On the very first page of Peter Ackroyd’s biography, you learn something strange and interesting about the first few moments of Shake- speare’s life: ‘A small portion of butter and honey was usually placed in the baby’s mouth. It was the custom in Warwickshire to give the suckling child hare’s brains reduced to jelly.’ Who knew that the first food our greatest dramatist tasted was jellied hare’s brains? Yuck.
On page after page that follows, he dishes out similar morsels. At the excavation of the site of the Rose theatre in 1989 he tells us that there were discovered ‘orange pips, Tudor shoes, a human skull, a bear skull, the sternum of a turtle, 16th-century inn tokens, clay pipes, a spur, a sword scabbard and hilt, money boxes, quantities of animal bones, pins and old clothing’. The detail is all. Ackroyd has written a big, expansive, densely imagined book in bite-sized chapters. I say ‘densely imagined’, and so it is, for it is a work as much of the imagination as it is of research, its idea being not just to document Shakespeare’s history, but to breathe some life into it. This he does with Ackroydian gusto.
His form of address is conversational and definitive. He often resorts to ‘we’, as if bundling the reader under one meaty arm and striding off down an Elizabethan back-alley. He’s fond of the florid, slightly pointless payoff — on successive pages we get ‘this was where Shakespeare belonged’; ‘it was the world of Shakespeare’; ‘this was Shakespeare’s experience of the world’ — but you find yourself indulging him. This is a book of great energy, clarity and interest.
Its instinct is also to be inclusive. The problem always confronting Shakespeare’s biographers are the gaps in the historical record, particularly of his early life. While making clear what is conjecture and what is not, Ackroyd has no fear of ‘would have’, ‘could have’, ‘probably’, ‘possibly’ and ‘might’. At one point, he wonders whether a line in A Midsummer Night’s Dream hints that the young Shakespeare joined his father in visiting a royal entertainment at Kenilworth Castle. ‘It is at least suggestive,’ he writes. ‘And a pretty story does no harm.’
The Shakespeare he gives us is at the centre of his world, but somewhat withdrawn; when he lived among the roaring boys of Shoreditch, a contemporary complained that he always excused himself from going out roister-doistering by claiming to have a headache. He was scorned by the University Wits and steered well clear of the School of Night, which is perhaps one of the reasons why, unlike Marlowe, Jonson and Kyd, he doesn’t seem to have murdered anyone, ended up in jail or died horribly.
He is canny with his money, highly sexed and apparently unhappy in his marriage; Ackroyd suggests that his departure for London so soon after his marriage wouldn’t have happened had all been well in the marital bed. Perhaps so, but it’s also clear throughout that Shakespeare was exceptionally ambitious.
What Ackroyd does wonderfully is to read back from the language of the plays into the world from which they emerged. He notes Shakespeare’s fascination with legal jargon, and sides with the view that he spent time as a legal clerk. He describes the birds and wild flowers of the Warwickshire countryside where Shakespeare grew up, and shows how their local dialect names make their way into his pastoral passages: crow-flowers, cuckoo-flowers, love-in-idleness, bilberry and honey-stalks. He describes the conventions governing the ways actors of the time gesticulated — right hand raised for ‘to be’; left hand for ‘or not to be’; both together for ‘that is the question’. He lists the stories and songs, the classical fables and Bible translations that marinated in Shakespeare’s extraordinarily retentive memory and nourished the language and cadences of his own invention.
Other facts pop up. ‘Mew’ was a common heckle in the theatre, from which we derive ‘cat-call’; ‘ham’ actors are so called because while they strut across the stage you can see their ham-strings sticking out. And, of course, when Ackroyd reaches his beloved London, he brings in a fantastic richness of detail, giving us a town you could smell from miles away, and one with a very energetic, young population, buying and selling and running around shouting and catching the clap and dying of the plague.
Everything was done fast — one contemporary was teased for having taken five weeks to write a play; another had 220 under his belt by the time he died. Shakespeare wrote fast, revised fast, and stands, for Ackroyd, as a supreme playwright of energy and motion. His basic dramatic instinct is, Ackroyd suggests, comic. The tragedies are doubled into parodic sub-plots, and he shows how, infatuated with Marlowe’s mighty line, he nevertheless lifts and transfigures it in The Taming of the Shrew. He had, as Ackroyd puts it, ‘a highly developed sense of the ridiculous’.
