DAVID ELLIS TALK (27th September 2002)

SHAKESPEARE AND BIOGRAPHY

 
Ever since I began working on Shakespeare and biography I’ve been having this dream. More of a nightmare really. I have committed some terrible crime, probably that sin in the Bible which is so bad that no-one can tell you what it is. Anyway, I have a huge burden of guilt and I’m sitting in the dock waiting to be judged. For some reason known only to dream logic, I have the opportunity of watching the members of the jury file in. As they take their seats, I realise that they are all Shakespeare biographers: Antony Holden, Park Honan, Katherine Duncan-Jones, Jonathan Bate, Ernst Honigmann, Richard Wilson in the front row, Marchette Chute, Antony Burgess, A. L. Rowse, Leslie Hotson in the second, even Sir Sidney Lee lurking in the background. Once I’ve recognised them all I realise that the game is up, that there is no hope, and that I might as well top myself.


One lesson I take from this dream is that the standards which operate in biography are chiefly forensic. Biographers can rarely establish with scientific certainty what they most want to know, but they can offer suggestions which are – as they say – beyond reasonable doubt. To do this, however, they need evidence and it is a notorious fact that, in Shakespeare’s case, there just isn’t any. Of course, there are christening, marriage and burial records, legal documents relating to house or land purchase, quite enough material to show that, in the often quoted and caustic words of one of Shakespeare’s 18th century editors, he: was born at Stratford upon Avon, -- married and had children there, -- went to London , where he commenced actor, and wrote poems and plays, -- returned to Stratford, made his will, died, and was buried.


That’s to say that there is plenty of evidence for a certain kind of life of Shakespeare, but it’s not the kind his biographers have wanted to write. What frustrates them – or should do – is that they are no eye-witness reports of any value, no records of how he looked, dressed, spoke, behaved; and more importantly, that there are no personal documents. If Shakespeare ever kept a dairy or commonplace book it has disappeared; he wasn’t given to talking about his `mountain belly’ in public as Ben Jonson was; and above all there are no surviving letters. I was going to focus in this talk on the importance of letters in biography, but in this company it’s perhaps too obvious a topic to spend time on.


Personal documents are the clue to the inner life but it could be said that if we want to know more about Shakespeare’s thoughts and feelings we have only to turn to the poems and the plays. Reading these in order to deduce from them an idea of `Shakespeare the man’ may be a legitimate exercise, but it’s not – it seems to me – biography. It would take the rest of this talk to explain why I think this, so let me just say here that a play strikes me as just about the worse possible literary form with which to play hunt the author. As for the Sonnets, I would have more confidence in their autobiographical status if, after two or three hundred years of intense scholarship, there was even a rough consensus on the identity of the addressee (Mr W.H.), or of the Dark Lady. The Sonnets seem to me at all points desperately and perhaps even wilfully enigmatic. In the absence of what I would call real evidence, Shakespeare’s biographers do of course pillage his writings ruthlessly, but there are two other major sources of material available to them and it’s those I want to say a brief word about.


The first is what the great Shakespearean scholar, E. K. Chambers, very aptly called `the Shakespeare-Mythos’: that collection of gossip, anecdote, hearsay, legend which has accumulated around his name over the years. There is the story, for example, of how he had to leave Stratford because he was caught poaching the deer of a local landowner. Several anecdotes are based on the idea that once he was established in London he became friendly with Ben Jonson and the two of them had many a `merry meeting’ in the Mermaid inn. We are told that when he travelled from Stratford to London he would always stay at a tavern kept by the Davenants. Mrs Davenant was apparently very beautiful and Shakespeare had an affair with her that resulted in Sir William Davenant, the Restoration dramatist. So that just as there were `sons of Ben’ in the mid-17th century literary world there was at least one son of Shakespeare. An initial problem with all these stories is that they only begin to circulate long after Shakespeare is dead. I thought therefore that the best one to discuss would be the one which is widely thought to have the best chance of being true, in large part because it’s contemporary.


In March 1601 John Manningham, a law student at the Middle Temple, wrote the following in his diary or commonplace book: Upon a time when Burbage played Richard III there was a Citizen grew so far in liking with him, that before she went from the play she appointed him to come that night unto her by the name of Richard III. Shakespeare, overhearing their conclusion, went before, was entertained, and at his game ere Burbage came. Then message being brought that Richard III was at the door, Shakespeare caused return to be made that William the Conqueror was before Richard III. Shakespeare’s name William. (Mr Touse.)


