A new book from Bill Bryson looks at the life of William Shakespeare -- and doesn't try to prove Big Willie didn't write the plays and poems we have come to love.
From the review of William Shakespeare: The World as Stage by Bill Bryson:
Fittingly, he starts with the celebrated Chandos portrait, whose authenticity is engulfed in a mystery of its own. Shakespeare's enduring enigma begins at birth. We cannot be sure that he came into the world on April 23, 1564. It's simply the traditional date.
Instead of concocting some plausible theories to fill in the many gaps in what we know about Shakespeare, Bryson draws a concise picture of his times - from the working conditions and admission prices of the Elizabethan theater to what people ate, drank and wore. He notes with amazement that the consumption of beer was a gallon daily for each person, without seeming to realize that such tippling was a necessity because the water was too foul and dangerous to drink.
Although he has visited the archives that hold Shakespearean treasures - such as the Folger Library in Washington with its unrivaled collection of First Folios - Bryson doesn't pretend to any original scholarship. His Shakespeare is a work of honest synthesis.
I especially enjoyed his spirited rejoinder to the thriving industry that has developed to advance the claims of others as the "real" authors of Shakespeare's plays. This began in the mid-19th century with the idea that Francis Bacon was the man. Bryson is right to stress what has always seemed to me a compelling rebuttal: Nobody ever questioned Shakespeare's authorship in his lifetime. Nor did the two friends and colleagues who prepared the First Folio seven years after his death and put his name and image on the title page. For the next two centuries no one raised a hint of doubt.
This sounds like a nice and brief introduction for people who may not like Shakespeare or be familiar with his work -- with none of the usual BS about authorship.
As for the seemingly endless conjecture by some that Shakespeare's plays, in particular, were written by someone else, who cares? I don't give a damn who wrote these plays, whether it was the playwright known as William Shakespeare, or Francis Bacon, Christopher Marlowe, or Edward de Vere, the Earl of Oxford (these are the top three candidates for authorship among those who like conspiracy theories).
The reality is that these plays are the foundation of Western literature and Western humanity, as Harold Bloom argued in Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human.
From the review in Boston Review:
I never supposed anyone would approach the level of admiration Harold Bloom reaches in Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human. For Bloom, Shakespeare stands alone not only as the greatest literary genius who ever lived, but the greatest intellect of all time, so far ahead of anyone who came before or after him that we can never catch up. He represents the outer reaches of human intelligence, and when we immerse ourselves in his plays we enter territory as yet uncharted. This means that even the most gifted critical minds-Bloom's included-cannot contain Shakespeare; he contains them. As Bloom puts it, "no one yet has managed to be post-Shakespearean."
And . . .
When Bloom claims that Shakespeare invented the human, however, he doesn't merely mean that he pioneered these psychological fields in literature before they became established in what gradually became our modern disciplines. According to Bloom, Shakespeare-especially in his creation of Falstaff and Hamlet-so utterly altered human consciousness that after him the world was a different place and we were different creatures. In other words, Shakespeare re-created humanity.
These are lofty claims, and there is no doubt that Bloom, who is one of our best critics, can back them up.
For me, however, and for Bloom as well, I suspect, the play is the thing. We will never know very much more than we know now about Shakespeare himself. And we know all we need to know about the times in which he lived. So the real focus should be on a close reading of the plays.
As much as I admire Samuel Beckett, Anton Chekhov, Harold Pinter, Tom Stoppard, Arthur Miller, and David Mamet, none of these brilliant writers can even approach the depth, complexity, and insight of a Shakespeare play.
When we actually pay attention to the images, symbolism, and language in the plays, not to mention the cultural commentary, the politics, and the grasp of human interiors, why would we care who wrote the plays? The plays themselves are each a self-contained world worthy of our close reading and contemplation.
My favorite class as an undergrad was when my school hired a new director (Alan Armstrong) for our Shakespeare Center (Ashland is home of the world-famous Oregon Shakespeare Festival, so we had to have a Shakespeare Center), who was teaching a class on Henry IV, Parts I and II, The Merry Wives of Windsor, and Henry V -- my favorite sequence of the Bard's plays. When we began to write papers, we were instructed NOT to use ANY outside sources. All he wanted us to do was read the play, think about it, and write a paper about some aspect of the play. Most of the students freaked out.
That class was awesome.
And it taught me about close reading, a style of criticism attributed to the new critics of the 1920s - 1960s (but corrupted by some of the post-modern deconstructionists). When it comes to Shakespeare, a close reading of the plays should be all that matters.
Everything we need to know about the work is in the plays.
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