SHAKESPEARE REVEALED: A BIOGRAPHY
By René Weis
In Internet circles reference is sometimes made to "Godwin's Law,"
a concept floated by cultural commentator Mike Godwin that holds that the longer
any online discussion goes on the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or
Hitler increases. It is considered bad form to play the Nazi card in such
discussions, as one corollary of the Law is that once such a comparison is made
the discussion is over and debate at an end.
A similar sort of Law might be posited for Shakespearean biographies and the
probability of finding a reference to the bard's homosexuality. For the record,
in René Weis's Shakespeare Revealed it gets duly trotted out on
page 4 as part of a reference to Richard II as Shakespeare's "gay
king." Apparently, "as with Richard so there are questions marks
hanging over Shakespeare's sexuality." And, as per Godwin's Law, at this
point one's attention begins to drift.
Of course we don't know if Shakespeare was, as the fashion has it today,
"gay." (Richard, by the way, almost certainly wasn't, and he isn't in
the play.) In fact we know very little about the Bard, even with regard to the
objective facts of his life. This absence of hard evidence has done nothing to
slow down the Shakespeare biography industry, which continues to churn out
speculative life studies at an astonishing rate. Weis, however, claims to be heading off in
a new direction:
the links between Shakespeare's life and his works may be far closer
than is commonly assumed. This book aims to show just how deep these connections
really are, and to demonstrate that the plays and poems contain important clues
not only to Shakespeare's inner life but also about real, tangible, external
events.
This, from the Prologue, is a forbidding warning. Yes, the link between
Shakespeare's life and his works may be closer than is commonly
assumed. Though it may not be. And how close a link is commonly assumed
anyway? What is the objective value of these "important clues"? In his
analysis of Hamlet - naturally one of the most clue-laden of texts in the
canon (though given the basic premise, why shouldn't Pericles tell us as
much?) - Weis writes that the "play is full of elusive and imprecise clues about the
relationship between Shakespeare and his family and other aspects of his
life." And yet some of these elusive and imprecise clues are no more than
indirect "echoes" of "real, tangible, external events" (a
ghastly expression). Is an echo a clue? Apparently it depends upon the ear of
the listener.
Shakespeare was no more King of England than he was Prince of Denmark, a
middle-aged black man consumed by love and jealousy and rendered vulnerable to
treachery by his race, or a Jewish financier seeking revenge on Christians for
putting him out of business or spitting on him. The echoes that bounce across
the boundary between life and art are much subtler, but are there to be caught
by those who listen.
Subtle and elusive as the connections may be, they provide the essential
textual key (Keats's "allegory") for understanding Shakespeare's life.
Which should come as no surprise. The book's aim to reveal Shakespeare
through the lens of his work is, in fact, wholly unoriginal. Given the lack of
biographical data already adverted to, such an approach is both inevitable and,
by now, routine. According
to Anthony Holden, author of the last Shakespeare bio I reviewed (William
Shakespeare), the life of Shakespeare "is there for all to see, in and
between every line he ever wrote." In clues. And echoes. Weis:
"Beneath Shakespeare's iambic pentameters the drum that is the private self
beats with percussive ardour."
There is nothing wrong, in theory, with coming at Shakespeare's life through
his work. It's just that everything that is said has to be heavily qualified
(some conclusions are "quite possible," some connections "should
not be ignored," some events "must surely" have occurred), and the results are rarely very interesting anyway.
Isabella in Measure for Measure is the only major character
so-named in any of Shakespeare's plays, and it is not her name in the play's
source. He might have plucked it from nowhere in particular - or he might have
found it in his own family's history. A man as keen as Shakespeare on English
history and his own family [?] may well have been aware that towards the end of
the fifteenth century at Wroxall Abbey, a few miles to the north of Stratford,
there had been a prioress by the name of Dame Isabella Shakespeare; another
sub-prioress of the same abbey, one Dame Joan Shakespeare, died in 1571, when he
was seven years old.
He might have . . . or he might have . . . and he may well have . . . finally
leads us to the conclusion that there may be some absolutely meaningless
connection between the name Isabella in Measure for Measure and the name
of an abbess in the neighbourhood of Stratford some hundred years before
Shakespeare wrote his play. But who cares?
Or, to move from an obviously trivial matter to something of more
consequence, at least to biographers, there is the question of whether
Shakespeare was Catholic. This is the scab that recent Shakespearean scholars
can't stop picking, despite the fact that "Whether William Shakespeare did
indeed feel attracted to one faith rather than the other is impossible to
determine."
It is one of the mysteries of the Shakespeare story that it cannot be
determined where he stood on the greatest national issue of the day, the
Catholic question. It is not that there are no clues; there are plenty, but they
pull in opposite directions.
Oh, those echoing clues, literally bouncing back and forth now! What do they
mean?
More to the point, what would they mean if they all pulled in the same
direction? What would that tell us about Shakespeare? This kind of label-chasing
doesn't seem to me to lead anywhere except more worrying of the bleeding
details. And who in the world can read such stuff as this:
Cottom's move to Shakespeare's school in 1579 coincided with the
mission to England being planned by the Jesuit William Allen, who ran the
English College at Douai, and by Robert Parsons, the English Penitentiary at
Rome. Not much later Parsons secured a blessing for the mission from the General
of the Society of Jesus, Claudio Acquaviva. Campion landed in England on
24 June 1580 and was put up at Sir William Catesby's house Bushwood in Lapworth,
ten miles or so from Stratford; Robert Parsons was also living in the Midlands
at this time. Thomas Cottom, younger brother of the newly appointed Stratford
schoolmaster, was a Jesuit, and a companion of Edmund Campion. When he was
arrested in June 1580 Thomas Cottom was carrying a secret letter addressed to
John Debdale of Shottery. It seems inconceivable that he should not have been
hoping to meet his brother John at the King's New School, since his mission to
Shottery took him to within less than a mile of Church Street. Thus was the
King's New School linked to the heart of the Catholic resistance.
Thus? Thus Shakespeare is revealed?
Notes:
Review first published September 4, 2007.
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