Shakespeare’s Lives

"Schoenbaum wrote two books, only one of which I’ve included. Schoenbaum attempted a documentary life of Shakespeare, which is really putting Chambers into narrative form. It was a very dry book – I suppose it’s kind of useful if you’re studying for an exam but it doesn’t hold much appeal for me. But his great work is Shakespeare’s Lives , which is the lives of all of those who tried to write Shakespeare’s life or those who thought somebody other than Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare. It’s not a life of Shakespeare so much as the lives that others have dreamed of for Shakespeare. It tells you the extent to which the cultural assumptions that have dominated at each cultural moment have shaped the ways that people have imagined or re-imagined Shakespeare. This book is hilarious, it’s informative, it’s impeccable in its scholarship and it tells you once again that it’s impossible to write a great biography of Shakespeare. It was and it wasn’t. Schoenbaum lost his cool, as we would say in Brooklyn, and he began to rant in this section of the book. I suppose he’d simply read too many books claiming that Bacon wrote Shakespeare, but he starts to call these people ‘deviants’ and starts doing things that are embarrassing to read and that I suppose he would have retracted had he lived long enough. In fact, the second edition of this book backs up considerably. But he made mistakes, he didn’t quite have the doggedness of a Halliwell-Phillipps. Schoenbaum was one of the leading biographers of his day but he too realised that, for all the research you could do, there were still too many missing links. But it’s a sprightly book and I don’t mind if somebody loses his temper once in a while in a book – it’s not a terrible thing. There was a very sad and brilliant woman named Delia Bacon, who was the first to argue that Shakespeare didn’t write Shakespeare. But before she argued that she did some spectacular, innovative readings of Shakespeare and Shakespeare’s politics. She went to Stratford-upon-Avon, and Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote a celebrated essay ‘Recollections of a gifted woman’ in which he describes her going to Stratford’s church and contemplating prying open Shakespeare’s grave and the like. What Schoenbaum did was take Hawthorne’s madwoman-in-the-attic portrait and institutionalise that in Shakespeare biography, so that she became seen just as this mad woman. She subsequently did die of insanity but that wasn’t affecting her scholarly years of research. Schoenbaum did a deep disservice calling her perverse and a deviant and so on. It was sexist, it was condescending, it was wrong. One of the things I tried to do in my book Contested Will was to get the record right on Delia Bacon."