2 - Shakespeare’s Life, Times and Stage

Summary

The most restrained among recent attempts to tell the story of Shakespeare’s life is Gerald Eades Bentley’s Shakespeare: A Biographical Handbook. Documentation is generous; comment, concise and tart in its refusal to indulge in speculation. This is an eminently useful book which assumes a care for scholarship in its readers, yet succeeds too in mediating between the scholar and the student. Another, more recent book in which Shakespeare’s career is narrated with scholarly rigour is Peter Alexander’s Shakespeare. In the section concerned with the life, Alexander is at pains to show how false beliefs have developed, thus enabling the reader to disentangle truth from legend. This part of the book is distinguished by much hard thought and a refusal to accept easy assumptions. No evidence derived from the Sonnets is admitted: indeed, the book includes little about them or the other poems. The chapters on the plays are inevitably limited in scope, but they tell much in little space, with notable learning and sympathy; the author frequently uses the relationship between play and source as the basis of his remarks. This is a hard-headed but not unattractive volume which presupposes in its readers a serious interest in its subject.