For Ackroyd, the key to Shakespeare is his extraordinary reserves of what a later poet called ‘negative capability’: his ability to inhabit every person in a scene, every position in an argument. The result, as Ackroyd sees it, is that ‘in the most sublime reaches of Shakespeare’s art there is no morality at all. There is only the soaring human will in consort with the imagination.’
Clare Asquith’s Shakespeare is, in that sense, quite opposite to Peter Ackroyd’s. Shadowplay is among the most remarkable books to come out about Shakespeare in years: above all, because it comes with a thesis, and a very big one indeed. In contrast to the Shakespeare that Ackroyd and other conventional generalists present us with — the polyvalent pioneer of a humanistic sense of interiority; the shrewd and politic career dramatist — she gives us a writer verging on the monomaniacal. Established wisdom is all but turned upside down. Her argument is that Shakespeare was not just sympathetic to the Old Faith, but was himself a determined recusant Catholic, and that the primary project of his dramatic career was to encode in his plays the struggles of Catholicism in post-Reformation England.
For Shakespeare’s having had Catholic sympathies, there is very good circumstantial evidence. Stratford was full of them, as Ackroyd agrees. His father, John Shakespeare, seems to have concealed a spiritual testament in the rafters of his house, and appeared at one point on a list of those fined for recusancy. His mother, Mary Arden, could claim connection with one of the most prominent Catholic clans in the country. His daughter Susannah, too, was named in 1606 as being ‘Popishly affected’. His patrons and several of the friends named in his will were Catholics or Catholic sympathisers.
Asquith, however, goes much further. Her argument — and it is both thoroughly and ingeniously presented — is that he developed a sort of code, with a series of markers which would cue the clued-up to understand his plays allegorically. So, the words ‘high’ and ‘fair’, for example, would identify a character as a Catholic; while ‘low’ and ‘dark’ were the markers of Protestantism. ‘Here I stand’ played off Luther; and storms are figures for the tempest of the Reformation. Numerological hints abound, too — whether references to the calendrical difference between England and the continent, the number 33 (Christ’s age at the time of his crucifixion), or allusions to the five wounds. Her idea is that he employed what she calls a ‘hologram technique’, which allows the plays to be read in two ways: the encoded meaning being at once invisible to the ce nsors and plain to those in the know.
The reader’s first instinct is to wonder whether Asquith isn’t a disciple of Dan Brown: her method seems dangerously close to the seductive hokum of The Da Vinci Code. It’s to the credit of her thoroughness and of her mastery of historical detail, then, that she makes her case so persuasively. As you read on, you find yourself thinking, blimey, there may be something in this. The first, startling, identification she makes is with Magdalen Montague, arguably the leading Catholic grande dame in the country, great-aunt of Shakespeare’s first patron, Lord Strange, and grandmother of his subsequent patron, Henry Wriothesley, Earl of Southampton. Asquith offers much detail to support her view that the character of Paulina in the Winter’s Tale is intended to indicate Lady Montague. At other times, she argues, Hamlet stands in for Sir Philip Sidney; Portia and Richard II for Queen Elizabeth; Lavinia for England; and so on.
The problem with her thesis is, in the first place, that it seems so utterly counter- intuitive. While others of his contemporaries were being racked and quartered, Shake- speare never got into trouble with the authorities. Indeed, as the chief playwright for the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, he was something of a court favourite. Why, you wonder, would he set out on this project? What was it for? If his coded polemics were too subtly demarcated for the authorities to pick up, what could their political impact be, and vice versa? Having your arms and legs pulled off is a mighty risk to take for the privilege of cocking a snook at teacher when his back is turned.
The bigger problem, perhaps, is that it makes Shakespeare’s writing mediaeval in character. It makes the dominant mode allegorical rather than psychological. It is surely too much to suggest that the inwardness of the soliloquies, the moral and psychological indeterminacy in which subsequent generations have seen the chief value of his work, was somehow an accidental emanation, a side-benefit, of an entirely different project. When the two, as they inevitably do, seem to pull in different directions, Asquith argues that ‘the topical meaning distorts the universal one’: the plays that seem less dramatically satisfactory make sense when you read them on the allegorical level.
I don’t really buy it. But her case — even if overstated — is far too well-made, and far too interesting, to be dismissed out of hand. It opens up another seam, another line in, another way of reading Shakespeare — and if she is even partly right, her book represents a small earthquake in our understanding.
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