When Antony Holden quotes this anecdote in his biography of Shakespeare he misses out the two final phrases, but they seem to me important. We know from other entries in the diary that `Mr Touse’ indicates Manningham’s source and Touse turns out to be another member of the Middle Temple and not someone with any known links to the theatre. It’s quite clear from those other entries that the diary was not meant for publication but rather functioned as an aide-mémoire. When Manningham writes `Shakespeare’s name William’ therefore he is reminding HIMSELF of essential information he has to have in order to understand the point of the story. But that hardly suggests he was close to the scene of action. What I think biographers ought to be asking themselves with material of this kind is: what are the qualities of the witness or informant, how far was he or she in a position to provide reliable information, and also – that essential principle – where can I find corroboration?


Several people have claimed that this anecdote has been corroborated because a version of it appears in Thomas Wilkes’s General View of the Stage, published in 1759. Since this was before the Manningham diary was discovered, they suggest that what we have is that great desideratum: two independent sources for the same material. But all that Wilkes’s version seems to me to indicate is that there was a funny story, a joke, going round London in the 1600s and more than one person picked it up. That it is a joke adds, I think, to the caution with which we should approach it. Jokes play an important role in the Shakespeare-Mythos. Running through the streets of Oxford, little Willie Davenant is stopped and asked why he is in such a hurry. When he says he is rushing home to see his godfather Shakespeare, who happens to be visiting, he is told not to take the name of God in vain. This story was first recorded by Thomas Hearne in 1709 but Schoenbaum reports that it had already been included in a book called Wit and Mirth published in 1629, but applied to quite different people. The old ones are the best. The details of the Manningham anecdote are too specific to suggest that material is being recycled but when people tell jokes truth, accuracy, fairness are not the first things on their minds. There are at present a number of anecdotes circulating about the intelligence of President Bush but, if I were writing his biography, I wouldn’t want to take them seriously unless their details were confirmed in (for example) the memoirs of one of his aides.


You will have noticed that the Manningham anecdote isn’t entirely coherent, that there is a narrative gap. Burbage and the female Citizen arrange a meeting but when Shakespeare turns up instead she either doesn’t notice or doesn’t care. In the 18th century version, Thomas Wilkes cleared up this difficulty. He has Shakespeare overhearing Burbage and the woman agreeing that the signal for his entry to her house (or bedroom) should be three taps on the window and the words, `It is I, Richard III’. When he borrows this signal: The lady was very much surprised at Shakespeare’s presuming to act Mr Burbage’s part; but as he (who had wrote Romeo and Juliet) … did not want wit or eloquence to apologise for the intrusion , she was soon pacified, and they were mutually happy...


Katherine Duncan-Jones’s way of making more sense of Manningham’s anecdote is different from Wilkes’s. Having read lots of Elizabethan and Jacobean plays she assumes that what Manningham describes is a `bed-trick’, that because he came dressed as Richard III Shakespeare was able to substitute himself for Burbage without the woman noticing. She concludes from this that Shakespeare must have looked like Burbage -- `the substitution could not have been attempted unless the two men were of a similar height, build, colouring and, perhaps above all, voice’ – and also that he must have been an excellent actor. This is the biographical capital she makes from the anecdote and it seems to me illegitimate, an ill-gotten gain. But that’s not important compared with the way Duncan-Jones uses her interpretation of the anecdote to support her general thesis that Shakespeare had scant respect for women. Developing this view in relation to another matter, she complains: `there was no question of considering the sensitivities of the woman who fancied Burbage and ended up in bed with Shakespeare’. Here a joke has been used to define not Shakespeare’s appearance or skills but his character. You can see I hope why in my dream I am so alarmed when I realise the jury is entirely composed of Shakespeare’s biographers.


