Shakespeare and Biography is so much more than its title implies. It might more accurately be called Shakespeare, Memory, and Historical Imagination. Its contributors reckon with how we create history. Chapters—and one short play—examine answers that have been given to unanswerable questions: Why did Shakespeare leave his second-best bed to Anne Hathaway? Was Shakespeare Catholic? Was he bisexual? At the root—not only of the answers provided by a plethora of biographers, but of the questions themselves—are moments in contemporary culture. This volume offers examples of Shakespeare imagined and the research and interpretation that allow us to create a past in order to understand our present.
Despite the inclusion of Graham Holderness's new edition of “Some Further Account” (1715) of the life of Shakespeare, a likely forgery of additions to the work of Nicholas Rowe, references to the documentary evidence of Shakespeare's life are few and far between in this volume. Indeed, although several authors allude to Shoenbaum's seminal Shakespeare: A Documentary Life, there is little discussion of the emphasis it placed on the evidence that underpins most biography. However, in the case of Shakespeare, this is perhaps for the best. After all, Shakespeare is as much a figment of the popular imagination as a historical figure. In his chapter on the work undertaken to create the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography entry for Shakespeare, the longest in that authoritative collection, Peter Holland explains his choice to spend more time on the afterlife of Shakespeare and Bardology than on the life itself. Of course, Holland and others discuss some of the key documents that shape our understanding of Shakespeare.
In her contribution, Katherine Scheil inspects the many interpretations of a single line in Shakespeare's will, his bequest of his second-best bed to Anne Hathaway. The ambiguity of the documents that witness Shakespeare's life seem to lead in two relatively opposing research directions, both of which Shakespeare and Biography consider: a researcher may either consider these documents in a vacuum, holding them up to modern culture and drawing interpretations consistent with their understanding, or they may undertake the considerably more difficult task of understanding the Renaissance more broadly by placing these documents in context. The bequest of a bed may be read on its own, or it might be compared to the literally hundreds of accounts of early modern marital economies laid bare in probate records housed at The National Archives to see where this admittedly mysterious gift stacks up against other instances of domestic indifference. Shakespeare and Biography provides a better sense of the former than the latter.
What the volume does brilliantly is provide us with a sense of the depth and scope of Shakespeare life-telling. From scholarly biography to bodice-ripping romance to poetry to film to theater. From forgery to interpretation and imagination. We are given new, and rather complicated, evidence for Shakespeare's familiarity with recusant culture in Sonja Fielitz's chapter, which focuses primarily on the architecture of Midlands counties, the proclivity of homes to include priest holes, and briefly relates this to Shakespeare's own thematic interest in deception. Likewise, Rowan Williams's “Shakeshafte” (a play included as the penultimate chapter of the volume) explores whether Shakespeare might, perhaps, have met Edmund Campion.
Through all of this, we move toward an understanding of the pressure biographers are under to fill out their subject's life, connecting gaps to satisfy their reader. We gain a sense of the difficulty of representing a man who left us with over 118,000 lines of drama and poetry, but no diary, no letters, and only six signatures. According to some accounts, Shakespeare is the most written-about person, with more biographies written about him by a factor of one hundred than anyone else in history. The overstudied nature of a man who is ultimately somewhat enigmatic gives us a sense of how he and his life have become emblematic of a popular understanding of the English Renaissance. Given the volume's emphasis on the often imaginative reaction to Shakespeare—in every field from biography to poetry—it is surprising that it does not give more time to the anti-Stratfordian theories, many of which are as engaging and evidenced as more traditional biographical findings.
