So for almost 50 years
my head has been full of the plays, but the life? When, in January 1976, I was
asked by ATV if I would write six plays about Shakespeare, on a schedule that
would give me about four weeks a play, the idea filled me with an equal mixture
of enthusiasm and panic. How could I cope with his biography? I asked Professor
Terence Spencer of Birmingham, whom I'd met at the National Theatre.
He assured me happily, "You can write it all on a postcard." This news came to me as a relief. (...)
If Professor Spencer were right, and the date of the marriage, the leases for the transfer of property, the few lawsuits and the detailed will were all history had to say on the subject of Shakespeare, surely the works would be more revealing. It's true that you can find almost any sort of Shakespeare you want in the plays. Would you care for a radical reformer? ("Handy Dandy, which is the justice, which is the thief?") Or do you prefer a Conservative? ("Take but degree away, untune that string and hark what discord follows.")
But the Sonnets, however interpreted, must be a great and agonised autobiography, and I thought the plays, if no guide to their author's politics, at least show certain obsessions. Ingratitude is a subject that aches through Shakespeare like an old wound: and the Shakespearean hero has always one quality the author admires, a Stoic acceptance, when the last battle is lost, of his own character, flawed as it is, and his destiny. Jealousy is also a recurrent theme, as are pride and ambition. (...)
It wasn't, of course, as easy as that. I began to discover that the known facts about Shakespeare's life would need a pretty big postcard. They take some 260 pages of the best and most down‑to‑earth of books on the subject, Professor Schoenbaum's "Documentary Life", where you may find facsimiles of all the documents, eked out, it must be said, by some of the carefully distinguished rumours which began to be circulated about Shakespeare after his death. It's as much as might be known about a successful Elizabethan businessman, and there is no doubt that a perfectly clear and coherent character emerges.
There was obviously a William Shakespeare, son of a Stratford glove maker and alderman, who got trapped into marriage with a woman a good deal older than he: Anne was 26 when he was about 18. He fathered three children, two girls and one boy, Hamnet, who died at the age of 11.
The year after Hamnet's birth Shakespeare
left Stratford and disappeared into those convenient "dark years"
during which he might have been a soldier, a lawyer's clerk, a schoolmaster, or
gone to Italy, or picked pockets, or indeed have done whatever his admirers
would most prefer. In about 1589 he's heard of at the theatre and a story put
about after his death has it that his first job was looking after the
gentlemen's horses while they were at the play.
Soon, however, he got
work as an actor, and then as a mender of old plays and writer of his own
chronicle of Henry IV. He became steadily more successful and prosperous, but
never wholly severed his ties with the country and his family, to whom he
returned, rich and famous, to retire and die in 1616.
Professor Schoenbaum can
show us with his facsimiles the externals of an actor‑writer's life, his
property buying, his unexpected path to the coat of arms of gentility and
financial success. What he cannot do is tell us what Shakespeare felt about
these matters, or why such an apparently calm course was forever inwardly
troubled with storms of bitterness, self‑hatred and rejection of the
world.