Critical Survey

"It seems to be a kind of respect due to the memory of excellent men, especially of those whom their wit and learning have made famous, to deliver some account of themselves, as well as their works, to Posterity. For this reason, how fond do we see some people of discovering any little personal story of the great men of Antiquity, their families, the common accidents of their lives, and even their shape, make, and features have been the subject of critical enquiries. How trifling soever this Curiosity may seem to be, it is certainly very natural; and we are hardly satisfy’d with an account of any remarkable person, ‘till we have heard him describ’d even to the very cloaths he wears." (Nicholas Rowe, 1709)

One of the most impressive contributions to Shakespeare scholarship of recent years famously opens as follows: ‘I began with the desire to speak with the dead’. The author, Stephen Greenblatt, explains that the modern critic is in some ways like a shaman who calls up the spirits of the deceased. Greenblatt goes on to argue that such unmediated access to the past is, alas, impossible, as we are always bound by the preconceptions of our own era. Yet the longing for such ultimate authority remains. A similar desire to speak with the dead, translated into a fantasy, lies behind many texts which do allow us unmediated contact with dead writers, including Shakespeare. Such fantasies often take the form of Shakespeare’s ghost appearing on earth, or of mortals being granted an interview with his shade in Elysium. Before 1800, it is almost exclusively in the form of a ghost that Shakespeare is deployed as a literary character, in prologues, epilogues, plays, novels, and narrative poems. Nor are such apparitions confined to Britain alone: in broadly similar ways, from the late eighteenth century onwards, Shakespearean ghosts also appear on the European Continent. I will study this phenomenon from the perspective of authority: the authority invested in Shakespeare’s ghost itself; and hence, in the later author who ventriloquizes through that ghost, making Shakespeare the mouthpiece for her or his ideas and values; and the eventual loss of that authority in Britain, though not so much in Continental Europe.

George Bernard Shaw vividly recalls the only time he saw Oscar Wilde and his aristocratic boyfriend Alfred Douglas together. It was on the eve of Wilde’s libel trial over the offending inscription (‘For Oscar Wilde posing Somdomite [sic]’) that Douglas’s father, the Marquess of Queensberry had sent him. Wilde came to see Shaw’s editor Frank Harris at London’s Café Royal, to ask him ‘to testify at the trial that Dorian Gray was a masterpiece of literature and morality’. Harris pleaded with Wilde to flee the country immediately.

Like the Chorus in Marlowe’s prologue to Doctor Faustus, let me begin by stating what this essay is not. This paper is not a detailed examination of the biographical character of either Marlowe or Shakespeare. Nor is it yet another attempt to show that Marlowe coauthored or, more conspiratorially, actually wrote some of Shakespeare’s plays. Nor will it focus on the working and playing conditions of the early modern theatrical scene.What it will explore is the relationship between Shakespeare and Marlowe as it has been portrayed in biographical and fictional forms.

‘I give unto my wife my second best bed with the furniture’, wrote William Shakespeare in his will of March 1616, a month before his death. The repercussions of this phrase have shaped the trajectory of Anne Hathaway’s life for almost 400 years. As an object of material domesticity as well as a reminder of sexual activity, the ‘second best bed’ embodies both the sexual and domestic sides of this famous wife, linking her physically to Shakespeare and to the domestic life that likely kept her in Stratford for the duration of her life.

Though religious matters have long been part of Shakespeare criticism, they have not been the most popular ones on this agenda for a long time. In the last two decades, however, the question of Shakespeare’s personal religious belief has been re-introduced to the scene of early modern studies and vividly discussed by Shakespeare scholars all over the world. The topic has thus proved to be much more than a wave of fashion in Shakespeare studies and certainly deserves further critical investigation. For matters of space this essay must be restricted to one of the numerous questions that concern the field, i.e., the cultural and political impact which the early Jesuit mission, and here the Provincia Germaniae Superioris, had on William Shakespeare, his contemporaries, and the theatre of his time.

