The Biographical William Shakespeare of Stratford

For the documentary facts of William Shakespeare's life, look at the comparative timeline.

There are literally thousands of biographies of William Shakespeare of Stratford. Among the best recent ones:

• Park Honan, Shakespeare: A Life - a psychological reading of Shakespeare
• Michael Wood, Shakespeare - popular life, both a TV series and a book; inaccuracies combined with generally good background on the Elizabethan world and a reasonably sophisticated sense of the religious politics
• Stephen Greenblatt, Will in the World

Of the three, Will in the World is the most interesting and most heartbreaking case. Greenblatt is one of the founders and champions of the New Historicism, which advocates going back to the original sources in their literary and historical contexts. Greenblatt was offered a large amount of money to go back to the original Shakespearean sources and write a life.

The typical life of Shakespeare goes like this:

• Young Will grows up in Warwickshire
• Will gets married and leaves Stratford
• Where he could have been during the seven lost years
• How the theater worked in London
• Shakespeare's friends and colleagues
• The theatrical and publishing history of the plays
• Old Will goes back to Stratford, buys King's Place, leaves his wife the second-best bed, and dies

In other words, there's not much of Shakespeare the man in London. Most of the extant information on him, and there's a surprising amount, is concerned with wool sales, grain sales, and moneylending in Stratford. So the biography is padded out with the interesting facts of Elizabethan England.

Will in the World was meant to be different. "I believe that nothing comes from nothing, even in Shakespeare. I wanted to know where he got the matter he was working with and what he did with that matter," Stephen Greenblatt said in Hamlet in Purgatory. Greenblatt was going to go through the extant material and he was going to find connections. He would prove that William Shakespeare of Stratford fit into the Elizabethan world. Perhaps he would even find new information about Shakespeare.

We all would have loved to read that book.

Will in the World is not it.

Stephen Greenblatt is a hugely intelligent man, a sensitive critic, and a fine historian. He tried. The book was late, then it was late again. It was put off for yet another year, he told me, because the publishers wanted him in the US for the publicity blitz. In the end he produced a sensitive, nuanced study of the mind behind the Shakespeare canon. Will in the World has gained many literary laurels, and deserves them.

But there is hardly a biographical fact in it.

Greenblatt, the historian, has produced a fine book by moving away from the history. In some aspects, particularly the absence of Shakespeare's father, the book doesn't follow the known facts of Shakespeare's life--John Shakespeare lived for most of William Shakespeare's life.

(This part of Greenblatt's analysis of Shakespeare, like several others, fits Edward de Vere better.)

When I spoke to Greenblatt about the book before it was published, the first thing he said was "Who do you think wrote the plays?"

My personal verdict: Great book; as good a biography of one man as of the other. Worth reading.

But the grounded, solidly historical biography that Greenblatt meant to write was, I think, produced by Mark Anderson.

"Anti-Stratford"

Among the Oxfordians and other "anti-Strats", there is a fashion for denigrating Shakespeare. "He was nothing but a wool-dealer, there's no evidence he could even read or write or was ever an actor, his wife and children were illiterate," and so on. Much of this is intemperate, irrelevant, and badly researched. A refreshingly moderate exception is Diana Price's Shakespeare's Unorthodox Biography. Both the book and the Web site are worth reading.

Biographical Stratford • Jonson's eulogy • Oxford's death • Biographical Oxford
Shakespeare's library • Shakespeare's travels • Shakespeare's experience
Dating the plays • Authorship timeline • "Theory of casual references"