And still more: “it is generally held that there was an earlier Hamlet play, the so-called Ur-Hamlet, either by Shakespeare or by someone else, with its own necessarily different set of dates, and this hypothetical lost play continues to complicate the issue of the date of Shakespeare’s play and indeed the issue of its sources.” And that’s all before we even start factoring in collaboration with other playwrights.
One way out of the textual dating mire is to ask more general questions. Why did this particular moment in our history produce a Shakespeare? How did the commercial theater produce plays of such extraordinary linguistic and emotional complexity? These are the questions asked, and answered brilliantly, by Bart van Es (2013). Shakespeare is special, in part, because of the unparalleled working conditions that he enjoyed, because he worked so well “in company,” and because that “company” was exceptional. Shakespeare is born into the right time, and the right place, for his particular talents to flourish. Other answers to similar questions appeal to the “richness of contemporary language” in Shakespeare’s time, or “the rhetorical treatises of the grammar school curriculum,” both of which both contributed to Shakespeare’s ability to capture “spoken cadences,” his “semantic attentiveness” (Smith 2012, p. 239).
Right time, right place takes us, however, only so far. Why did this moment produce only one William Shakespeare? Maybe we just need to go straight for the notion of “genius.” Jonathan Bate thinks so, thus his The Genius of Shakespeare (1997). For Stephen Greenblatt (writing in the same period) it is Shakespeare’s genius itself that has created a problem for biographers: “[S]o absolute is Shakespeare’s achievement that he has himself come to seem like great creating nature: the common bond of humankind, the principle of hope, the symbol of the imagination’s power to transcend time-bound beliefs and assumptions, peculiar historical circumstances, and specific artistic conventions” (Greenblatt 2000, p. 1). His very ability means that he floats somewhere above material history, somehow ineffable. A less direct route to the same destination is taken by Dutton. “There is, moreover, nothing that we know, suspect or have made up about Shakespeare’s early years that really helps us to explain the achievement of the plays and the poems” (Dutton 2016, p. 5). Once again, the biographical turn fails. It will not – perhaps cannot – explain “genius” and, more specifically, it cannot explain this genius: The Bard.
For some, this failure is a blessing in disguise. As Charles Dickens put it, the “life of Shakespeare is a fine mystery and I tremble every day lest something should turn up” (quoted in Garber 2004, p. 21). What if something turned up and compromised our idea of genius, made the man ordinary, of his time, and not an empty vessel into which we can pour our own vision of the great artist?
There are other reasons not to delve too deeply. What happens if the man we find is not merely ordinary, but unpleasant, even hateful? For many years, a convenient biographical syllogism (here unpacked by Emma Smith with exemplary brevity) kept this kind of thing at bay. “1. Prospero is a good guy. 2. Shakespeare is a good guy. 3. Therefore Prospero is Shakespeare.” But the same syllogism is far more problematic if Prospero is viewed as “irascible, tyrannical, subjecting Caliban to slavery,” or “a distinctly unlikeable, manipulative control freak.” As Smith puts it: “if this Prospero is Shakespeare, we wouldn’t much like Shakespeare” (2019, pp. 312–317). When it comes to his portrayal of women, the novelist Gayl Jones (2000, p. 103) has her character Joan say what a lot of us are thinking: Shakespeare “knows what a man wants, and what a man thinks a woman wants, even the best of women. He’s good at portraying bitches, but even they’re a man’s idea of a bitch. You know, even Shakespeare’s sweet bitches are still a man’s idea of a sweet bitch.”
The reluctance, even now, to countenance an unlikeable Shakespeare informs or suppresses the debate over (Christian, white, male) Shakespeare’s representation of Jewish people, of people of color, of women. Far better to duck a discussion of the writer’s opinions entirely rather than to consider his potential anti-Semitism, racism, or misogyny. Even the superbly clear-sighted Marjorie Garber squirms away. Acknowledging that Shylock would have been portrayed as a “comic butt” (2004, p. 4), that the actors would use the “standard signs of Jewishness on the Elizabethan stage” for laughs, she insists this tells us nothing about the man who created Shylock. For Garber, Shakespeare as a writer (and as a man?) is committed to balance and dialogue. Othello may have a “particularity as a black man and a Moor,” but this is balanced against “a certain desire to see him as a figure of universal humanity” (Garber 2004, p. 6). That “certain desire” is presumably that of the playwright, a man who believes in balance, in a universal humanity – even for a black man and a Moor.
Garber (2004, p. 7) insists that because the plays work “contrapuntally” it is impossible to say “Shakespeare said …” or “Shakespeare believed …” These are, however, two different impossibilities. Yes, we cannot say “Shakespeare said” because we have no documents, no utterances from the man, other than his literary texts. What of “Shakespeare believed”? Surely Garber’s Shakespeare, so wedded to “contrapuntal” drama, so careful to embed dialogue and balance into his plays, might just have believed in these qualities or virtues. Many of those who admire his work seem to accept this almost as a foundational fact. For many – not Garber – it is a short step to arguing that because William Shakespeare gave interiority to characters who were not fully human according to the mores of his own time – people of color; the Jew; servants; almost, but not quite, women – he must have understood and recognized those who were different to himself. It is a short step – and this time Garber makes it (2004, p. 6) – to seeing Shakespeare as every man, and every woman in his plays. “Shakespeare is Prospero, Caliban, Ariel and the wondering Miranda. He is Othello, Desdemona and Iago. Shylock, Portia and Antonio.” No one voice is “definitively right,” all are in dialogue with each other. All are Shakespeare.
This opens the door to more radical understandings of the plays. “Generations of readers and playgoers, many of them ‘cultural others,’ have experienced the powerful and pleasurable perception that in Shakespeare they are indeed represented. Witness Maya Angelou’s famous declaration: ‘I know that William Shakespeare was a black woman’” (Callaghan 2000, p. 6 drawing on Erickson 1992). It’s a powerful, and liberating, way of sidestepping conventional biographical understandings of authorship.
But it also sidesteps the tough questions. Was Shakespeare racist? Is Othello the play racist? Are those two questions related? Or in the words of Marjorie Garber, again: “What is Shakespeare’s own view of such political questions? The answer – which is not an answer – lies in his plays,” in all their “brilliance and capaciousness” (Garber 2004, pp. 6–7). If you read to the end of this book, you will find that I too come back to the plays and poems. They are what we have, and I believe they do offer us answers (although not necessarily to traditional biographical questions). Even more importantly, they offer questions – which is one of the reasons they are so powerful.
What Garber cannot or will not say is whether the “brilliance” (another word for genius, perhaps?) of the plays, is also that of William Shakespeare, the human being. Nor can she or will she suggest where this “capaciousness” came from or how it found its way into his drama. Better to avoid the biographical turn entirely than end up with answers we do not want.
There are other, very good reasons, to be wary of reading the man from the plays. One is the literary practices of Shakespeare’s own era. During his lifetime, writers were very unlikely to be driven by a desire for the confessional disclosure of the self, since the “primary impulse behind early modern dramaturgy – indeed, behind early modern writing more generally – is rhetorical rather than autobiographical” (Smith 2019, p. 312). This is absolutely true, but still leaves space for an author like Ben Jonson to write numerous prologues, epilogues, and essays about his own writing, and put his family and feelings into his poetry. It’s possible to pick apart the rhetorical gestures at work in Jonson’s sonnet on the death of his young son (even easier when considering his sonnet on the death of his daughter), but in the case of the former, the father’s grief is palpable and intensely
