BWH

[Art Neuendorffer]

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_Bad Will Hunting_ _ Daniel Swift
Tue Feb 28, 2:37 PM ET

<<The Nation -- Portraits of Shakespeare don't look like we want them
to. In the well-known Chandos portrait, he is swarthily guarded,
thuggish, and the only sign of life is the silver hoop in his left
ear. Art historians are not sure if this really is a portrait of
Shakespeare. The Flower portrait is more promising--the face is
serenely human, and the curve of his lip implies a welcome smile-
-but last year the National Portrait Gallery in London revealed
the painting to be a nineteenth-century forgery. And perhaps the
best-known contender, the 1623 engraving on the title page of the
first complete edition of Shakespeare's works--an oversized head
perched awkwardly upon an ornate ruff--was drawn by someone who had
never met him. Shakespeare portraiture is a speculative genre, as an
exhibition opening at the National Portrait Gallery in March will
acknowledge. Called "Searching for Shakespeare," it will present the
various contender portraits as possibilities rather than likenesses.
"Having a photograph of Shakespeare," wrote Susan Sontag,
"would be like having a nail from the True Cross."

If Shakespeare study today is a lively mix of wishfulness, mythology
and scholarship, this may simply be because we don't know what he
looked like, and what we do know about him is unsatisfactory. It is
often claimed that we know little about Shakespeare's life, but this
is untrue. We have many life records. The picture they paint, however,
is of a man we are unwilling to recognize. He was baptized and buried;
he bought malt, houses and land; he sued people who owed him money,
and he failed to pay his taxes; he gave legal testimony in a lawsuit
over the financial settlement of a marriage, and his will is formulaic
and businesslike. According to one seventeenth-century account, he was
"not a company keeper," and when asked to a party, he excused himself
with a headache. How did this money-worried little capitalist, who
conducted his life in a flurry of land deeds and small business
ventures, write Romeo and Juliet and Hamlet? As Prospero tells
Miranda in The Tempest, "My tale provokes that question."

The records force us back to the portraits; but the portraits only
look back at us, or apart from their potential inaccuracy, the three
images of the artist commonly held to be the greatest writer who ever
lived share one central trace. All are watchful; in each, the eyes
follow us across the room. We're in the grip of Shakespeare's gaze,
mesmerized by the enigma. But inside the works--inside the head, so
to speak--are a series of warnings to those who would imagine the man.
Othello, for one, is the tale of a man whose life is ruined by the
stories that others tell about him, and in his desperate final lines
the hero pleads to all would-be biographers. "I pray you, in your
letters,/When you shall these unlucky deeds relate," he begs,
"Speak of me as I am. Nothing extenuate."

The academic study of Shakespeare is a discipline made up of
strategies carefully wrought to avoid these matters. Published
last fall, Stephen Greenblatt's Will in the World is a speculative
biography that imagines what Shakespeare may have seen and where he
may have been; the stylistic tic that most aggravated reviewers was
Greenblatt's insistent use of the conditional "perhaps," which
carefully signaled that this was, in fact, no more than intellectual
fantasy. More recently, Greenblatt's Harvard colleague Marjorie Garber
released a 1,000-page bench press of a critical study, Shakespeare
After All, which studiously avoids any mention of his life and instead
finds the plays to refer exclusively to other plays, or to themselves.
This past fall saw the publication of 1599: A Year in the Life of
William Shakespeare by James Shapiro, a professor of English
literature at Columbia University, which skirts the larger story
of the life in favor of a microscopic archeology of
the day-to-day of a single year.

But this cautious academic approach to Shakespeare is only one
face of the modern cult of the playwright. Like the slasher-movie
serial killer, Shakespeare has escaped the grounds of the academic
institutions and is now at large in the community. In this alternate
universe, the most influential Shakespearean alive today is not
Stephen Greenblatt but Julia Stiles, who has played the female lead
in three Hollywood updates of Shakespeare plays in the past six years.
This worldly Shakespeare is as pinup beautiful as Joseph Fiennes,
and his words sit easily in the curled mouth of Leonardo DiCaprio.
Such a man demands a flesh-and-blood biography, and three new
books, each of which anchor the plays to the man, give it to him.

The hefty biographical confidence of Peter Ackroyd's new life of
Shakespeare is evident from the title: simply, Shakespeare: The
Biography. This is a thoroughly sensible biography, beginning, as
life does, with birth and politely accompanying our hero through a
well-known arc: the early years as the child of a well-to-do family in
Stratford-upon-Avon; lessons in the narrow classroom at the King's New
School, where he read Aesop and Ovid, was home for lunch at 11 and
then off to games in the afternoon; a move to London, where he found
hard-won theatrical success and a career as King James's leading
playwright; and then retirement, at about the age of 50,
to a grand house in Stratford.

