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You've undoubtedly seen - or even at one time been - an
imaginative child leaping from sofa, to chair, to ottoman in the role of a bold
adventurer avoiding crocodiles or molten lava. Well, that's about how Peter
Ackroyd progresses in his new biography of Shakespeare, except that the supposed
dangers he avoids consist of the past fifty years of scholarly research on the
playwright, and his stepping stones are various errant hypotheses and
unsupported suppositions about the patron saint of English literature.
In Shakespeare: The Biography, Ackroyd is very taken with his ideas about
Shakespeare the actor, an area of the writer's life about which we know
virtually nothing, and also with recent arguments for Shakespeare as a secret
Catholic; but he seems to have no interest or ability to pursue the subject of
Shakespeare's actual historical context, his nuanced responses to past writing
and contemporary events, or his startling literary innovations.
Ackroyd frustratingly employs the discarded 18th-century method of reading
backwards from the plays to construct a biography of guesses and "must-haves":
Shakespeare includes *blank* in Play X, so surely he must have done or known
*blank*. Well, no, Mr. Ackroyd, he really doesn't. What author hasn't written
about something he's only read of or imagined? Knowledge and sensitivity aren't
equivalent to experience. And really, sir, you should know better.
Perhaps the worst crime committed by Shakespeare: The Biography, other
than its self-aggrandizing title, is that its eccentricities and gaffes are
never really shocking, just shockingly dull and wrong-headed. Read it, I
suppose, if you're an avid Ackroyd fan, and try not to be distracted by the
gnashing of my teeth.
In contrast, James Shapiro's A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare: 1599
is a lively and electric book by one of the best American Shakespeareans. It
should be hard to argue that we need another Shakespeare biography after Stephen
Greenblatt's fine 2004 book Will in the World, but Shapiro more than
makes the case. Rather than give a cradle-to-grave account, he instead chooses
to focus on a turning point in the playwright's career: the year 1599, which
marked important shake-ups in and a fantastic leap forward in Shakespeare's
writing.
Shapiro engagingly recounts the politics of a kingdom presided over by an old
and ailing queen and beset by belligerent foreign threats; He relates the issues
of nationhood found in Henry V and Julius Caesar to England's
ill-fated invasion of Ireland; And he describes how these macro-scale events,
through the economics of patronage, would have affected what a rising dramatist
would choose to write and how he would treat it: some subjects - like the
killing of a monarch - were taboo at the time while others - including the
existential angst of Hamlet - were ripe for the picking.
Shapiro also delves into a fascinating subject that I've never found in other
works on Shakespeare, that being how the make-up of Shakespeare's theatre
company influenced his writing. For example, when he had a star clown, the
playwright penned bombastic roles like Falstaff and Dogberry, but when a later
comedic player ascended to prominence, he produced more songs to feature that
man's strong singing voice. Shapiro offers several such enlightening instances
that serve to make Shakespeare's daily world all the more immediate to us as
readers.
In effect, Shapiro's excellent book reminds us that the best scholars don't
study Shakespeare in order to close him up in a musty academic cabinet in some
ivory tower but rather to unlock a door to the past and to invite the curious to
step right through.
Review by Mark Bradshaw, November 3, 2005
Do yourself a favor and read Stephen Greenblatt's Will in the World: How
Shakespeare Became Shakespeare, reviewed here:
http://www.watermarkbooks.com/review1104-002.html
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