When I first sat down to write the life of William Shakespeare, I found myself occasionally longing for a less-studied subject. Say Lincoln, Churchill, or the man from Galilee. The sheer volume – and sheer volumes – of Shakespeare’s biographical patrimony are daunting, to say the least. And saying the least was the charge given to me in writing a Brief Life of Shakespeare. I say ‘given to me’ because it was a gift – the chance to shoulder my way into the crowded room of Shakespeare biographers to see how little I could get away with and still get away with it.
There is yet another ‘problem’ in writing a bio of Shakespeare. The facts of his life will fit on a postcard, while what biographers have made of them will crowd a dozen phonebooks. There’s not that much to know about Shakespeare – too many gaps, too little gossip – but there’s plenty to say, which leaves us with too much interpretation chasing too few facts. Usually where there’s smoke, there’s fire. But sometimes there’s just a crowd of beggars blowing on a dying ember. Writing the Brief Life, I was constantly conscious of all who’d done so and constantly conscious that others were doing so. Research into Shakespeare’s life is an ongoing enterprise, and so add to the worry one feels that your book will be outdated before the ink even dries.
Though it has its challenges, it is not hard – and is hardly heroic – to write the life of Shakespeare. No slogging through pipe rolls in a parochial outpost. No leafing through letters in an underheated archive. Everything you need is at arm’s length. The primary documents are just a click away. I wrote the bulk of the book with a sleeping baby lashed to my chest (my own, I hasten to add), suggesting that even a child could do it.
With all this in mind, I set myself a handful of rules. Never draw the auxiliary conclusion that Shakespeare ‘must have’ done anything (‘Shakespeare must have liked birds to have written so often about them …’). Do not add my pet take on this or that play to the menagerie of readings already out there (‘Coriolanus is a play about corn…’). But my main regulation was never to use the first-person pronoun. These shackles prevented me from scratching an itch about the ‘difficulty’ of writing about Shakespeare, which was my problem, not the reader’s. (I unlocked myself just once for a joke that I thought – and still think – earned its keep near the end of the book.) Above all, I never permitted myself to mention that I sometimes winced at the redundancy, presumption, and embarrassment of throwing up yet another tenement on a teeming street called Biographer’s Row.
Until now, where I’m describing the pervasive sense of redundancy, presumption, and even embarrassment at writing a biography of Shakespeare. Pervasive, but also enabling. The relief from any obligation to originality was liberatory. The presumption a chastening rod against self-aggrandizement. The embarrassment productive of a certain style. I had no ambition to say anything original. My ambition was to say old things in new ways so that readers would remember them.
Which brings up the question of style. The book is often jokey, probably to a fault, but its style is the blush that comes from the embarrassment of writing a biography of William Shakespeare. Life writing is probably always a bit embarrassing – it feels so abject, feels so intrusive – but in the case of W.S. you’re also feeding the theology of the exemplary individual, turning the Life into a liturgy. The tone in Brief Life is intended to inoculate me against self-seriousness, but it is also a hedge against hubris, a wary skepticism about what there is ultimately to understand about this ultimate author. There is so much to say, and so little to know.
Henry James’ 1903 story ‘The Birthplace’ tells the tale of Mr. and Mrs. Morris Gedge, a married couple offered the custodianship of Shakespeare’s birthplace. Although ‘Shakespeare’ is never named – it is always the capital ‘Him’ – it is patently clear whom James has in mind. The story is hilarious, in James’ smuggled way, and is about disenchantment. Turns out the job is little more than the dispensing of specious facts to a credulous crowd of trick-or-treaters. But before disillusionment settles in to ‘The Birthplace’ like damp in the basement, Morris and his wife are delighted, even awed by the offer, which arrives in the post over breakfast as Mrs. Gedge ‘picked a fly out of the butterdish.’
The story is not exactly a parable of biography, but there is a fly in the butterdish, which I’ve tried to swat at here since it buzzes around the act of writing about Shakespeare. At the same time, if there’s a fly in the butterdish, it’s still mostly butter. Writing a biography of Shakespeare is a creamy assignment, a deeply rewarding one. For perhaps the most compelling mystery of Shakespeare is that a lifetime of study of his words, world, and works does not dispel the mystery, it actually deepens it. Not ‘mystery’ in the sense of something Agatha Christie would write or Sherlock Holmes would solve – a ‘who done it’ or, God help us, a ‘who wrote it’ – but ‘mystery’ in the root sense of the term of something quasi-spiritual, nearly mystical. Something beyond belief. Shakespeare is wonderful – full of wonder but also wonder-inspiring, and after a few brief years spent with his brief life, my wonder is not lessened but deepened.
Paul Menzer is the author of William Shakespeare: A Brief Life (2023) from the Arden Shakespeare Insights series, Shakespeare in the Theatre: The American Shakespeare Center (2017) and Anecdotal Shakespeare (2015) as well as the editor of Romeo and Juliet: Arden Performance Editions ( 2017) and Doctor Faustus (2018). He is the Provost at Mary Baldwin University, USA, where he is a Professor of Shakespeare and Performance.
