple signatures don’t match. Spelling bees were not an Elizabethan pastime.
*
His reputation grew with time. His acting company developed a good reputation with the king, and was usually invited to perform for the monarch in the winter months when the theatres were closed. More than 70 runs of his works were printed in his lifetime. We know enough to know that he was considered eminent in his field.
He died in 1616, aged 52. For some years prior he had been gradually disengaging from the theatre scene, and spending more time in Stratford. We don’t know what he died of, though naturally various theories have been put forward. (Inter alia, typhoid, syphilis, ague, influenza, “fever”, alcohol poisoning, …)
Seven years after his death, the famous First Folio appeared, a handsome edition of his collected works. But for this collection, we would know neither Antony and Cleopatra nor Coriolanus, plays for which we have no other surviving evidence. The edition was a success, and within a few generations several other similar editions had been brought to press. He never lost his good reputation, but it was, I think, not until late in the eighteenth century that he began to be regarded as peculiarly great, and his star has only ascended since. He is our great writer, by common consent.
*
Ackroyd is an old hand at the biographer’s art. He has written literary biographies of Eliot, Dickens, Blake, and Chaucer, not to mention massive tomes on London, the Thames, and a variety of other topics in English cultural history. You just knew he was going to write a book on Shakespeare one day, and he’s good at what he does. Overall, I enjoyed the book very much.
There were some odd details here and there, though. Noting that Shakespeare was sometimes accused of plagiarism, Ackroyd defends him by citing an 18th century phrenologist, Franz Joseph Gall, who hypothesized that theft and creativity were related. “Perhaps, “ says Ackroyd, “this is one explanation…”, as though we’re supposed to take the findings of phrenology seriously. In the variety of Shakespeare’s name spellings, to which we’ve already alluded, Ackroyd finds evidence for “the multifarious and polyphonic nature of his given identity”, which sounds like puff to me.
More problematic is a basic thesis that Ackroyd wants to maintain about Shakespeare: that he was a cipher, a nothing-man, a void. “Shakespeare had no sympathies at all.” We’ve already seen that the historical record is thin, even surprisingly thin, for such an important figure, and that it is hard to descry Shakespeare’s own thoughts with much confidence from the things his characters say, but to move from this observation to the conclusion that “he is both everything and nothing, his is many and yet no one” tips over into mere bloviation. Likewise for the claim that Shakespeare’s personality is “a negative so deep that it becomes a positive”. I’m not even sure what that means.
But apart from these modest criticisms, it’s a fine book. Reading it hasn’t changed my view that undertaking a biography of Shakespeare is basically a quixotic enterprise, but I do feel that I’ve learned something valuable about his times, if not his life.
All Manner of Thing 