Contested Will (42 page)

It was a spellbinding performance, as perfect a marriage of conspiratorial history and autobiographical analysis as one could imagine. If the enthusiastic response of the audience that evening was any indication, Oxfordian concerns about the riskiness of Whittemore's approach were misplaced. I looked around the room and saw the same kind of people – middle-aged, sensibly dressed, middle-class – who regularly attend lectures about Shakespeare, nodding their heads in agreement and laughing aloud at the funny parts. I found it all both impressive and demoralising, a vision of a world in which a collective comfort with conspiracy theory, spurious history and construing fiction as autobiographical fact had passed a new threshold.

I left the Globe wondering what mainstream biographers might say in response to Oxfordians who insist that Edward de Vere had a stronger claim to have written
Hamlet
and
Lear
, since – unlike the glover's son from Stratford – he had been captured by pirates and had three daughters. I can readily understand why this is a conversation that Shakespeareans who believe that autobiographical evidence counts are reluctant to have. But refusing to acknowledge that they have been doing similar things in their own books – even if their topical readings are far less fanciful and the author whose life they read out of the works is the one named on the title pages – rightly infuriates those who don't believe that Shakespeare of Stratford had the life experience to write the plays. I was left wondering whether Shakespeare scholars ignore their adversaries (when not vilifying them) because they share with them more unspoken assumptions about the intersection of life and literature than they care to admit – and indeed, were the first to profess. If they would concede as much, they might well conclude, as Prospero said of Caliban, ‘This thing of darkness I acknowledge mine.' Perhaps it's time to shift our attention from
debating who wrote Shakespeare's works to whether it's possible to discover the author's emotional, sexual and religious life through them.

The evidence strongly suggests that imaginative literature in general and plays in particular in Shakespeare's day were rarely if ever a vehicle for self-revelation. With the exception of confessions of faith and some lyric poetry, autobiography as a genre and as an impulse was extremely unusual. And even in instances when sixteenth-century lyric poets like Edmund Spenser or George Gascoigne speak about themselves, it is in the tradition of the invented persona adopted by Chaucer in his
Canterbury Tales
or Dante in his
Divine Comedy
, as characters in their own fictions rather than anything resembling what we now understand as autobiographical. Those who have scoured the period for evidence of autobiographical writing have come up almost empty-handed. In his pioneering study of the origins of British autobiography, Paul Delaney found little in the sixteenth century, and even when he turned to the seventeenth century he could find only two hundred examples, half of which were ‘religious autobiographies'. In her recent and promisingly titled
Tudor Autobiography
, Meredith Skura has revisited this barren ground, but even with a considerably looser definition of autobiographical writing she located only a dozen or so Tudor writers ‘who found ways to incorporate their lives into a sermon, a saint's life, courtly and popular verse, a history book, a traveler's report, a husbandry book' – everything, it seems, but a play.

Those who believe that Elizabethan plays were autobiographical ought to be able to show that contemporaries were on the lookout for confessional allusions, as we know some were for topical ones. Yet not a single such contemporary observation survives for any play in the period, including Shakespeare's; however much on the minds of modern biographers, it doesn't appear to have occurred to Elizabethan playgoers. It's hard to avoid concluding that autobiographical details Shakespeare is alleged to have embedded in the plays are a lot like Baconian ciphers: something
hidden there for posterity, about which contemporaries were oblivious, but that hundreds of years later brilliant detective work can uncover and decode.

Even if Shakespeare occasionally drew in his poems and plays on personal experiences, and I don't doubt that he did, I don't see how anyone can know with any confidence if or when or where he does so. Surely he was too accomplished a writer to recycle them in the often clumsy and undigested way that critics in search of autobiographical traces – advocates and sceptics of his authorship alike – would have us believe. Because of that, and because we know almost nothing about his personal experiences, those moments in his work which build upon what he may have felt remain invisible to us, and were probably only slightly more visible to those who knew him well.

It's wiser to accept that these experiences can no longer be recovered. We don't know what we are looking for in any case, and even if we did, I'm not at all sure we would know how to interpret it correctly. In the end, attempts to identify personal experiences will only result in acts of projection, revealing more about the biographer than about Shakespeare himself. It's worth recalling the experience of T. S. Eliot, who was struck by the inability of contemporary biographers to untangle the personal from the fictional: ‘I am used … to having my personal biography reconstructed from passages which I got out of books, or which I invented out of nothing because they sounded well; and to having my biography invariably ignored in what I
did
write from personal experience.'

If we can't get the autobiographical in Eliot's poetry and drama right – though there are many still alive who knew him, as well as a trove of letters and interviews to draw upon – what hope have we of doing so with Shakespeare? You would think that the endless alternatives proposed by those reading his life out of the works – good husband or bad, crypto-Catholic or committed Protestant, gay or straight, misogynist or feminist, or for that matter, that the works were really written by Bacon or Oxford, Marlowe and so on
– would cancel each other out and lead to the conclusion that the plays and poems are not transparently autobiographical.

A more serious objection to hunting for the life in the works is that it assumes that what makes people who they are now made people who they were back in Shakespeare's day. Social historians have shown how risky such an assumption can be. There's little evidence that the lives of early modern men and women resembled our own. Their formative years certainly didn't. Childhood was brief and most adolescents, rich and poor, were sent from home to live and serve in other households. As a result, children – even royal ones – didn't live under the same roof as their parents for very long. Households, far more than families, were the domestic unit people considered themselves part of; these went beyond simple ties of blood or marriage, and one might pass through several households in the course of a lifetime. Despite all this, it's not easy to break that preconception so central to psychobiography, that the modern, nuclear family and the developmental struggles intrinsic to it were the norm back then too.

