It’s hard to write about the Bard. That’s because there’s a shattering lack of biographical detail out there. “Although he left nearly a million words of text, we have just fourteen words in his own hand — his name signed six times and the words ‘by me’ on his will,’’ to quote the wonderful travel/humor/uncategorizable writer Bill Bryson.
Just so: Shakespeare’s birth date is a guesstimate, and we can’t say whether he was Catholic or Protestant. We don’t know how many plays he wrote, or in what order. We don’t know his hobbies, if he ever left England, even how he pronounced his name. For one 10-year span, we have no idea where he was. What did he look like? Uncertain. What was his sexuality? Ditto. Now, at the 400th anniversary of his death, it’s humbling to realize that, as one scholar told Bryson, all Shakespeare biographies are “5 percent fact and 95 percent conjecture.’’
Bryson doesn’t shy from this deficit. He embraces it; indeed, he jokes, that’s why his book is “so slender.’’ Part of the Eminent Lives short biography series, his “Shakespeare: The World as Stage’’ (HarperCollins, 2007) is an endearing and wry companion. How fine to join Bryson, therefore, at London’s National Archives — which holds 100 miles worth of records — to plumb the paltry pickings of Shakespeare’s life.
About 100 documents have been found, so far, that possibly link to Shakespeare. Lots concern his father John, glover, wool merchant, scofflaw. In 1983, a researcher named Wendy Goldsmith found that John was accused of usury when Will was 12 years old. Did this fact propel “The Merchant of Venice?’’ Do we not bleed to find out? At any rate, documents explain so little. “Faced with a wealth of text but a poverty of context, scholars have focused obsessively on what they can know,’’ Bryson explains. So modern analytics have crunched rather meaningless knowledge: Shakespeare wrote “hath’’ 2,069 times but “has’’ just 409 times. But maybe also meaningful? His characters refer to “hate’’ 183 times — but “love’’ 2,259 times.
If we can’t pin down Shakespeare, maybe we can pin down his world. That’s Peter Ackroyd’s policy, and his illuminating “Shakespeare: The Biography’’ (Nan A. Talese/Doubleday, 2005) pulls from various strata of detail. He hazards that, like all babies of the era, the infant Shakespeare was fed hare’s brain jelly. He thinks he must’ve had strong genes to resist the plague, which raged through his lifetime. And he believes Will probably started his career in the theater as a horse minder for patrons taking in shows. The plays are saddled with lots of equine minutia, maybe as a result.
Shakespeare was not a university man, as were most playwrights of his day. He began as an actor and shows up in some surviving cast lists from his plays and others. Ackroyd admires how he was of, not above, the theater. And he was mindful of his patrons. Years before James I became king in 1603, some Scottish witches allegedly tried to assassinate him. His highness also had a short attention span. Thus Macbeth (circa 1606), full of royalty, witches, Scotsmen — and the second shortest of all Shakespeare’s plays.
What a piece of work is “Shakespeare the Thinker’’ (Yale, 2007). A.D. Nuttall, an English professor emeritus at Oxford, fuses close critical reading with biographical wisps. I was particularly taken by Nuttall’s view of Ophelia, whose drowning is told so lyrically (“Her clothes spread wide,/ And mermaid-like awhile they bore her up’’) then so abruptly (“To muddy death’’). Tantalizing theory: The source material was a young woman — named Katherine Hamlett — who drowned in Stratford when Shakespeare was 15.
Nuttall also debates Will’s occupation during the lost decade (soldier, teacher, lawyer?). And he scratches at the opaque evidence that Shakespeare was a secret Catholic during this time of persecution by Protestants. It’s telling that the ghost in “Hamlet’’ — a role we know Shakespeare played on stage — is in purgatory, a strictly Catholic concept.
“Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare’’ (Norton, 2004) is Stephen Greenblatt’s tour de force (it was a Pulitzer Prize finalist) with a force of detail: Will owned a tenth of the Globe theater, we learn, which entertained 1,500 people a day. He must have grown up seeing morality plays, with characters named Vice, Misrule, Diligence, Virtue, etc. Pious and wooden, these works nonetheless “helped him grasp how to construct plays around the struggle for the soul of a protagonist.’’
What moved me so, reading these books, reading these lines, was how of all men Shakespeare had “the most comprehensive soul,’’ as John Dryden wrote. He made comedy and tragedy; he broke all the rules; and he compassed all human emotions. Greenblatt holds that Shakespeare had a “preference for things untidy, damaged, and unresolved over things neatly arranged, well made, and settled.’’ So it is right, perhaps, that his biography echoes his art.
Katharine Whittemore is a freelance writer based in Northampton. She can be reached at katharine.whittemore@comcast.net.
