They found a lawsuit in which the daughter of John Heminges, one of Shakespeare’s closest colleagues, sued her father over some family property in 1615. For Shakespeare scholars these are moments of monumental significance.
Unfortunately, as time passed Charles Wallace began to grow a little strange. He penned extravagant public tributes to himself in the third person (‘Prior to his researches,’ read one, ‘it was believed and taught for nearly fifty years that everything was known about Shakespeare that ever would be known. His remarkable discoveries have changed all this…and brought lasting honor to American scholarship’) and developed paranoid convictions. He became convinced that other researchers were bribing the desk clerks at the Public Record Office to learn which files he had ordered. Eventually he believed that the British government was secretly employing large numbers of students to uncover Shakespeare records before he could get to them, and claimed as much in an American literary magazine, causing dismay and unhappiness on both sides of the Atlantic.
Short of funds and increasingly disowned by the academic community, he and Hulda gave up on Shakespeare and the English, and moved back to the United States. It was the height of the oil boom in Texas, and Wallace developed another unexpected conviction: he decided that he could recognize good oil land just by looking at it. Following a secret instinct, he sank all his remaining funds in a 160-acre farm in Wichita Falls, Texas. It proved to be one of the most productive oilfields ever found anywhere. He died in 1932, immensely rich and not very happy.
With so little to go on in the way of hard facts, students of Shakespeare’s life are left with essentially three possibilities: to pick minutely over legal documents as the Wallaces did; to speculate (‘Every Shakespeare biography is 5 per cent fact and 95 per cent conjecture,’ one Shakespeare scholar told me, possibly in jest); or to persuade themselves that they know more than they actually do. Even the most careful biographers sometimes take a supposition – that Shakespeare was Catholic or happily married or fond of the countryside or kindly disposed towards animals – and convert it within a page or two to something like a certainty. The urge to switch from subjunctive to indicative is, to paraphrase Alastair Fowler, always a powerful one.
Others have simply surrendered themselves to their imaginations. One respected and normally level-headed academic of the 1930s, the University of London’s Caroline F.E. Spurgeon, became persuaded that it was possible to determine Shakespeare’s appearance from a careful reading of his text, and confidently announced (in Shakespeare’s Imagery and What it Tells Us) that he was ‘a compactly well-built man, probably on the slight side, extraordinarily well-coordinated, lithe and nimble of body, quick and accurate of eye, delighting in swift muscular movement. I suggest that he was probably fair-skinned and of a fresh colour, which in youth came and went easily, revealing his feelings and emotions.’
Ivor Brown, a popular historian, meanwhile concluded from mentions of abscesses and other irruptions in Shakespeare’s plays that Shakespeare sometime after 1600 had undergone ‘a severe attack of staphylococcic infection’ and was thereafter ‘plagued with recurrent boils’.
Other, literal-minded readers of Shakespeare’s sonnets have been struck by two references to lameness, namely in Sonnet 37:
As a decrepit father takes delight
To see his active child do deeds of youth,
So I, made lame by Fortune’s dearest spite,
Take all my comfort of thy worth and truth.
And again in Sonnet 89:
Say that thou didst forsake me for some fault,
And I will comment upon that offense.
Speak of my lameness, and I straight will halt
and concluded that he was crippled.
In fact it cannot be emphasized too strenuously that there is nothing – not a scrap, not a mote – that gives any certain insight into Shakespeare’s feelings or beliefs as a private person. We can know only what came out of his work, never what went into it.
David Thomas is not in the least surprised that he is such a murky figure. ‘The documentation for William Shakespeare is exactly what you would expect of a person of his position from that time,’ he says. ‘It seems like a dearth only because we are so intensely interested in him. In fact we know more about Shakespeare than about almost any other dramatist of his age.’
Huge gaps exist for nearly all figures from the period. Thomas Dekker was one of the leading playwrights of the day, but we know little of his life other than that he was born in London, wrote prolifically, and was often in debt. Ben Jonson was more famous still, but many of the most salient details of his life – the year and place of his birth, the identities of his parents, the number of his children – remain unknown or uncertain. Of Inigo Jones, the great architect and theatrical designer, we have not one certain fact of any type for the first thirty years of his life other than that he most assuredly existed somewhere.
Facts are surprisingly delible things, and in four hundred years a lot of them simply fade away. One of the most popular plays of the age was Arden of Faversham, but no one now knows who wrote it. When an author’s identity is known, that knowledge is often marvellously fortuitous. Thomas Kyd wrote the most successful play of its day, The Spanish Tragedy, but we know this only because of a passing reference to his authorship in a document written some twenty years after his death (and then lost for nearly two hundred years).
What we do have for Shakespeare are his plays – all of them but one or two – thanks in very large part to the efforts of his colleagues Henry Condell and John Heminges, who put together a more or less complete volume of his work after his death – the justly revered First Folio. It cannot be overemphasized how fortunate we are to have so many of Shakespeare’s works, for the usual condition of sixteenth- and early-seventeenth-century plays is to be lost. Few manuscripts from any playwrights survive, and even printed plays are far more often missing than not. Of the approximately three thousand plays thought to have been staged in London from about the time of Shakespeare’s birth to the closure of the theatres by the Puritans in a coup of joylessness in 1642, 80 per cent are known only by title. Only 230 or so play texts still exist from Shakespeare’s time, including the thirty-eight by Shakespeare himself – about 15 per cent of the total, a gloriously staggering proportion.
It is because we have so much of Shakespeare’s work that we can appreciate how little we know of him as a person. If we had only his comedies, we would think him a frothy soul. If we had just the sonnets, he would be a man of darkest passions. From a selection of his other works, we might think him variously courtly, cerebral, metaphysical, melancholic, Machiavellian, neurotic, light-hearted, loving, and much more. Shakespeare was of course all these things – as a writer. We hardly know what he was as a person.
Faced with a wealth of text but a poverty of context, scholars have focused obsessively on what they can know. They have counted every word he wrote, logged every dib and jot. They can tell us (and have done so) that Shakespeare’s works contain 138,198 commas, 26,794 colons, and 15,785 question marks; that ears are spoken of 401 times in his plays; that dunghill is used ten times and dullard twice; that his characters refer to love 2,259 times but to hate just 183 times; that he used damned 105 times and bloody 226 times, but bloody-minded only twice; that he wrote hath 2,069 times but has just 409 times; that altogether he left us 884,647 words, made up of 31,959 speeches, spread over 118,406 lines.
They