This essay traces the process of naturalization of Shakespeare on the Continent and especially in nineteenth-century Germany with the consistent recurrence of his oscillation between the Protestant and Catholic poles in the biographical studies by Shakespeare scholars up to the twentieth century. In the second half of the eighteenth century, when German poets and critics discovered Shakespeare and chose his dramas as their literary models, they were not chiefly interested in his biography, character, and religious belief. Instead, his German admirers, especially of the school of Sturm und Drang (Storm and Stress) and the early Romanticists, concentrated on coming to terms with his dramatic art and defining his poetological position.

A report on my experience with Shakespeare: A Life may not be generally useful, but I shall touch on factors that are changing our view of literary biography. It helps to refer to oneself and to the matter of a biographer’s outlook and feelings, no matter how deplorable the feelings. Of course, what a biographer thinks or feels is irrelevant, in one sense.We don’t care what you may have felt, for heaven’s sake; we judge your work! That is proper as far as it goes, but outlook and preparedness count in this field and so I shall allude to those. My general view is that biography thrives when we regard it as highly sophisticated, entertaining, and moving, and able to depict as much about life as works of fiction can. This genre has a certain relation to music and painting in its possible intensity. ‘All that is not useful’, says Matisse, ‘is detrimental to the effect’; the same applies to biographical narratives. Shakespeare’s life offers a special challenge, but not for any dire lack of evidence. Much depends on what use is made of abundant facts about Tudor Stratford, for example, and so on a personal attitude. My early attitude to Shakespeare was romantic and poor. For some time I thought of him as semi-divine, or as being ‘more than a man’. If I liked ‘Prufrock’, that was for its Hamlet allusions mainly. Later at University College in London, I was taken aback when my supervisor asked me to read something besides Shakespeare before trying to write a PhD thesis on the tragedies. I wrote two plays, both staged by London groups, but reviewed harshly in student newspapers, except for a remark to the effect that ‘Honan is incapable of writing anything but duologues, rather like Shakespeare in Two Gentlemen of Verona’. Finally I wrote a thesis on Browning partly because ‘Caliban upon Setebos’ reminded me of The Tempest.

People write biographies of Shakespeare for many different reasons, often in combination. Rarely, if ever, is it out of a desire to disseminate new information, though a technique that can illuminate is to find new ways of placing long-established facts within a fresh context. Biographical discoveries, and serious scholarly treatment of biographical issues, are more likely to be communicated through articles in learned journals. Full-length biographies may be the consequence of a creative wish to engage with and to entertain imagined readerships, or a desire to educate, or the fulfilment of personal or polemical agenda, possibly at least partly subconscious: feminist, or psychosexual, or political; and also, less worthily but no less understandably, of a desire to make money or a search for professional advancement.

IT seems to be a kind of Respect due to the Memory of Excellent Men, especially of those whom their Wit and Learning have made Famous, to deliver some Account of themselves, as well as their Works, to Posterity. For this Reason, how fond do we see some People of discovering any little Personal Story of the great Men of Antiquity, their Families, the common Accidents of their Lives, and even their Shape,Make and Features have been the Subject of critical Enquiries. How trifling soever this Curiosity may seem to be, it is certainly very Natural; and we are hardly satisfy'd with an Account of any remarkable Person, 'till we have heard him describ'd even to the very Cloaths he wears. As for what relates to Men of Letters, the knowledge of an Author may sometimes conduce to the better understanding his Book.

The Perch PETER WALTON

Agency VICTOR WRATISLAW

The Shadow WAYNE BURROWS

Fuel by Andrew Sant (North Fitzroy: Black Pepper, 2009), 122pp. ISBN 978-1-876044-63-3, £9.99

Wimmera by Homer Rieth (North Fitzroy: Black Pepper, 2009), 374pp. ISBN 978-1-876044-61-9, £15.95

Notes on contributors