Ackroyd is the biographer of several opaque English literary
figures--William Blake, Chaucer, Sir Thomas More--as well as the
author of London: The Biography, so it comes as no surprise to find
here a vivid grasp of the material elements of the daily life of
long-lost England. Ackroyd paints this scene with quick, telling
details. People got up at 4 in the morning and "by five, the streets
were filled"; in the theaters, the audience ate, drank and smoked,
and on the days when players did not occupy the stage there was
bear-baiting. "It was the custom in Warwickshire," Ackroyd writes,
"to give the suckling child hare's brains reduced to jelly." He
is particularly strong on the London that, as he reminds us,
"smelled terribly of dung and offal and human labor." In all
these small details--what journalists call "color"--
we are reminded of the distance between this world and ours.

These details of imaginative reconstruction are the strongest elements
of the book, and Ackroyd confidently places Shakespeare within them.
Surveying the house in which the young playwright grew up, on Henley
Street in Stratford, Ackroyd thoroughly describes its layout and
proportions and goes on to comment: "It was also a noisy house, a
wooden sound-box in which a conversation in one part of the house
could clearly be heard in another." The sounds of place are important:
It is striking to remember, for example, that Stratford was a
"well-watered town with various streams or streamlets running
through the streets," so the child Shakespeare
"was never very far from the sound of water."

But the Shakespeare who emerges from this grimy, smelly and lively
world is a shadow of a man: Ackroyd stresses his "business-like
acumen" and then again notes "his practical and business-like
approach to all the affairs of the world." This hard-nosed theatrical
bureaucrat, "in every sense a professional," is the logical result of
the business records which constitute the few traces of Shakespeare's
life, but the tension here between the man we want and the man we
have looms like a huge canyon of disappointment. "There is nothing,"
declares Ackroyd, "of personal vanity or personal eccentricity about
him," and this is, unfortunately, simply untrue. The thirty-eight
wondrous, bizarre and often terrifying plays, as well as the poems,
are nothing less than absolute proof of a flamboyantly
idiosyncratic imagination.

Ackroyd is magisterial on the contexts--the smells of London, the
details of the playing companies, the hare's brain jelly of daily
life--but weak on the texts, as each stage of his cautious character
study can be falsified by examining the plays. The relationship
between biography and works may be unknowable, but it is also
tantalizing. Surely there cannot be a total divide between life and
art. "Shakespeare was a profoundly unsentimental person," Ackroyd
announces; yet he imagined the clown-king Falstaff, whose betrayal
and death in the Henry IV and Henry V plays are one of the peaks of
English sentimental drama. "He never took sides," insists Ackroyd;
yet Shakespeare is clearly and extravagantly on the side of Romeo
& Juliet against the bloodthirsty legions of Capulets & Montagues.
He was, Ackroyd tells us, "an eminently practical and pragmatic man
of the theater"; yet the scene in Richard II where the vacuous king
is deposed was so controversial that it was censored from all
editions of the play printed during the reign of Queen Elizabeth.

The problem here is foundational. Ackroyd's careful social history of
late 16th- and early 17th-century England can tell us much of what
makes Shakespeare different from us today, but it can tell us nothing
of what made Shakespeare different from his contemporaries. That
distinction lies in the slippery, glittering realm of his imagination,
which two further new studies use to attach the man to his works.
Shadowplay by Clare Asquith and "Shakespeare" by Another Name by
Mark Anderson both attempt to ascribe the sources of Shakespeare's
creativity to his biography. "I have that within which passeth show,"
Hamlet tells his mother. For both of these scholars, the true
biography is hidden, like the Da Vinci Code, within the plays.

Shakespeare's England was, as Asquith compellingly sketches it, a
society embroiled in violence and religious upheaval. England was
a traditionally Catholic society, but from the early 1500s the
convulsions of the Reformation across Europe were exacerbated in
England by the rapid deaths of three English monarchs. In 1558 Queen
Elizabeth was crowned and imposed upon her countrymen a new and
state-sponsored national religion that abandoned the Catholic past in
favor of Protestant doctrine. Traditional wall paintings in churches
were whitewashed, and the grand monuments of Catholic England were
defaced; during Shakespeare's childhood, popular uprisings in the
north and west of England were violently quelled by government armies.
It is here, "in the repressive years following the Reformation, years
of censorship and propaganda," that Asquith finds the origins and
inspiration of Shakespeare's imagination.

Childhood in a culture of public violence and fear is a fertile
incubator for any artist, but this is only a starting point for
Asquith. Shakespeare "was driven to write by a different fear," she
writes, "the growing concern, shared by many contemporaries, that the
true history of the age would never be told." To preserve this
history, Asquith argues, Shakespeare developed what she calls a
"hologram technique"--a fancy phrase for nothing more than simple
allegory. The plays and poems are, she insists, written in "coded
language" whereby characters embody abstract principles like
"England's despoiled soul," or political figures like the Queen. In
Twelfth Night, for example, Asquith finds a bonanza of so-called
holograms: In this supermarket stocked with personifications are
"figures representing Rome, Ireland, the Pope, Philip II [the King of
Spain] and Robert Persons [a well-known Jesuit missionary]."

