the perceived paucity of the kinds of archival documents that are the traditional raw materials for the writing of a literary life. Not a single letter written by Shakespeare or written to him survives, except one which was not sent. We have no information, beyond their names, about his relationship with his parents, wife, children, or grandchildren. Shakespeare almost never writes about his creations as a playwright and poet, and only a handful of people in his own time bothered to comment on his work.
Therefore, although there are plenty of things we want to know about Shakespeare (his political views, his religious beliefs, whom he loved, what he did with his time when he wasn’t writing or acting, and so on) these things cannot be known. This list is based on that of James Shapiro (2015, p. 12) who argues that, once the people who knew Shakespeare died, it became impossible to write “that sort of biography.”
I will return to a couple of assumptions made here (about “that sort of biography” and concerning the need for evidence from people who “knew” Shakespeare), but first I need to pick up the gauntlet thrown down by Shapiro’s next sentence: “Modern biographers who nonetheless speculate on such matters, or in the absence of archival evidence read the plays and poems as transparently autobiographical, inevitably end up revealing more about themselves than they do about Shakespeare.” This is harsh and not very fair, the more so since it comes in the Prologue to his own literary biographical account of 1606: William Shakespeare and the Year of Lear. Most literary biographers shy away from reading the plays and poems as “transparently autobiographical.” All those who engage with Shakespeare’s life and works are, on one level, speculating. It is just that some do it more openly than others. There are plenty of critics who make their assumptions discreetly, hiding behind the screen of, say, a discussion of Shakespeare’s literary influences. Did Shakespeare know the work of his fellow writer, Thomas Nashe? Shakespeare would “probably have read” Nashe’s Unfortunate Traveller; “some believe” that Moth, a character in Love’s Labour’s Lost written “around” 1594, is based on Nashe; Nashe might even have been involved with Tamburlaine in 1587 (Hadfield 2004, p. 2). Or, what prompted Shakespeare to write the moment in A Midsummer Night’s Dream when Oberon asks Puck if he remembers when he, Oberon, sat “upon a promontory / And heard a mermaid on a dolphin’s back”? Could this be an echo of a production at Kenilworth in 1575? Kenilworth is in Warwickshire: we are in the right county, and William is 11 years old, so he could have been there. The evidence is unstable (one eyewitness noted the dolphin, another remembers a mermaid, but neither record seeing a mermaid on a dolphin’s back), but is nevertheless used to imagine scenarios rooted in Shakespeare’s lived experience. “Did Shakespeare’s memory play tricks on him over the years, or did he embroider the event for his own artistic purposes? Or, more prosaically, did Shakespeare simply read about these famous events in one or both printed accounts, and adapt them to his needs?” (Dutton 2018, pp. 25–27).
This kind of thing is not a million miles away from the assumptions made by previous generations that the playwright could not have created characters of such depth unless he had experienced at least something similar to those characters. Thomas Carlyle, for one, saw a bit of Macbeth, Hamlet, and Coriolanus in William Shakespeare, the man. This might be too simplistic for us now, but we still perceive that Shakespeare is concerned with, or preoccupied by, some aspect of life, and slide into the assumption that the concern is rooted in lived experience. His “particular sensitivity to ravaged landscapes of continental battlefields” for example, leads a critic to wonder whether Shakespeare went to be a soldier in France (Brennan 2004, p. 58).
Others, including the hugely popular Stephen Greenblatt (2004, p. 151), openly ask us to use our imaginations because what matters is “not the degree of evidence but rather the imaginative life that the incident has.” This comes very close to saying what matters is not the true story, but a good story, a stance complicated by the moments when Greenblatt does assert (his own) truths about Shakespeare. But it is at least honest, recognizing that each of our Shakespeares will be different, dependent on our imaginations.
The challenge remains, to read a consistent “Shakespeare” from his deeply inconsistent drama. Reading from the plays to the life, some argue that Shakespeare was aware of his own aging from, say, 1599, and is exploring this new awareness in As You Like It. But which experience of aging is William’s? Consider Jaques and Touchstone, both additions to Shakespeare’s source material. Jaques “constructs an existential stage-play world in which ‘All the world’s a stage, / And all the men and women merely players’” with life viewed as “a series of declining stages to an old age ‘sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything’” (2.7.139–166) (Smith 2012, p. 17). But “Touchstone has a parallel speech on the seven degrees of quarrelling: more expansive, more verbally witty, and ultimately more optimistic” (ibid.). Is Shakespeare Jaques or Touchstone, both or neither?
These kinds of micro-biographical turns abound, but often remain unexplored asides to more conventional literary critical analyses. The enduring consensus in the academy, to return to Shapiro’s words, is that a particular “sort of biography” should be avoided, not least because it is “impossible” to write. And perhaps unnecessary to write. The editor of one edition of Hamlet (Edwards 2003) refuses to engage with any discussion of Shakespeare the human being. The man who wrote the play is irrelevant. Instead, the focus is on deciphering the genealogy of the surviving texts and deciding which is “best” for performance.
In the face of this kind of thing, cautious biographers turn – tentatively – to the plays and – much less tentatively – to what we do know (or think we know) about the world around Shakespeare. James Shapiro has demonstrated, triumphantly, the powerful results of this approach in his two best-selling studies of the years 1599 and 1606. He argues that Shakespeare’s age, friendships, family relationships, location, and finances at any one time must have impacted in some way upon his writing: a new patron, a new king, a new playhouse, a new rival could – and did – change his drama and poetry. By focusing on both Shakespeare’s times in a general sense, and on a specific time in his life, we can get “a slice of a writer’s life.” Shakespeare’s emotional life in 1606, the “year of Lear,” may be lost to us but “by looking at what he wrote in dialogue with these times we can begin to recover what he was thinking about and wrestling with” (2015, pp. 15–16).
Shapiro clusters plays together, challenging simple generic clusterings, teases out their themes and preoccupations, and then maps those onto (the little we know about) Shakespeare’s lived experience or (the considerable amount we know about) the world in which he worked. Grouping plays chronologically rather than generically allows us to see the connections between Henry V and
plays like Julius Caesar or As You Like It, written at much the same time, and with which it shares a different set of preoccupations. Shakespeare himself seems to have taken for granted that ‘the purpose of playing’ was to show, as Hamlet put it, “the very age and body of the time his form and pressure” (3.2.20–24). To see how Shakespeare’s plays managed to do so depends upon knowing when each one was written.
(Shapiro 2005b, p. 10)
And that’s both the virtue of and the faultline in Shapiro’s approach. We simply do not know “when each one was written.” Was 1606 even “the year of Lear”? In the vast majority of cases, it remains unclear when, precisely, Shakespeare wrote individual plays or when a play was first performed. And the challenges don’t end there. It may be hard to date the plays with any precision, but what precisely are we dating? What do we mean by, say, Hamlet?2 Some editors will prioritize the date of a first performance of a play. Others will seek to work out when Shakespeare actually put pen to paper. In fact, there are at least three separate significant dates for any Shakespeare play. The moment when he completed the manuscript (although the idea of completion is misleading, since playbooks were constantly adapted); the play’s first performance (again, performance can and did take many forms); and the first printing. With Hamlet, as Thompson and Taylor (2006, p. 44) point out, we are dealing with not one
