Nine Lives of William Shakespeare

[neufer]

http://www.brooklynrail.org/2012/02/books/occupying-w-s

OCCUPYING W. S.
by William S. Niederkorn

Review of _Nine Lives of William Shakespeare_
by Graham Holderness (Continuum 2011)

<<Biographies of Shakespeare have always been problematic: so much to
explain, so little information. Introducing his new book, Nine Lives
of William Shakespeare, Graham Holderness, author of some 20 books on
the Bard and an English professor at the University of Hertfordshire,
in Hatfield, about 20 miles north of London, acknowledges the
preferred solution. Every biography of Shakespeare, he writes,
“embroiders fact and tradition into a speculative composition that is,
at least partly, fictional.”

Naming seven authors of Shakespeare biographies published in recent
years (Peter Ackroyd, Jonathan Bate, Bill Bryson, Katherine Duncan-
Jones, Stephen Greenblatt, Stanley Wells, and Michael Wood),
Holderness says, “The very fact that they seek to construct a holistic
and integrated totality out of essentially heterogeneous material
renders them vulnerable to question.”
Bard the Lover.

In his new book, Holderness eschews homogeneity and occupies
Shakespeare with nine disparate lives, each on a different aspect of
the biography as scholars have told it. Nine Lives, he says, is the
“first biographical study to proceed on the assumption that
Shakespeare’s various lives are multiple and discontinuous.” In other
words, he has ditched the hopeless Humpty Dumpty project, and instead
examines the pieces.

Nine Lives of William Shakespeare has nothing to do with the old
saying about cats. In fact, by avoiding the initial limiting article
“the,” the title implies that there are potentially more lives. The
book’s nine chapters (Life One through Life Nine) include subsections
recounting “facts,” “tradition,” and “speculation” peculiar to each of
the lives—a triple dose of data.

For these parts alone, the book is a useful reference. Though always
displaying allegiance to the traditional Shakespeare story, Holderness
critiques the biographies in useful ways and shows just how weak and
tenuous many of their assertions are.

Not to be outdone on the fictional part of Shakespeare biography,
however, Holderness, a novelist and poet, concludes each Life with a
purely fictional story that takes off from it. Here, Holderness says
he has “taken considerable encouragement” from his old ally in the
culture wars, Stephen Greenblatt.

In his Shakespeare biography, Will in the World, “Greenblatt’s
challenge to orthodoxy was to be much more overtly fictional,”
Holderness writes. When Greenblatt discusses the relationship of the
Hamlets, father and son, Holderness says, “this is clearly not just
about Shakespeare: it is also about Greenblatt himself.” But while
Greenblatt mingles fact and fiction indiscriminately and produces
mystification, Holderness clearly separates the two and avoids it.

In Life One, “Shakespeare the Writer,” the story is “The Shakespeare
Code.” In a brief introduction, Holderness cites The Da Vinci Code and
says that here he is drawing on an “incident in the life of Pre-
Raphaelite poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti, who buried a manuscript volume
of poems together with the corpse of his wife Lizzie, ‘between her
cheek and hair,’ and later consented to have the poems exhumed from
her grave in Highgate cemetery.”

An academic obsessed with the hope of finding a Shakespeare manuscript
breaks into an underground burial chamber in Stratford and extracts a
sheaf of papers from the coffin of Shakespeare’s daughter Susanna. He
is ultimately disappointed to learn that it is not a manuscript but a
copy of the 1608 quarto of King Lear. It’s nothing to him, and of
course, nothing comes of nothing. That seems shortsighted. Such a
revelation, if actual, would rock the Shakespeare world because
Shakespeare has never been shown to have possessed any books at all,
much less one in the canon.
Bard the Father. From Nicholas Rowe’s 1709 Shakespeare, courtesy New
York Public Library.

For Life Two, “Shakespeare the Player,” Holderness utilizes Hamlet’s
speech to the players as a real lesson Shakespeare gives his fellow
actor Richard Burbage, but it runs out of steam. In introducing the
story, Holderness even admits that “this Shakespeare is obviously
rather too knowledgeable about Stanislavski and Artaud and Brecht.” By
the time Shakespeare delivers his acting lecture, it’s old news.

Three stories are devoted to “Shakespeare in Love,” all involving the
same fetish object: a gold ring, which actually exists, engraved with
the initials “W. S.” It “was acquired in 1810 by Stratford solicitor
and antiquarian Robert Bell Wheler” and “can still be seen today in
the Visitor’s Centre at Shakespeare’s Birthplace in Stratford.”

Never mind that the ring was “found” in the age of forgery; the three
stories Holderness forges from it are what matter. The first
embellishes Wheler’s own ring narration to tell of the true love of
Shakespeare and Anne Hathaway.

The second, recounting the homosexuality of the sonnets and projecting
W. S. as William and Southampton, has Sherlock Holmes solve a mystery
of the ring’s theft, which involves Oscar Wilde, for whom the initials
mean either Wilde and Shakespeare or Wilde and Salome.

