2 - Shakespeare’s Life, Times and Stage

Summary

The quatercentenary occasioned a spate of books retelling Shakespeare’s life story, and attempting to create an image of the elusive personality that should be more accurate, or more glamorous, or more exciting, or more ‘contemporary’ than the others that were available. We could run the gamut from Burgess, through Rowse, to Bentley. The spate has now dwindled, and the main recent offering is a reprint of a book first printed in 1928. John S. Smart’s Shakespeare: Truth and Tradition has an excellent ‘Memoir of the Author’ by W. Macneile Dixon in which he remarks that ‘To Smart’s friend and successor in the Queen Margaret College Lectureship, Mr Peter Alexander, we owe the transcription of the pencilled chapters and notes, a labour of love, which made it possible to send this book to the press’. Professor Alexander has been constant in his loyalty. In his own Shakespeare, itself one of the offerings of 1964, he wrote: ‘of modern works, the best brief introduction to a study of Shakespeare’s Life and Times’ is Smart’s book, and pointed out that it had long been out of print. Now for its reissue he has written a Preface setting Smart’s achievement in context. Such a Preface was necessary; for if the book deserves to be regarded as a little classic, it has some of the disadvantages implied by such status. Progress in the study of Shakespeare’s life since it was published has not, it must be confessed, been so remarkable as to render the book seriously out of date on matters of fact.