2 - Shakespeare’s Life, Times, and Stage

Summary

This year there are fewer full-length books to review in this section than is normally the case, though of course articles continue to appear in large numbers. There is little to report on the biographical side. Parvin Kujoory deals with the development of Shakespearian biography from the seventeenth to the late eighteenth centuries, from casual anecdotes to the scholarly approach of Malone. His essay contains no fresh material, however, and adds nothing to Samuel Schoenbaum’s magisterial Shakespeare’s Lives (Oxford, 1970), which Kujoory, rather surprisingly, does not mention.

One way of placing an author in his 'times' is to ask what the relation is between the artistic culture of a given age and the state of its politics. Joel Hurstfield suggests that the greatest period of Elizabethan society was ending as Shakespeare came to maturity, and goes on to debate what is meant when we describe late Elizabethan and early Jacobean political life as corrupt. Administrators of the time expected a fee for their service which must not necessarily be considered a bribe. The deepest corruption came in the later Jacobean period, when the king's favourites failed to consider the national interest as well as their personal interest. Hurstfield's discussion, though not primarily a piece of literary criticism, should be read by all literary students who are interested in Shakespeare's political themes.