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Saturday 19 July 2008

The divine pork butcher

Yet the mystifiers remain convinced that a glover’s son who had not been to university could not have produced such stuff, that the historical Shakespeare was not up to being ‘Shakespeare’. This is mostly snobbery, but also ignorance, for example about the demanding standards of grammar schools like Stratford’s, staffed mostly by university men. The plays show that in fact Shakespeare had read more Latin than classicists in universities today.

I remain baffled by the obsessive labours not only of those who waste their lives trying to prove that Oxford or Bacon or Queen Elizabeth wrote the plays, but also of those who long to tie Shakespeare down, to pigeonhole him in some profession or allegiance or character which would somehow explain away his disquieting genius. It’s as if knowing what Shakespeare was like as a person would somehow relieve us from the obligation of understanding what he wrote.

So we have the ‘lost years’, in which he was allegedly employed as a schoolteacher in the country (Aubrey’s Brief Lives) or as a soldier in the Low Countries (Duff Cooper’s Sergeant Shakespeare). The battered old ‘Theatre Edition’ that I have in front of me argues, following the 18th- century Shakespearean Edmund Malone, that after leaving school Shakespeare was employed in the office of a local attorney — this on no stronger ground than that he had nice handwriting and there are more legal references in his plays than in those of his contemporaries. Surely the obvious answer is that, like anyone else trying to get into the theatre, Shakespeare spent his twenties learning his trade as prompter, scene-shifter and understudy — years lost only in the sense that there would be unlikely to be much record of them. For his later life we are offered the sour, money-grubbing capitalist of Katherine Duncan-Jones’s Unquiet Shakespeare and Edward Bond’s play Bingo. Well, it is always a mistake to underestimate how unpleasant great writers can be — though few of us would come out smelling sweetly if the only traces left of us were our dealings with the Inland Revenue and the local planning department.

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