From the issue dated October 1, 2004
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The Writer's TaleIn a new biography, the founder of New Historicism finds a paper trail that links Shakespeare's life, beliefs, and morality
No literary life excites as much speculation or poses as many puzzles as that of William Shakespeare. The keen interest in Shakespeare's biography that began in the 18th century is a natural byproduct of his preeminence in our culture. For all his fame, however, there are few outright certainties. The paper trail that does exist teases and tantalizes. Scholars have records of Shakespeare's birth in 1564, and mentions of his work in the theater. There is evidence of his unpaid taxes and legal quarrels, a few property transactions, and a will. Indeed, it is more than scholars know about many of Shakespeare's artistic contemporaries. But the overall narrative thread of Shakespeare's life is frayed in many places, and broken completely in others. Tying that thread back together is the goal of Stephen Greenblatt's new biography, Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare (W.W. Norton). In the book, Mr. Greenblatt seeks to combine the scholarship that has made him a central figure in the world of literary theory with the demands of a popular audience. To begin with, he says, shaping the scant facts of Shakespeare's life into a cohesive whole posed some problems. "It's difficult to do because the traces are so unnarrative," says Mr. Greenblatt. "Or seem at first glance to have nothing to do with the stories we tell about lives. ... No one told a story at the time about his life, except, indirectly, Shakespeare himself in the sonnets -- and that's famously and deliberately elusive." In the 19th century, the gaps in the narrative of Shakespeare's life even gave rise to the fantastic notion that Shakespeare did not write the works published under his name. Literary sleuths have proposed a number of eminent Elizabethans -- including Francis Bacon, Christopher Marlowe, Edward de Vere, and Queen Elizabeth I herself -- as the true author of the plays and verse. To this day, news media stoke this controversy, in spite of a virtually unanimous chorus of literary scholars who dismiss the so-called "authorship question" as nonsense. "No serious person who is engaged in the historical record can have any doubt" that William Shakespeare wrote the works published under his name, says Mr. Greenblatt. "He was famous in his lifetime for writing them. It would have required a literally unbelievable conspiracy to pass these plays off as his when they were someone else's." Scholars such as Mr. Greenblatt, who is Cogan university professor of the humanities at Harvard University, prefer to chew over the real questions about Shakespeare's life. How did the son of a glove maker and local burgher end up as a luminary in the London theater? Was Shakespeare raised as a Catholic in a time when Catholics were viewed as traitors? Was he a crabbed and penny-pinching social climber? Stanley Wells, professor emeritus of Shakespeare studies at the University of Birmingham and chairman of the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, which administers six historic properties and a library in Stratford-upon-Avon, says that one of Mr. Greenblatt's strengths is the excellence of his writing. "This is why he's made as much of a mark as he has in Shakespeare studies," he says. Among Mr. Wells's many writings are two popular introductions to Shakespeare -- Shakespeare: A Life in Drama in 1995 (Norton), and Shakespeare For All Time in 2003 (Oxford University Press). He sees Mr. Greenblatt's ambition to present scholarship to a wider audience as akin to his own. "The question is to what extent are you prostituting yourself writing for a general audience," he says. "Not so much, I should hope. Stephen proves that you can be intellectually respectable without being cryptic." History's Mysteries Mr. Greenblatt, who served a term as president of the Modern Language Association, is best known as the founder of "New Historicism" -- a school of literary criticism that reconnects literary works to the social and historical currents of their time. New Historicists' aim in making such connections is to illuminate larger issues of power and culture embedded in literature and history. In his 1991 University of Chicago Press book, Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World, for instance, Mr. Greenblatt probed the writings of Christopher Columbus and other explorers to unlock how their views of the "marvels" of discovery became harnessed to the cruelties of colonization. Shakespeare has been a key topic in Mr. Greenblatt's work. Three of his previous books, Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare in 1980 (University of Chicago Press), Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England in 1988 (University of California Press), and Hamlet in Purgatory in 2001 (Princeton University Press) applied his theories to Shakespeare's work. In Hamlet in Purgatory, for instance, Mr. Greenblatt examines Shakespeare's most famous play in the light of the pitched battle over the existence of purgatory between Protestants and Catholics in the 16th century. Catholics saw purgatory as a spiritual state of suffering where imperfect souls were purified before ascending to heaven (and could be aided by the prayers -- and donations -- of the living), but Protestants saw a scam that was both contrary to Scripture and the occasion of clerical corruption. Mr. Greenblatt sifts through antipurgatory polemics and ghost stories of Shakespeare's age before turning to Hamlet, a play that famously commences with the appearance of a ghost from purgatory in the form of Hamlet's father. His