Family dynamics that we find in Shakespeare's fictions are not necessarily what we find in his world. Likewise we should not assume that people married at thirteen just because Juliet did (both men and women waited, on the average, until they were twenty-five, and a surprising proportion, perhaps as many as one in five, including Shakespeare's three brothers, never married at all). It's odd that those who think they have discovered Shakespeare's life in his works focus so exclusively on his relationships with his father, son, wife and daughters – all of whom he lived apart from for most of his adult life. The whole business is so circular as to be suspect. For all we know (and the point is that we don't know) Shakespeare's most meaningful relationships might have been with fellow writers, actors, sharers, patrons, landlords, neighbours, lovers, friends or household members with whom he interacted in the course of the quarter-century in which he was writing, but for which no evidence survives.

The lives of women within Elizabethan households have been
especially misunderstood, when not ignored. Thanks to studies like Germaine Greer's
Shakespeare's Wife
, it's now clear that many of the documents relating to Shakespeare's economic activities in Stratford – from processing malt to petty debts – concerned matters that were under Anne Hathaway's jurisdiction, part of the complicated business of overseeing a household for close to thirty years while her husband was mostly off in London. Here, too, biographers – obsessed with the notion of Shakespeare as malt dealer and unable to imagine Anne Hathaway as anything but a spurned, passive and possibly adulterous wife – have got it wrong.

There's also reason to be sceptical about the extent to which early modern emotional responses resemble ours. For one thing, recurrent and devastating outbreaks of plague, death in childbirth, harvest failures and high infant-mortality rates may have taken a toll on social and familial bonds. For another, these bonds didn't last as long. People lived on the average until their mid-forties. Some, like Shakespeare's parents and daughters, lived quite long lives. But six of Shakespeare's seven brothers and sisters didn't survive past the age of forty-six and he died at fifty-two. Extraordinary claims have been made about Shakespeare's grief over his young son Hamnet's death. But there's a good chance that he only saw his son a handful of times after leaving Stratford-upon-Avon for London not long after Hamnet was born.

Other imagined constants such as love and marriage weren't the same then either. Stratford records indicate that Shakespeare's decision to marry at eighteen was exceptional. Given the late age at which people got married and the extremely low illegitimacy rates at the time, sexual desire must have either been sublimated or found an outlet in non-procreative sex – perhaps both. People didn't think in terms of modern binaries of ‘heterosexuality' or ‘homosexuality' either. Moreover, the degree of personal privacy and hygiene we enjoy today would have been foreign to Shakespeare and his contemporaries, who shared rooms and even beds, and lived at a time when the use of objects like the fork, the
handkerchief and the nightdress were only beginning to become widespread.

Even the meaning of key concepts, such as what constitutes an ‘individual', weren't the same. Writers, including Shakespeare, were only beginning to speak of individuality in the modern sense of ‘distinctiveness' or ‘specialness' – the exact opposite of what it had long meant: ‘inseparability'. You can search in vain through the handful of Elizabethan works that even touch on the subject for anything that resembles modern notions of social or psychological development. Henry Cuffe, writing about
The Differences of the Ages of Man's Life
in 1600, can't get much beyond choosing between Pythagoras' division of life into the four stages of ‘childhood, youth, manhood, old age' and Aristotle's tripartite division into ‘childhood, flourishing man-age, and old-age'. Cuffe doesn't think in terms of individual psychology; people fall into types, and types behave according to imbalances in heat or moisture in their bodies, which, for Cuffe, explains why children can't reason, fretful ones die young and old men are suspicious. While Cuffe may be dismissed as a stodgy scholar trapped within inherited theoretical categories, someone who would be more comfortable with Ben Jonson's humour plays than the complex psychology of Shakespeare's, his work, and that of others like him, suggests that Elizabethans didn't think of motivation, individuality or behaviour in the ways we do now. Nor did they subscribe to modern notions of coming of age, which define so many cradle-to-grave biographies of Shakespeare, imposing on him sexual, religious or familial traumas, and sometimes all three, for which no substantive evidence, barring that imported from the plays, survives.

Pre-modern conceptions of self and of one's place in the world were not identical to our own, and though social historians are still defining the differences, those who view the lives of early modern men and women through the lens of modernity ought to proceed with caution. Moreover, given that this was an age of faith (or at least one in which church attendance was mandatory), religion too played a far greater role in shaping how life, death and the afterlife
were imagined. As much as we might want Shakespeare to have been like us, he wasn't – and biographers lead us astray when they invite us to imagine that he was.

A friend recently shared with me a terrific review in the
Financial
Times
by Susan Elderkin about novels set in places that their authors had never visited. Elderkin writes:

The same week, while at work in the British Library, I called up one of the two surviving copies of a volume of Elizabethan poetry called
Licia, or Poems of Love
. It was published anonymously in 1593 and contains fifty-one sonnets, along with an ode, an elegy and an unusual poem about ‘The Rising to the Crown of Richard the Third', told as if ‘written by himself'. It was just the kind of thing that might have caught Shakespeare's eye, busy at this time on his own Sonnets and perhaps on his
Richard the Third
as well. The author of
Licia
appended a longish preface, in the middle of which is a remarkable sentence that anticipates Sid Smith's conversation with Mark Lawson by four centuries: ‘A man may write of love, and not be in love, as well of husbandry, and not go to plough, or of witches and be none.' It's as apt a description of the
author of Shakespeare's Sonnets,
As You Like It
and
Macbeth
as any I know.