One of the most enduring literary mysteries is that of William Shakespeare’s biography. How could such a popular playwright and poet, an actor and shareholder in the most successful acting company of his time, patronized by the wealthy and the powerful, have left so little documentation of his working life? There are seven known signatures on various legal documents, including his will, birth and death records in his hometown, and various passing references to him among his contemporaries. If his partners in his acting company had not chosen to publish an edition of his plays seven years after his death, nearly half of them would have been lost. Most scholars have given circumstantial reasons for the lack of data, usually emphasizing that Shakespeare left no more or less behind than most common-born professional people of his time.
Michael Wood, a veteran British filmmaker, in the course of preparing a recent documentary for the BBC, has taken a comprehensive new look at the historical context of Shakespeare’s life that radically questions these old assumptions. In his new book, Shakespeare, Wood is willing to pose the old biographical question in a refreshing way. That is, did Shakespeare deliberately keep a low profile, and if so, why?
To begin his search for answers, Wood turns to Stratford in Warwickshire, where Shakespeare was born in 1564. The town, it turns out, had a contentious and troubled history during the political and religious upheaval brought on by the English Reformation started by Henry VIII in 1538. Many in Stratford, Shakespeare’s upwardly mobile father John among them, were unwilling to abandon their attachment to Catholicism, and until 1570 or so, were not under much pressure to do so. Once the Protestant Queen Elizabeth I decided to crack down on the so-called “recusants,” John Shakespeare’s personal fortunes took a fairly well-documented tumble.
Modern scholarly databases are now so well integrated that Wood and his research colleagues have been able to draw a vivid picture of Shakespeare’s family and connections in the Stratford area, and the picture that emerges is loaded with evidence of Catholic sympathies. His relatives provided hiding places for Jesuit missionaries, and his father suffered persecution and loss of office because of suspicions about his continuing attachment to the “old faith.”
Thus, Shakespeare’s very public career in the theater made him particularly vulnerable to penalties that ranged from monetary fines to the public butchery of “drawing and quartering” visited upon Catholic missionaries and political conspirators. In fact, Wood contends that the reign of Queen Elizabeth, often superficially portrayed as a model of courtly Renaissance grace, was in truth a paranoid police state, rife with double agents, agent provocateurs, and covert operations as ruthless as those practiced in our modern Cold War.
In connecting Shakespeare’s life with his literary legacy, Wood maintains his biographical focus, mining Shakespeare’s narrative poems, sonnets, and plays for passages that may provide biographical revelations. He never attempts any Harold Bloomian flights of interpretive fancy; instead, he deftly chooses passages from the works that could reflect biographical information. The year 1597, for instance, seems to Wood to be one of great crisis involving the death of Shakespeare’s son Hamnet. Perhaps the vexed relationship with the young man whose love he so desperately described in his early sonnets was related to grief over his son.
Wood’s accounts of the great peak of Shakespeare’s career during the early years of James I’s reign and his subsequent increasing dependence on collaborators during his approach to retirement are buttressed with the latest scholarship, but presented with unassuming common sense. In fact, Woods is sometimes a little too unassuming, employing British slang terms like “boob” for “mistake.” There are enough of these that Wood’s American editors should consider a little translation work for future editions.
As befits a book so closely related to filmmaking, Wood’s Shakespeare contains some of the best and most complete contemporary illustrations of Shakespeare’s London and environs I have ever seen brought together under one cover. Shakespeare is much more than a coffee table ornament, however. The general reader will find no more authoritative and accessible portal into the dangerous world of the canny, chimerical man who became the greatest author in modern history.
This article appears in Oct 22-27, 2003.
