Shakespeare: A Compact Documentary Life

"Everybody has an interest in Shakespeare, but if you have got a serious interest in Shakespeare, at some point or other you will imagine to yourself that there ought to be a big book that reproduces all the important documents relating to Shakespeare’s life and all the spurious ones as well, and give an account of everything in chronological order. This is the way I imagined somebody should produce that book and then I happened to be in Stratford-upon-Avon and there was the very thing! This was it, Shakespeare: A Documentary Life , which is still available in the cut down version. It was exactly what I had hoped for. I am passionate about the reality of the man and his experiences that led to all those plays being written and all that poetry. My own original training was as an archivist, so there’s the information angle as well. I want to know where this information comes from about him. I’m interested in the Shakespeare authorship debate too, so I’m very pleased to have this big book at my disposal. Every time I need to cite a particular document, I’ve got it there to hand. It’s a wonderful resource, and if anybody is interested in Shakespeare the man, it is an essential resource. No serious scholar would ever entertain the idea that Shakespeare didn’t write Shakespeare, but I don’t think anybody has properly articulated why there is this no-need-to-doubt. That’s the bit that interests me. Because of my medieval studies I cover historical evidence from a different point of view from most people in that you don’t take what is said at face value. Any piece of evidence you deconstruct to find out what was available information-wise to the person who created the evidence. So for a medieval chronicle, you don’t just see what the chronicle says, you work out how the information could have come to the person who wrote it down in the chronicle. For the Shakespeare authorship, there are enough documents showing he was William Shakespeare who is referred to as being one of the players. The most critical piece of information for me is the mentioning of Henry Condell and other players in his will, in his own hand, which is confirmed by the legal copy of his will, in 1616. So we know that the executor of William Shakespeare’s will knew William Shakespeare the man was William Shakespeare the player from the mention of the other players he was acting alongside. From looking at pieces of information like that, who knew what, who knew who, you can demonstrate that William Shakespeare of Stratford-upon-Avon was William Shakespeare the player and William Shakespeare the author. Now it is entirely possible, by some extraordinary feat, that somebody else had some ideas that fed through to William Shakespeare, and to a certain extent that’s true because other players helped with various lines, other playwrights helped with various lines. But the bulk of the genius we associate with the man is associated with William Shakespeare of Stratford-upon-Avon, because we can prove his contemporaries associated it with him, and that he knew those contemporaries. Apart from the wild dreams of circumstantial blithering idiots, there is no alternative. If you look at some of the arguments put forward, you just think “Oh my God! Go and do some historical research!” But I delight in the fact people question things, and tackling those questions is a pleasure to me. So Schoenbaum’s Documentary Life is a fantastic resource. There are so many current thoughts about Shakespeare. If you go to a specialist Shakespeare library and look at all the material that’s been written, and continues to be written, it’s a one-man industry. It would be impossible for me to encapsulate. I favour the writers who suggest the man derived his experience from growing up right in the middle of England, and yet also had experience of the court in London, and London at a time of growth. He’s got fingers in so many different pies. He’s familiar with aristocrats, he’s familiar with labourers in Stratford-upon-Avon and in London. He has a range of experiences which allow him to synthesize and or empathize with people in a wide range of different positions in life. Also, there was so much knowledge flooding into London, you can see how society is changing. He was well-positioned to be the author who describes London riding the crest of this brave new world at the end of the 16th century. He lost one of his children – that’s a tragedy. He clearly had an emotional life which was intense, to write those poems. You have to write from experience if you’re going to write anything as intense as that, so his love life must have been intense. It was varied, and it probably would have fallen well short of modern moral standards. But W.H. Auden remarked on the fact that most writers don’t have interesting lives, there’s no point in a writer writing an autobiography. Besides which if he’s got anything interesting to talk about that was worthwhile, he’d probably write it into his work anyway. I think Shakespeare, in many ways, is the proof of that. There is very little point of writing the life story of a man who spent his time at his desk with a pen in his hand, or on stage directing people."