After the mythos, the second source for those who want to write a life of Shakespeare but don’t have any of the usual evidence is … history. The first sentence of Park Honan’s biography reads: `Research into the Elizabethans is of such quality today that new material about Shakespeare, his town, his parents, his schooling, his friendships, or his career comes to light continually’. The last document with any direct relevance to Shakespeare was discovered in 1909, yet it’s true that our knowledge of the Elizabethans and Jacobeans is continually on the increase, or at least that new information continues to accumulate. No-one could write a life of Shakespeare without knowing a good deal about his times but it’s a fallacy which it seems to me his biographers often adopt that the more extensively you explore those times, the more you will know about his life. The cut-off point comes early. Take the question to which Honan allludes of Shakespeare’s education. The records of Stratford grammar school for Shakespeare’s time have not survived but it’s virtually certain he went there. It is possible to deduce what he was taught from the mass of research on Elizabethan grammar school education because the educational regime of the time was relatively standard, uniform. `History’, that is, enables us to reconstruct Shakespeare’s experience at school from year to year, month to month, almost day to day. But only at a certain level. It won’t tell us, for example, whether he enjoyed the lessons or how well he got on with the other pupils. Nor whether he was a star. Of course we assume that he must have been precocious, the Mozart of the classroom, yet the man whose name has become a bye-word in our time for super-intelligence -- `So what’s your solution to this problem, Einstein’ – that man did not shine at school. However intensely we research Elizabethan grammar school education we shall never know whether Shakespeare was top of the class, nor whether he was a disruptive, unruly pupil or a passive one.


History is good at defining collective experience. Since Shakespeare must of necessity have been a church-goer, for most of his life at least, it can tell us what he had to listen to with the rest of the congregation, but it can’t give us his religious beliefs, his private thoughts as he sat there in his pew. A lot of historical effort has gone recently into trying to prove that he was secretly Catholic. The key figure here is John Cottam who became the Stratford schoolmaster in 1579. Cottam had a brother who was a Catholic priest and who came over to England with Edmund Campion in 1580 on a secret Jesuit mission. Like Campion, this brother was eventually arrested, tried for treason and executed. Sometime after his arrest, John Cottam left Stratford and went back to live on a small family property in Lancashire, that hotbed of Catholicism. One of his Catholic neighbours there was Alexander Hoghton and it is in the will Hoghton had drawn up in August 1581 that many have found not only the vital clue to Shakespeare’s Catholicism, but also to how the glover’s son from Stratford first became an actor. In an item of the will, Hoghton leaves his musical instruments and his play clothes to his brother: if he be minded & do keep players. And if he will not keep & maintain players, then it is my mind & will that Sir Thomas Hesket knight shall have the same instruments & play clothes. And I most heartily require the said Sir Thomas to be friendly unto Fulk Gillom & William Shakeshafte now dwelling with me & either to take them unto his service or else to help them to some good master...


What could be clearer? It is these words which have allowed some to speculate that, recommended by Cottam, the fervently Catholic young Shakespeare went to work for the Hoghtons, in the first instance perhaps as a tutor – Catholic families felt a special need for private tuition for their children – and that he then discovered his gift for acting before returning to Stratford in 1582 to marry Anne Hathaway and father his three children.


One of the problems of expressing scepticism about supposed episodes from Shakespeare’s life such as this one is that you are then asked, `Can you disprove it?’ But where there is so little prima facie probability the burden of proof is not on the sceptic. Attempts to disprove the `Shakespeare in Lancashire’ thesis do in any case, it seems to me, give to its arguments a respectability they don’t deserve. Everyone now knows that when two well dressed young men from Utah arrive at the door, the thing to do is explain you’re a Jew or a Catholic and not allow yourself to be seized by the demon of ratiocinative conceit. If you are tempted to display your logical powers then it’s soon made clear that rational discussion is impossible between people whose ideas of what constitutes proof vary wildly.


It could be objected that, because his father was in financial difficulties, Shakespeare had probably left Stratford grammar school by the time Cottam arrived there, but we don’t know that for certain. What it certainly seems legitimate to point out is there is a difference between the name in the Hoghton will – Shakeshafte – and Shakespeare. Those who believe he spent time in Lancashire are able to answer this objection in two mutually exclusive ways. They can remind us, as Richard Wilson does, that Campion and his colleagues took aliases when they arrived in England, in order to escape detection, and suggest that this is what Shakespeare did with `Shakeshafte’. But if that’s the case then we have an uncharacteristic moment in Shakespeare’s career when he was singularly lacking in invention. Alternatively, they can point to the notorious variation in Elizabethan names, to the fact (for example) that Shakespeare’s grandfather is sometimes referred to in local records as Richard Shakstaff and that, in one account of payment to Shakespeare’s company from Elizabeth’s Court, he himself is called Shaxberd. Quite apart from wildly variant spelling of what are demonstrably the same names, clerical error does seem to have been rife. When the clerk entered Shakespeare’s special marriage license into the Bishop’s Register in November 1582, he called Anne Hathaway Anne Whately. Given that degree of distortion as standard, almost any name in any will could conceal Shakespeare’s.