This is not literary criticism but algebra, using formulas and
equations to crack a code whose very existence becomes increasingly
farfetched as Asquith goes on. King Lear, she argues, was written to
beg King James's sympathy for his disenfranchised Catholic subjects,
and she notes the record of a court performance as evidence. The
problem is that this simply doesn't come close to accounting for the
play: King Lear is a searing, terrifying nightmare of aging and family
love, a heartbroken hymn of pain, but for Asquith it is a slice of
propaganda.

Such an argument is made possible only by an almost maniacal refusal
to consider seriously the plays as plays, as creative works. Of King
Lear, she writes that "for once, Shakespeare's dramatic control
falters," and she claims that Macbeth "seems almost carelessly put
together." The plot and language of Macbeth, on the contrary, are
impossibly, unforgivingly tight. But Asquith appears not to
particularly like Shakespeare's plays, and by the end of the book she
hardly mentions them at all except in brief plot summaries.
Shakespeare's literary imagination--that alchemist's furnace where he
made gold from base metals--is sidelined; in the place of a writer
Asquith offers us a spin doctor. It may be impossible to attend both
to Shakespeare's biography and his plays, as each appears to falsify
the other. Asquith's solution, to diminish the plays and to replace
the creative writer with a mechanical propagandist, is inventive, but
hollow.

There is, however, another solution to the problem of Shakespeare's
biography. In "Shakespeare" by Another Name, Mark Anderson gives us
the life we want of Shakespeare: He is a warrior and a playboy;
bisexual, promiscuous, generous, dashing; "a brilliant and troubled
man with whom one might enjoy sharing a beer but loathe sharing a
house. He was at times a cad and a scoundrel. He was also a notorious
teller of tall tales." He spent a lot of money on clothes, and threw
great parties: One famous night's revels featured a firework dragon
that set the house next door aflame. He killed a man, by mistake, in a
duel. Doesn't this sound like Shakespeare? The trick, of course, is
that it isn't: This is the life of Edward de Vere, the seventeenth
Earl of Oxford.

"'Shakespeare,' it turns out, was one of the most autobiographical
authors who ever took pen to paper," writes Anderson: "To recognize
this, one only need redefine 'Shakespeare.'" As Anderson reminds us,
Shakespeare's "documented biography is extensive, but it is all
commercial activities, lawsuits, and entrepreneurial ventures"; Edward
de Vere, by contrast, has exactly the right kind of biography. He went
to Cambridge at the age of 8; he was a sickly child, but he led an
army in Scotland; he enjoyed a passionate and unsuitable love affair,
which led to an unhappy marriage; and he traveled widely across Europe
meeting artists and thinkers and, according to Anderson, living the
life that gave birth to the plays. Fearing the stigma of a playwriting
career, de Vere simply hired the young actor Will Shakspere-
-the beard of Avon--as his frontman.

In this telling, the plays are still ciphers: not window dressing on
a hidden calculus but coded biographies. Hamlet, Anderson notes,
"closely follows the contours of de Vere's life," and Juliet and
Desdemona are both portraits of his wife--who, like Shakespeare's, was
named Anne. De Vere was involved in a legal case concerning the back
payment of wages to soldiers in the Netherlands, which Anderson
suggests is the source of The Merchant of Venice; noting that in the
Sonnets Shakespeare uses lameness as a metaphor for lovesickness,
Anderson observes that de Vere was lame. Any concept of literary
creativity disappears, and Shakespeare's imagination becomes no
more than a mechanism for reproducing biographical experience.
This is a portrait of the artist as photocopier.

"My name is Will," writes Shakespeare in one of the sonnets. It is a
joke: not proof that his name really is Will but a passing second of
free play with naming and identity, with who we are and who we may be,
and with possession and desire. Indeed, one of the joys of Shakespeare
is the constant riddling of identity. In Henry V, the Chorus describes
the young king as "like himself," and this tells us nothing, and all
that we need to know, about our hero. "I am not what I am," the
villain Iago confides in Othello; and Richard III is speaking
directly to the audience when he declares, "I am I" and then,
a couple of lines later, "Yet I lie: I am not."

Shakespeare's plays and poems are products of the imagination, and if
they still speak to us today, it's because we remain willing to
imagine along with them. Clare Asquith and Mark Anderson read with
blinkers on, like Central Park horses trudging around the same old
loop. This bleak prospect is the price we pay when we refuse to look
at the plays. "Lovers and madmen have such seething brains," wrote
Shakespeare in A Midsummer Night's Dream: "Such shaping fantasies,
that apprehend/More than cool reason ever comprehends." If there
is a lesson to be learned from the mismatch of Shakespeare's life
and works, it is that we must clear a space for wonder.>>
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