gambit of linking that ghost to the religious fervor of Shakespeare's time exposes a complicated interplay between theater and spirituality at the heart of the work. But New Historicism's celebration of the messy historical conflicts literally written into works of art does run somewhat counter to the task of biographers, who impose chronology and narrative on history's unruly muddles. For his part, Mr. Greenblatt says that writing Will in the World was a chance to revisit ideas that he explored in his doctoral dissertation on the life of another Renaissance figure, Sir Walter Ralegh. "The model that I had of what it was to have a life in relation to a set of historical events was a little thin," he recalls, "as if people had lives and then there was this thing out there called history that they connected to." Mr. Greenblatt says that moving back toward biography "is, in some sense, just a tiny shift in optic, to return to what has always been my interest." Tender Traps Some scholars do point to tensions between New Historicism and strict biography. Robert S. Miola, a professor of English at Loyola College in Maryland who is editing a forthcoming volume of early modern Catholic writing for Oxford University Press, says that New Historicism has made Shakespeare scholars "more attuned to the relations between cultures and artistic achievements, [and] so more likely to take closer looks at biography." But he argues that "the hard work must be done by old historicism methods -- work with manuscripts in public record offices, local archives, patient assembling of evidence. The downside of New Historicism has been an impatience with all of that and a reliance on sometimes misleading anecdote and the encouragement of a tendency to generalize without warrant and evidence." Mr. Wells also points to a significant divergence between the aims of scholars plowing through archives and biographers. "It's not the biographers who tend to produce the evidence," he says. "They are the interpreters, rather than primary investigators." In Will in the World, Mr. Greenblatt's creative suppositions about Shakespeare's life often win out over certainty. Anecdote and coincidence mix easily into his narrative, which also draws heavily on a close reading of the works for clues about the writer. Such leaps are particularly evident in his approach to the playwright's childhood, in which he introduces the reader to the morality plays that a young Will Shakespeare might have seen put on by traveling players. Mr. Greenblatt also finds in A Midsummer Night's Dream traces of the entertainments at a 1575 pageant arranged by the Earl of Leicester for Elizabeth I. And through a combination of textual mining of the plays and anecdotes, he suggests that John Shakespeare, the playwright's father, may have had a drinking problem that led his son to become abstemious. Some contemporary scholars, most notably Katherine Duncan Jones in her 2001 book, Ungentle Shakespeare: Scenes from a Life (Arden), have depicted Shakespeare as downright unlikable -- cruel, competitive, and conniving. But Mr. Greenblatt prefers to label the playwright as "prudential," a writer who keeps mainly to himself outside of the theater, avoids the riotous and squalid life lived by many of his fellow writers, and carefully husbands the money that he earns. "When I started the book," he says, "I thought that I was going to organize the book around the idea of Shakespearean generosity. Then I realized as I went on that, actually, the record simply wouldn't sustain that." It's not that Shakespeare was a bad man, he continues. "I don't want to exaggerate," says Mr. Greenblatt. "The record is not that pissy. People in Shakespeare's own time who knew him said he was a fine person. ... It's just that he wasn't strikingly generous." Mr. Greenblatt locates the formation of a "prudential" Shakespeare in family turmoil. Even if his father was not a heavy drinker, he says, the family business was failing and the father's climb to prominence had ended. "Shakespeare decided fairly early on that he wasn't going to be a victim in this life," says Mr. Greenblatt. "That he wasn't going to be eating dog food. He was actually going to make it. He didn't want his father's life and he didn't want the life of those writers whom he encountered when he went up to London." Recusant Rebels Mr. Greenblatt's take on Shakespeare and religion plunges him into one of the hottest debates in contemporary Shakespeare studies: Was Shakespeare a Catholic? England endured violent swings between Catholicism and Protestantism in the decades before Shakespeare's birth. During much of Shakespeare's lifetime, Elizabeth I was not merely the sovereign, but she was also the head of the Church of England. Though a range of private beliefs on religious matters were tolerated, public conformity to the state church was expected. Recusancy was punished with fines or worse. "Anyone who was alert in this world was immersed in this symbolic language of religion," says Mr. Greenblatt. "Because that is how this world was put together. It would be like growing up in the 1950s and not being interested in Communism versus capitalism. This is the great struggle that was defining life." Shakespeare's religious beliefs have excited heated debate among scholars. What is in little dispute is that some of Shakespeare's family and acquaintances -- including his schoolmasters -- had connections to English Catholicism and to the missionaries sent secretly to England by the Catholic Church to bring that country back to the fold. Many of these missionaries, including the Jesuit scholar Edmund Campion, were arrested and executed by the authorities. There is also evidence -- in the form of a Catholic religious testament found in the 