Shakespeare: A Life by Park Honan OUP 479pp, £25 in UK
John Aubrey, that assiduous collector of 17th-century gossip, wrote that William Shakespeare was "a handsome, well shap't man, very good company and of a very readie and pleasant smoothe Witt". Aubrey's brief life, written sixty-five years after Shakespeare's death, is as close to the man's personality as we are likely to get, for despite the rummaging of scholars and antiquaries through nearly four centuries, biographies must still rely to a large extent on apparently and perhaps and maybe and might, and such locutions.
There are documents that record the dates of his christening, of his marriage, of the birth of his three children, of various monetary transactions, and of his death. His father was a leading citizen of Stratford on Avon and was a glover by trade. It is assumed that he sent the young William to the local Grammar School, after which Shakespeare may have been an apprentice in his father's shop or may have been, as Aubrey heard, "a schoolmaster in the countrey". At any rate he was in Stratford when he was eighteen and married Ann Hathaway, three months pregnant and seven years his senior. She bore him a daughter, Susanna, and two years later twins, Hamnet and Judith.
The next seven years are known as the Lost Years. During them, it is not known when or why he left Stratford and his family and became an actor and playwright in London.
In 1592 the university wit, Robert Greene, made a contemptuous allusion to "an upstart Crowe . . . in his owne conceit the only Shake-scene in the countrey". In 1593 his long poem Venus and Adonis was published and in 1594 a second long poem, Lucrece. In 1595 he was listed as one of the Lord Chamberlain's Men who performed before the Queen the previous Christmas. In 1598 a book appeared that listed twelve plays by Shakespeare. He was not only becoming a personage of some account but had also put by enough money to buy, in 1597, a large house in Stratford. Sadly, his son had died the year before. Now in his early thirties, Shakespeare continued to write plays and buy properties in Stratford. Aubrey says that "he was won't to goe to his native countrey once a year".
There are so many gaps in the record that it is impossible to write a satisfactory life: what can be done is to create a context in which a life might fit. Honan describes the life of the market town of Stratford, the education offered in Grammar Schools, the work of glovers and of schoolmasters, the trials of being an actor in London, the effects of the plague, social and religious divisions, all the minutiae of the Elizabethan and Jacobean worlds. It is a landscape with figures where one senses rather than sees the shadowy figure of the dramatist; he continually eludes our vision.
It is a difficult task, relating the dramatic writings to the circumstantial evidence. Did the two poisonings perpetrated by previous residents of New Place (the large house in Stratford) have any bearing on the murders in Ham- let? These, says Honan, "are not like pictures out of Ovid . . . but intimately known happenings based in part on real, acutely judged events". Did the loss of his son help him "to gather up his strength for the most emotionally complex and powerful dramas the English stage has known"? Honan could be right, but it can't be proved that Hamlet, Othello, Macbeth and Lear owe anything to the aforesaid events.
Sensibly, Honan avoids speculating on possible identities for the Young Man and the Dark Lady of the Sonnets. "In a sense, the study of Shakespeare in his age is only beginning; relevant material comes to light year by year," writes Honan. He has been able to correct some of the errors of his predecessors, as well as unearthing recherche information. "Some playhouse customs may have warded off death . . . The flea . . . infected in October, could awake to transmit plague in March after nesting in white fabrics, bedclothes, or neutral-coloured garments; since the rat-flea favoured these colours, the bright clothes of the public and the actors were fortuitous." (I would not have expected a professor of English to use "fortuitous" in the sense of "fortunate" rather than of "by chance"; in any case, it was not the garments but their wearers that had the good fortune to escape being bitten.)
Such details only tell us of what was common to the Elizabethans: they cannot explain why other men from Stratford, with the same background and opportunities, lacked the power of invention that William Shakespeare showed in his best plays.