reference to the death of William’s son, Hamnet, in his plays may only be a reflection of a world in which “no playwright, including Shakespeare could make his own personal grief the centre of a play” (Potter 2012, p. 288). More generally, “no literature of this period has the elevation of the artist’s own inner feelings as its legible core, and drama even less so, where the animation of different voices and different people is more important than the single narrative consciousness of, say, the traditional novel or lyric poem” (Smith 2019, p. 313). Lyric poetry might, just, be starting to blur the boundaries, and Shakespeare’s sonnets certainly play with those boundaries, but the playwright keeps well away.
It might be alien to the culture for an individual’s personal grief to be expressed, but drama in Elizabethan and Jacobean England could be, and was, polemical. Not Shakespeare though, according to Potter (2019, p. 402), who, reflecting on her own biographical practice, sees a writer who likes “to work within parameters.” Shakespeare “throughout his career, like me in my biography, was trying to fill specific requirements, as opposed to conveying a secret message about his views on sex, politics, or religion.” This view is, to a degree, questioned by the work of Van Es (2013, p. 197) who argues that “to echo a theatrical fashion is not necessarily to endorse it: there is room for resistance alongside pragmatic imitation when Shakespeare responds to commercial trends.” Simply because Shakespeare was writing to order does not mean that he did not, at times, question the order of things.
Of course, a strongly anti-Catholic play might not reflect the strongly anti-Catholic views of its creator, merely a writer keen to pander to his audience’s prejudice, but Shakespeare – according to many – never writes a drama from which the audience can take a single, straightforward political message. Instead, not only does he refuse to be overtly autobiographical (standard practice for his time), but he pursues a “model of authorial near-anonymity,” a model that was evidently “congenial to his purposes” (Bevington 2010, p. 4). Those purposes may have included survival in an era when a political or religious word out of place could have the most drastic consequences.
Bearing this in mind, the strangely lacking archive deserves another look. Could the lack of documentation be strategic – a sign of Shakespeare’s caution in a dangerous era? Or is it precisely what we might expect from an individual of his class and profession? Either way, the archive only appears to be thin because we are so interested in Shakespeare: “what we know falls a long way short of what we would like to know” (Dutton 1989, p. 1).
Yet the problem with the archival evidence may not be its scarcity. Indeed, some would argue there is no dearth in the first place. It is simply that biographers have given “a special weight to what we might call documented fact: those details of Shakespeare’s life that can be supported by footnoted reference to archival materials” (Stewart 2016, p. 57). Schoenbaum’s William Shakespeare: A Documentary Life from 1975 is the perfect example, keeping strictly to the “facts.” But this “documentary life” “obscures an earlier biographical tradition, which fails to meet Schoenbaum’s insistence on documentation – one that may be exploited by biographers for anecdotal colour, but which is routinely dismissed as apocryphal.” This earlier tradition, stretching through the seventeenth century and beyond, is in fact “remarkably coherent, and serves to conjure a notably different Shakespeare from the one attested to by ‘documents’” (Stewart 2016, pp. 57–58).
This notably different Shakespeare is conjured from a tradition of life-writing rooted in homosocial cultures of the seventeenth century. That tradition excludes the domestic. It should be no surprise therefore that early modern sources for Shakespearean biography ignore the presence of his wife and children. Stratford appears, but “until Rowe cites the still unnamed daughter of Hathaway, this is Shakespeare without a wife: a woman who is mentioned only once in the seventeenth century, and then only to be banned from the posterity of his grave.” Hamnet is not mentioned. Instead, there are hints of an illegitimate son, Davenant, “a poet-playwright son conceived adulterously in a tavern on the road from London to Stratford” (Stewart 2016, pp. 72–73).
Stewart offers a powerful corrective to our placing of familial relationships at the heart of biography and, even more importantly, reveals the mechanics of this particular biographical turn. The recorded events in early lives “routinely take place at various ‘merry’ meetings of men – in chambers at Eton, at a baptism, at a tavern.” But there is a twist. These venues would, in real life, be open to women but when turned into biographical anecdote, almost all female presence is written out of the story. More than that, Shakespeare’s network, his dynasty even, is not his family, but the theater.
He is consistently presented in rivalries with fellow players (Burbage) and playwrights (Jonson); anecdotes attesting to his worth come down through theatre luminaries (Jonson, Davenant, Shadwell); in the first full life, even the archival research is carried out by a Hamlet, Thomas Betterton, and written up by another playwright, Nicholas Rowe. The seventeenth-century Shakespeare is thus insistently embodied as a man of the theatre – but a theatre that takes place in the largely homosocial conviviality of the tavern; is judged in the homosocial conviviality of its critics in Eton; and talked about in the homosocial conviviality of its target audience in Middle Temple chambers.
(Stewart 2016, p. 72)
In some ways, contemporary approaches to life-writing (including my own) return Shakespeare to this biographical tradition. I admire hugely, and have drawn unashamedly upon, the work of scholars such as Van Es, Potter, and Dutton, all of whom offer profound insights into Shakespeare the working playwright, the man of the theater.
Samuel Schoenbaum (1991, p. 5), who should know, argues that the records “nevertheless possess a pattern and significance of their own.” The problem is that the pattern and significance is not always to our taste:
Perhaps the reason we so desperately want the plays to speak to us, is that the story the legal documents tell us is not always the story we want to hear. Many biographers have been troubled by Shakespeare’s lack of civic or institutional philanthropy (given his affluence) in his will or by the evidence of Shakespeare hoarding grain in 1599, at a time when a series of bad harvests meant that many of Stratford’s poor were starving, especially as he writes about exactly this scenario at the beginning of Coriolanus. Or by the fact that in a Stratford protest against proposed land enclosures by William Combe in 1614–15, Shakespeare hired a lawyer to protect his own land and appears to have supported Combe.
(Maguire and Smith 2012, p. 109)
Whatever the reasons for the lack of traditional “documentary” biographical materials, it has had an effect on our understanding of Shakespeare’s life. Since nature abhors a vacuum, “later ages have filled the picture with guesswork, legend and sentiment,” writes Dutton (2016, p. 2), who is tolerant of guesswork, but critical of legend and sentiment. And harnessed “Shakespeare” to their cause.
Emma Smith (2012, p. 223) offers a scathing critique of this kind of thing: claims that “he retained the old religion of Roman Catholicism, or that he was gay, or that he was politically conservative, or whatever, tend to reveal more about the priorities of the speaker than the subject.” Smith’s list is a little slippery. “Gay” is a modern term: if we call Shakespeare gay we are very obviously co-opting modern terminology to understand a man 400 years dead. But keeping the “old religion” and “politically conservative” are less straightforward. Both concepts meant something very different then than they do now. Shapiro (2005b, pp. 9–10) is excellent on this:
Even the meaning of such concepts as individuality was different. Writers, including Shakespeare, were only beginning to speak of “individual” in the modern sense of “distinctive” or “special”, the exact opposite of what it had long meant, “inseparable”. This was also an age of faith, or at the least one in which church attendance was mandatory; religion, too played a greater role in shaping how life, death and the afterlife were imagined. All this suggests
