2 - Shakespeare’s Life, Times, and Stage

Summary

Samuel Schoenbaum’s William Shakespeare: A Documentary Life (Oxford, 1975) has already won high praise for its elegance and scholarship. Now, in William Shakespeare: A Compact Documentary Life we are given the substance of the lavish parent volume in a more portable form and at a lower, if hardly popular, price. But it would be a mistake to regard it as a lesser and merely derivative work. Schoenbaum has taken the opportunity to revise and correct, and even to augment, what he has written before. As he foreshadowed in an article in The Times Literary Supplement, he is now able, for instance, to give further details of William Bott, a former owner of New Place who was declared by his son-in-law to have murdered his own daughter with ratsbane in 1563; this makes of New Place a remarkably unsavoury locality, since the very next owner, William Underhill, was to be murdered by his son in 1597. A letter of Schoenbaum’s to The Times Literary Supplement contains corrections both to his article and to the Compact Life itself. Amongst the same letters Eric McLellan comments on the vexed legal question of the widow’s portion.