2 - Shakespeare’s Life and Times

Summary

Nine years ago we knew that Alan Keen had discovered a copy of Hall’s Chronicle with numerous marginalia believed to have some connexion with Shakespeare’s second historical tetralogy. Now Moray McLaren has produced a book in which the marginalia are claimed to be in Shakespeare’s hand. He usefully gives an appendix in which the notes relating to the subject-matter of Richard II are set out, along with the passages from Hall that they annotate and the corresponding lines from the play. It might indeed have been better at this stage to have devoted the book to a reproduction of all the 406 notes: a basis for judgement would have been more securely provided in this way than by McLaren’s rather impulsive pleadings. Space is given, for example, to the arguments that the annotator was ‘poetically minded’ because he writes the words “Prisoners pitifully slayne”, and that he was not unfamiliar with the theatre because, like the author of Thomas of Woodstock, he used the name ‘Woodstock’ for Gloucester. Certainly there are interesting points of contact between some of the marginalia and passages in Shakespeare; there is, too, the sketch of a large-nosed face against Hall’s account of the soldier hanged for stealing the pyx; but many other parallels adduced by McLaren are altogether nugatory. Nor is it helpful to read that, if Shakespeare was a schoolmaster, he would have had to use Hall as a text-book for the teaching of English history.