2 - Shakespeare’s Life, Times, and Stage

Summary

The question of Shakespeare’s identity, always so rewarding for the imaginative writer, has provided the year’s most entertaining item among many delightful contributions to the study of the dramatist’s life—William Honey’s The Shakespeare Epitaph Deciphered. Mr Honey’s beginning was, he tells us, with Shakespeare’s end, more precisely, with the bard’s doggerel epitaph which, he discovered, was capable of being deciphered as follows (spelling has been modernized):

Good friend who wishes for Shakespeare

To dig the dust: entombed here:

Plays by the man, verses his sonnets

And Christopher Marlowe's bones.

From this starting point, we are told, the author proceeded to ‘bolster up’ his discovery with historical facts. These include the murder of the actor William Shakespeare, Marlowe’s impersonation of him, and his subsequent acceptance by Shakespeare’s degenerate family (including Anne Hathaway) and (more puzzlingly) his associates. The reviewer was charmed but unconvinced. Delight has also been afforded by another imaginative work of a very different kind, Ivor Brown’s The Women in Shakespeare’s Life. Taking the scraps of information available to us about Shakespeare’s mother, wife and daughters as his point of departure, the author has woven round them his considerable knowledge of the period with characteristic charm, creating a graceful ‘family portrait’ which cannot fail to enchant its anticipated audience of ‘Avonside tourists . . . under the influence’. Taking the scraps of information available to us about Shakespeare's mother, wife and daughters as his point of departure, the author has woven round them his considerable knowledge of the period with characteristic charm, creating a graceful 'family portrait' which cannot fail to enchant its anticipated audience of 'Avonside tourists . . . under the influence'.