Shakespeare Beyond Doubt by

Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 2013-04-29T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 13 Shakespeare tells lies

Barbara Everett

The obvious place to look for information about a writer is in contextual sources. Hence the relevance of historical and biographical study of literature. But there are distinctions to be made. Poets of the Romantic period seem far nearer to us, and more is in fact known about them: as a result, they appear much more symbiotic on the world about them. Elizabethan writers derive much less, or less clearly, from their time and place. Such knowledge as can be gained may prove a matter of generalization, gossip and myth. Because of the lapse of four centuries, even what is recovered and regarded as circumstantial data may well conflict with deep-rooted snobbish or romantic or simply wilful presuppositions in the enquirer.

Being foxed can lead a researcher to search the work itself for answers it was never intended to give. Some editors and critics suppose that they can find in the Sonnets of Shakespeare a fair young man, and then settle to dispute which Earl he might turn out to be. This kind of interpretation will be wrong from the start, a fact not encouraging to historical scholars. Literature is, as Aristotle once came near to arguing, metaphorical. But there are closer studies of poets’ work that look for information. Scholars who hope to find evidence there, in questions – for instance – of collaboration and attribution, will test Shakespeare's literary and verbal style for what it tells of identity. Such analyses are often interesting, but dogged by a problem that I have never seen properly articulated. Most good actors are brilliant mimics, of their colleagues, their friends and any passing public figures. This seems certain to be true of Burbage and likely to be true of Shakespeare. The gift of imitation was equally likely to have pervaded the poet's verbal style, its gigantic richness, inventiveness and variety gratefully or amusedly absorbing anything of character that offered itself.

I suspect that examinations of verbal style can't give back very securely much information about the writer's authenticity. But there are other kinds of questioning of the text which may render up a sense of Shakespeare, and moreover of Shakespeare within a given social world. I have just touched briefly on the probability of Shakespeare's verbal mimicry. It is manifest that as a writer he did what Hamlet urges on the actors, and held ‘the mirror up to nature’ (Hamlet 3.2.23–4), learning from all he saw and heard, watched, and read: but this art of mimicry never ended in an approach to the modern newspaper or cinematic image. The master of styles was also and simultaneously the great inventor of dramatic characters, who are true but not factual, dreamed into existence but never overstepping what Hamlet calls ‘the modesty of nature’ (Hamlet 3.2.9): or, as the Epilogue of Henry IV Part Two tells us, of Falstaff, ‘Oldcastle died a martyr, and this is not the man.’ Shakespeare was perhaps the first and greatest of English artists who worked throughout

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