RSS

Contact us

Friday 18 July 2008

The divine pork butcher

Yet still people pretend there is a mystery about what Shakespeare looked like. There was even an exhibition, Searching for Shakespeare, devoted to the subject at the National Portrait Gallery last year, featuring all the alternative more romantic versions of the face, chaps with earrings and hollow cheeks and soupy expressions, none of them bearing much resemblance to the divine pork butcher, like those hopeless lookunalikes at a police identity parade. Even A. D. Nuttall’s Shakespeare the Thinker, which sets out to clear away the cobwebs, uses for its dustjacket the Flower Portrait which was exposed two years ago as a 19th-century pastiche — the chrome yellow was the giveaway.

Nobody could be more solidly anchored in his home town than William Shakespeare, christened and buried a few hundred yards from the house where he was born, his sister Joan and her descendants living in that same house for the next 200 years, just as Anne’s brother, Bartholomew Hathaway, and his descendants lived in their ‘Cottage’, in reality a substantial timbered farmhouse, for the next 300 years. As you stand outside and look across the cottage garden to the fields and oaks of the Forest of Arden, where his mother Mary Arden came from (her family’s farm still standing too), you cannot help being moved, and also puzzled. Where’s the mystery?

In fact scholars are now beginning to admit that we know more about Shakespeare than about most people at the time who were not noble or royal. There was, after all, nothing obscure about his reputation in his lifetime. The wall tablet under the bust says in Latin ‘the earth covers, the people mourn and Olympus holds a Virgil in art, a Socrates in intellect and a Nestor in wisdom’. So not just a provincial wordsmith who kept London bums on seats. He was regarded in his own time not merely as the Lloyd Webber of the West Midlands but as a profound thinker. The young John Milton, one of the most learned poets who ever lived, wrote of Shakespeare’s ‘Delphic lines’ which ‘make us marble, with too much conceiving’. We remember Ben Jonson saying that his old friend ‘had small Latin and less Greeke’, but this was just a joshing prelude to comparing him to Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides.

More articles from: Ferdinand Mount | this section

Print this article  |  Email to a friend  |  Permalink  |   Comment

Post this entry to:   del.icio.us | Digg | Newsvine | NowPublic | Reddit

Advertisement

Spectator Business | Apollo Magazine

Corporate | Advertising | Privacy | Terms

Spectator, 22 Old Queen Street, London, SW1H 9HP

All Articles and Content Copyright ©2008 by The Spectator | All Rights Reserved