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James Fenton
copyright © 2006
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Originally published
in The Guardian
17 June 2006
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The critical and popular success of James Shapiro's
1599, A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare (Faber),
is well deserved. It is often asserted that practically nothing
is known of Shakespeare's life, but Shapiro shows us one sense
in which this is quite untrue: once you begin to look at what
happened in the London of Shakespeare's day, the events the
playwright lived through, the common experiences he would have
endured, a great deal can be learned. To demonstrate this over
the course of a single year was an act of biographical bravura.
I find myself torn between knowing and not
wanting to know about Shakespeare. I don't want to go mad, and
so I don't want to start obsessing about the identity of anyone
referred to in the sonnets. Nor do I want to be bullied into
accepting that Shakespeare was a Catholic with a Lancashire
past.
On the other hand, whenever I see or read one
of the history plays, I feel a quiet conviction that Shakespeare
must once have been a soldier. He seems to have had such an
empathy for the common man's experience of war. Now the known
facts of the biography may do nothing to support my quiet conviction,
but there it is. Maybe a more plausible view is that Shakespeare
was just very good at listening to soldiers' tales. But when
the Chorus exhorts us in Henry V -
Oh, do but think
You stand upon the rivage and behold
A city on th' inconstant billows dancing;
For so appears this fleet majestical
Holding due course for Harflew ...
- I think to myself that this is something
Shakespeare saw.
I also suffer from the conviction that I can
understand the relationship between Shakespeare and his wife,
and the two households they ran in Stratford and London. This
is because I have lived in a capital city (Manila), which seemed
to enjoy the same relationship to provincial life as Elizabethan
London did to Stratford. Shakespeare's pursuit of a career in
London by no means involves an abandonment of his roots (as
it might today) or his business and family interests in Stratford.
On the contrary. His successes in London are used to promote
his interests and his status in his home town, to which he retires.
He not only retains his contacts with Stratford,
he develops them. Anne Hathaway's role would have been immensely
important, not only looking after the children and the house,
but also supervising a range of activities to do with the produce
of Shakespeare's orchards, his storage of (indeed, his hoarding
of) grain and so forth. I see her as a powerful, managerial
Filipina wife.
The one surviving letter to Shakespeare, from
Richard Quyney, asking for a substantial loan of £30,
addresses him as "loving countryman" - in the sense
of a fellow native of Warwickshire. Shapiro quotes a letter
from one Abraham Sturley to Adrian Quyney "which imported
that our countryman, William Shakespeare, would procure us money".
This Warwickshire clannishness (not to mention this neediness)
is very Filipino.
When Shakespeare made his annual journey from
London to Stratford we are told he would have hired a gelding
from William Greenaway, Stratford's main carrier, who lived
near St Paul's and brought "letters, messages, food, goods
and gossip" between Stratford and London. The Greenaways
were neighbours of the Shakespeares in Henley Street in Stratford.
It is supposed William would have had the task of informing
Shakespeare of the death of his son, Hamnet.
Of course, for the most part, Shapiro is dealing
with larger issues than what he mentions in passing, the exact
route Shakespeare would have taken from London through Stokenchurch
to Oxford and on to Stratford. He is talking about the building
of the Globe, about Essex's abortive campaign in Ireland and
his eventual downfall, about how Hamlet and As You Like It would
have struck their first audiences. Nor does he push speculation
too far.
But when he tells us, for instance, that in
the summer of 1599 the roads would have been full of demobbed
soldiers from the Ireland campaign, hurrying home to work on
the harvest, his imaginative method seems highly rewarding.
The vision of rural poverty in the Forest of Arden, as presented
in As You Like It, is strikingly evoked, and it is good
to be told or reminded that, by tradition, Shakespeare himself
played the role of old Adam. Such details add up. But the mystery
never evaporates.
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