A lot of effort has been spent on showing that `Shakeshafte’ was a common name in Lancashire. Precisely the reason, responds Ernst Honigmann, why the clerk should have written Shakeshafte instead of Shakespeare. I used to think that the only reliable model for dealing with these issues had been provided by Macauley. Travelling in India, Macauley met a clergyman who said he could prove that Napoleon was the Beast of the Apocalypse. This was because if you write Napoleon Bonaparte in Arabic and leave out only two letters the numerical values of the remainder will give you 666. Macauley told the clergyman that he must be wrong because he himself had already discovered the real Beast to be the House of Commons: `There are 658 members of the House and these, with their chief officers -- the three clerks, the Sergeant and his deputy, the Chaplain, the doorkeeper, and the librarian -- make 666’. I like this because it suggests that in certain circumstances the reductio is the only legitimate response. I don’t like it because it suggest that I think the Shakespeare in Lancashire thesis is inherently absurd. But he may well have been there, or in the West Country where Burgess puts him, or anywhere. The important point is that we don’t know, but alas `don’t know’ doesn’t sell books.


In defence of recent Shakespeare biographers questions might be raised about the inaccessibility of any so-called `truth’, the `new history’ as it is sometimes termed, or even the uncertainty principle. I won’t bother with all that. Possibly more relevant would be the challenge: `Don’t all biographers speculate?’ They certainly do. Anyone who has ever been involved in writing one will know how frequently the biographer is obliged to `make things up’, particularly as regards the subject’s thoughts and feelings. Could it be then that in criticising recent lives of Shakespeare I have entered their authors for the wrong race? I think here of recent criticisms of Freud’s work and the way they have sometimes been met by the insistence that its value lies not in its theoretical coherence, its truth, or its effectiveness as a therapy, but in its eloquence and architectonic splendour. Is it not then precisely for their speculations that we ought to value Shakespeare biographies most?


I think there are a couple of answers to this challenge. The first is that all writers seem to me to be under an obligation not to give the impression of offering one thing when they are in fact offering another. Park Honan, and Katherine Duncan-Jones especially, are massively scholarly – you learn a lot from them. Duncan-Jones, for example, is very interesting on one of the early theatrical companies, the Queen’s Men, and on disputes within the College of Arms around and just after the time Shakespeare was applying, on his father’s behalf, to qualify as a gentleman. Yet there is no worthwhile evidence that Shakespeare was ever a member of the Queen’s Men and none that will tell us how he felt about acquiring a coat of arms. On the one hand his name is used to justify the inclusion of material with a minimum proven relevance to his life (Duncan-Jones writes a whole chapter on the Queen’s Men which is certainly of value to the specialist but which the general public could hardly have been persuaded to read had it not appeared in a `trade’ biography), and on the other, the scholarly character of that material imparts to her wilder speculations a bogus authority. Despite a sprinkling of `perhaps’s and `possibly’s, one is given the impression that there is a continuum between the scholarship and the speculations when in fact the two are both separate from each other and of a radically different character. Reviewing Duncan-Jones, Peter Ackroyd said that her `thorough grounding of historical knowledge supports … leaps of speculation’. In theory, the more Shakespeare’s biographers know, the more authority their conjectures ought to have. In practice, they seem to me like financial advisors who can explain in great detail the difference between various forms of investment but then put all your money on a horse in the 3.30.


The second answer is that, although all biographers speculate, some do so much more than others. There is a vital difference of degree here which I can best illustrate with a simile. Stendhal speaks in his autobiography of his past life being like a fresco, parts of which have fallen from the wall leaving a number of bare patches. With that image in mind one you say that for modern biographers writing a life can be thought of as more like completing a jigsaw puzzle. Some pieces are always missing but as the picture is built up the surrounding context allows them to fill in the gaps. They can see the shape and size of the gaps and the surrounding pieces allow then to make a fair guess as to how they should be filled. In Shakespeare’s case however there are so few pieces to begin with, that I think the only decent thing to do is to put them back in the box and direct the attention to activities which are more respectable and useful.