18th century in a house that once belonged to the Shakespeare family -- that Shakespeare's father remained a Catholic during Shakespeare's youth. Theories about Shakespeare's beliefs rooted in those facts grow stranger and more elusive. One such theory places the young Shakespeare in the service of a recusant Catholic family in Lancashire with connections to Campion and (equally significant) a strong interest in the theater. Mr. Greenblatt embraces the Lancashire hypothesis for his own narrative purposes, but with a significant twist. Far from pegging Shakespeare as a Catholic, he argues that the writer's close encounter with religious fanaticism shaped the reasoned sensibility of his plays. Mr. Greenblatt goes so far as to imagine an encounter between the young Shakespeare and Campion to place their respective views into a clear juxtaposition. "That's the moment of the book that's the most implausible," Mr. Greenblatt admits. "The wildest leap. ... We have a huge body of work by William Shakespeare, and that body of work shows a consistent distaste for a certain kind of sainthood, and an attitude toward fanaticism, toward plotting and conspiracies, that runs through an enormous body of work." Other scholars find the Lancashire theory less useful. In Shakespeare For All Time, Mr. Wells assesses the evidence and concludes that it's a stretch. "One must be cautious in saying because a theory helps explain a lot," he observes, "that it is necessarily true." Mr. Miola, who is organizing a research seminar on "Shakespearean Catholicities" for the Shakespeare Association of America's 2005 meeting, concurs. "I do not subscribe to the Lancashire theory at all," he says. "Catholics believed in baptism by desire but not by association. So Shakespeare knew so-and-so, whose cousin was a Catholic, et cetera, is not very persuasive." The case for a formative Catholic influence on Shakespeare is a good one, says Mr. Miola, but he argues that it is difficult to extrapolate adult belief from this influence, especially in light of his poems and plays. "In the plays," observes Mr. Miola, "it's very contradictory. There are very Protestant moments -- a false miracle in the Henry VI play. But you have a belief in at least a poetic value and power of purgatory in Hamlet." Mr. Miola sees the larger question revolving around Shakespeare and Catholicism as what effect these tensions had on his work. "The mix of political and religious angst and the peculiar situation of Catholics, prohibited, oppressed, outlawed, is only beginning to be understood and reevaluated," he says. "I think Shakespeare certainly registered these anxieties and conflicts in his works." Hiding Between the Lines Though Mr. Greenblatt's carefully argued suppositions bridge many gaps in his narrative of Shakespeare's life, his approach to Shakespeare's 154 sonnets is more restrained. These poems have aroused the most fevered speculation about Shakespeare's life for centuries, as literary sleuths have attempted to glean Shakespeare's sexual preferences and the identity of his lovers from the poems. "I'm reckless in many places in the book," says Mr. Greenblatt. "But I'm careful with the sonnets because that's where I think he's setting the most traps." Some of the sonnets, he says, may have been written to persuade Henry Wriothesley, the young earl of Southampton, to marry against his personal inclination not to do so. The story behind other sonnets remains hidden behind what Mr. Greenblatt calls "a translucent curtain." Mr. Greenblatt says that reading the sonnets as sexual autobiography is "the great temptation. This is the place in Shakespeare's work in which he uses the word 'I' and uses the word 'Will.' But it's precisely here that Shakespeare is at his most elusive, guarded and cunning in terms of how much he's willing to reveal and how much he's holding back. The closer we get to the word 'I,' the more concealed he appears to be." Mr. Wells also points to the dangers of reading too much of Shakespeare's life into the work. "In the absence of some of the documents we would like to have" in writing about Shakespeare's life, he says, "we turn to the work to try to discover things." The problem is trying to grab hold of biographical certainties in works of art that are so creatively oppositional. "Shakespeare had, supremely, the ability to hide himself," says Mr. Wells. "To enter into the minds of the persons in his plays and to present, sometimes, absolutely conflicting points of view." At the end of a chapter in Will in the World titled, "Crossing the Bridge," Mr. Greenblatt offers readers a glimpse of what Shakespeare might have seen when arriving in London: rows of heads on pikes, a display reserved for executed traitors. He writes that two of those heads were men well known to Shakespeare, and that the grotesque sight offered the young playwright a warning of sorts: "Keep control of yourself; do not fall into the hands of your enemies; be smart, tough and realistic; master strategies of concealment and evasion; keep your head on your shoulders." "A lot in my book depends on finding symbolic moments," says Mr. Greenblatt, "that focus on particular problems. Getting that he would have seen these two heads, one of whom was his distant cousin, at least, on the bridge. Do I actually think at that moment, he said, 'Aha! I'd better hide myself!' He might have said such a thing. ... If you think of your own life, there are certain moments that seem to pull everything together symbolically, but they're only moments that confirm things you've had a thousand other ways of learning in your life." http://chronicle.com Section: Research & Publishing Volume 51, Issue 6, Page A16 | |||||||||||||||
Copyright © 2004 by The Chronicle of Higher Education