Posted on 09/18/2005 6:00:17 PM PDT by nickcarraway
SHAKESPEARE: The Biography
by Peter Ackroyd
Chatto £25 pp560
Surely Shakespeare’s life cannot have been as boring as this. His dynamism, and the excitements of Elizabethan culture, are repeatedly vouched for in Peter Ackroyd’s account. So how come they turn, at his touch, into 91 chapters of stodge? It has taken a lot of hard work. He seems to have read everything ever written on Shakespeare’s life, and he packs it all in, complete with scholarly ramifications. The result is not so much a book as a compendium. He used the same technique in his life of Dickens. But there his subject was inexhaustible. Dickens is still alive in thousands of letters, interviews and memoirs. You never reach the end of him. With Shakespeare it is quite different. Only the bare bones of his life are known, and apart from his own writings the few documents that survive are of minimal interest. They show that he pursued small debtors in the courts, bought land, and failed to pay his taxes. As memorials of our greatest writer they call to mind Dickens’s description of the cuts of pork served to Pip in Great Expectations — those portions of the pig of which the animal, when alive, had least reason to be proud.
Where there are no dependable facts, the biographer must either make things up or opt for indecision. Ackroyd mostly does the latter. Was Shakespeare’s father a crypto-Catholic? Was Shakespeare? Did he work, after leaving school, as tutor to a Catholic family in Lancashire? Was he ever a lawyer’s clerk? Or a schoolteacher? Was his marriage to Anne Hathaway happy? In each case, after pondering the conflicting theories, Ackroyd decides possibly yes, possibly no. Quarrying the plays for clues to their author’s personality proves equally frustrating. Of all writers, he discovers, Shakespeare has the widest vocabulary relating to the varieties of weeds found in rural Warwickshire. But then, as he grew up in rural Warwickshire that is perhaps less momentous than it might seem. From the evidence of his dramas it can be deduced, too, that “he had a pronounced aversion to unpleasant smells”. But that is hardly an individual quirk.
An alternative to writing about Shakespeare is to supply background information on subjects that must in some way have affected him, and Ackroyd embraces this option indefatigably. There are lengthy excursions on the curriculum at Stratford Grammar School, the history and touring itineraries of the various acting companies, the construction of Elizabethan playhouses, the histrionic styles that may or may not have been adopted in them, the writers and playwrights Shakespeare must or may have known, and inevitably, given Ackroyd’s partiality, the geography and demography of the various London districts in which he lodged. What is missing is any sense of how Shakespeare the man related to these topics. They remain barren tracts, unenlivened by his presence: Hamlet without the prince.
Or mostly they do. Another approach Ackroyd adopts provides a startling alternative to his usual routines. Spasmodically, but increasingly as the book goes on, he seems to acquire privileged access to the workings of Shakespeare’s mind. We “may imagine”, he tells us, that Shakespeare as a child was “singularly competitive”. We may, of course, but in fact there is no evidence one way or the other. As Shakespeare approaches manhood, Ackroyd’s insights gain in confidence. “The young Shakespeare was eager for experience in all its forms.” “We might also remark upon his buoyancy, an inward easiness of spirit.” “He manifested a continual subtle humorousness like some stream of life.” Wherever do such assertions come from? Certainly not from the testimony of anyone who knew Shakespeare. They seem to exemplify what the book-jacket refers to as the “intuition” of “a writer about a writer”.
The intuitions do not stop at Shakespeare. Aspects of social history are also clearer to him than to most. He tells us, for example, that in the Elizabethan period “it was customary for men and women to have sexual congress almost fully clothed”. How does he know? Whoever can have gathered the statistics? But it is with Shakespeare that he is most inward, and his perceptions gradually amount to a complete explanation of how the plays came to be written. Shakespeare, we learn, “did not know what he was writing until he had written it”. There was no forethought or deliberation: “words elicited more words from him in an act of sympathetic magic”. It was like automatic writing — and the result was just words, there was no “message”. Shakespeare was “without opinions” and “without beliefs”. Nor did he feel for his characters. He “had no sympathies at all”. It is not to be supposed, for example, that he was moved by the death of Desdemona. On the contrary, he was probably “deeply excited” by his own expressiveness. “It may have been remarked that he was particularly cheerful that day.”
These ideas are not new. They belong to the romantic doctrine of the “pure” artist and derive, via Oscar Wilde, from Keats, who proclaimed that the “poetical character” was above good and evil, and took as much delight “in conceiving an Iago as an Imogen”. But it is not the theory itself that is remarkable so much as the tangle Ackroyd gets into over it. He contradicts himself without apparently noticing. Having posited a Shakespeare without sympathies, he claims that failure always arouses his sympathy — “Whenever any man fails, Shakespeare’s sympathy envelops him” — and he speculates that this may reflect the playwright’s grief at the downturn of his father’s career. With the same inconsistency he cautions that it would be “absurd and anachronistic to portray Shakespeare as a nihilist”, though that is what someone without opinions or beliefs is. This kind of seesawing ran through Ackroyd’s biography of Sir Thomas More. Sometimes More was a free spirit, sometimes a thorough-going Tudor conformist. You begin to suspect that when he seizes on persistent ambivalence as the key to Shakespeare’s art — “every idea suggested its opposite” — he is constructing Shakespeare in his own image.
In the end he seems hopelessly in two minds about what Shakespeare was like. Maybe he was amorous, witty, fluent, full of “furious energy”. Or maybe he was shy, reserved and aloof. He lived in lodgings away from his family, and it was said that he refused invitations to parties, pleading illness. There are many references to blushing in the plays, which Ackroyd thinks may signify their author’s social awkwardness. He suspects that Shakespeare was, in effect, invisible, adapting his opinions to the company he was in. That could explain why nobody bothered to collect biographical data about him until decades after his death. His personality “was not considered to be of any interest”. At all events, no glimmer of it is discernible among the indecisions and pontificatings of this biography — which may, if Ackroyd is right, make it true to life.
HOME THOUGHTS
Shakespeare’s Stratford home must have left an indelible impression on him, Ackroyd asserts. “No other Elizabethan dramatist employs so many domestic allusions,” he claims. “Shakespeare maintained a unique connection with his past.”
Available at the Books First price of £22.50 on 0870 165 8585
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websites: http://shakespeare.palomar.edu/theatre.htm Terrific Shakespeare portal
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The A&E Biography on Shakespeare is definitely worth a look.
That which we call an historical revisionist and a marginal comedian, by any other name would smell as bad.
One assumes it runs in the family. Bad luck on the family, of course.
He tells us, for example, that in the Elizabethan period “it was customary for men and women to have sexual congress almost fully clothed”. How does he know?
It's common knowledge, that's how he knows. I learned that in my Shakepeare classes. Don't remember much else from my Shakespeare classes, but there you have it.
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