The third story goes off on an unfortunate tangent as it explores the
“dark lady” of the sonnets by turning Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to
Arms into a sexually explicit account of an affair with a black nurse
whose initials are W.S. The precedent of Nothing Like the Sun, the
Shakespeare novel by Anthony Burgess, whose dark lady is a black
prostitute, is no excuse for flaunting racial attitudes that are
severely compromised. Professors who introduce this preposterous
fantasy in teaching the sonnets are, at best, clueless.

It is truly not until Life Nine that Holderness’s fiction fulfills
expectations, but then it does so brilliantly. The subject is
“Shakespeare’s Face,” and the discussion of facts, tradition, and
speculation ranges from conjectural portraits of Shakespeare to the
images of Shakespeare that permeate popular culture.

Describing the “best-known sculpted representation of Shakespeare,”
the marble statue “executed by Peter Scheemakers and erected in
Westminster Abbey as a memorial to the national poet in 1741,”
Holderness notes its “similarity to the icon of Christ,” and cites a
Victorian “Bible-Shakespeare Calendar” in the Folger Shakespeare
Library with a cover that “features a Shakespearean visage assimilated
to the traditional iconographic conventions used for representing
Christ.”

The Westminster statue was appropriated by David Garrick, Holderness
continues, as a “miniature souvenir” cast in lead for his Shakespeare
Jubilee in 1769, when Shakespeare “became a god,” according to
Christian Deelman’s book on the event.
Bard the Wise.

The same statue’s image on Britain’s £20 banknote, from 1970 to 1993,
was a “god with a countenance of marble, with feet of lead,” which
then was superseded by another image of Shakespeare that “was depicted
in the form of a high-technology visual hologram, designed to inhibit
fraudulent use and reproduction” on a popular credit card known as the
Bardcard.

“Where the £20 note pointed to the legitimate state ownership and
control of both economic and cultural power,” Holderness writes, “the
Bardcard proved its holder’s title to credit by displaying the image
of the one major author whose responsibility for the cultural
productions attributed to him has been consistently and systematically
questioned.”

Here Holderness is reprising some of the admirable work in his book
Cultural Shakespeare, published in 2001 by the University of
Hertfordshire Press, where he brought to bear with lucid clarity some
excellent left-wing political and philosophical thinking upon the
Shakespeare apparatus.

“An Account of a Voyage to Bardolo,” the short story included in Life
Nine, is the pièce de résistance. Inspired by Jonathan Swift’s
Gulliver’s Travels, as well as H. G. Wells’s The Island of Dr. Moreau,
William Golding’s Lord of the Flies, and James Hawes’s Speak for
England, it is about the “mysterious disappearance” of a cargo of
orphan children, six boys and six girls, trained as actors and
singers, who were being brought to Japan in 1710 to perform for the
imperial court. A storm came up and they were put off the ship in a
lifeboat, never to be seen or heard from again.

Centuries later, by similarly weird circumstances, the story’s
narrator, Edward, a man with a “sound education,” who was once an
actor in London and for a time an officer in the Royal Navy, comes
alone in a lifeboat to “an island I could not recall seeing on the
charts.” Soon he encounters “two young men of European appearance,”
each wearing “a crudely tailored doublet” and sporting long hair
“partly shaved above the forehead” so that they bear a “remarkable
resemblance to William Shakespeare.” Their names are Orsino and
Marcellus. They call both their island and their city Bardolo, and
their king “is always called William. After the Bard.”

With only a copy of Nicholas Rowe’s 1709 edition of Shakespeare to
provide for their culture, after 13 generations, a community of
descendants worships the Bard and lives “by the Book.” Edward goes
along with the program and becomes a friend of the director of the
Academy of Bardolo, Dr. Pericles, who shows him a “great chamber
inside the rock” with three iconic images, Bard the Father, a
depiction of Shakespeare’s funeral effigy in Stratford, “who holds the
Woolsack of Abundance”; Bard the Lover, based on the Chandos portrait,
“who brings us Passion and Fertility”; and Bard the Wise, the
Droeshout portrait, “who opens to us the Book of Knowledge,” the Rowe
edition.

All is sweetness and light in Bardolo, but as a year progresses, “I
suffered under the constant disquiet of concealment, growing more and
more restless in the poisonous, gnawing knowledge that it was all
based upon a misunderstanding,” Edward says. “Gradually I became more
and more determined to expose the absurdity of their beliefs, and to
bring these idolatrous people to their senses.”

Finally, turning to Dr. Pericles (“where most of the Bardolians were
like devotees of some fundamentalist religion, he seemed to me to have
a kind of sly comic wit and a knowing scepticism that would surely
make him a willing auditor to what I had to say”), he lets the cat out
of the bag in a daylong discourse, concluding, “And I explained that
some people had even ventured to doubt whether Shakespeare himself was
the author of the plays, and to propose that they may have been
written by someone else.”

With a smile, Dr. Pericles dismisses him, saying he’ll have to think
about it. But at night, back at his hut, Edward wakes up and sees a
“small group of young men” gathering round. “I knew instantly that I
was to be seized and arrested as a heretic and blasphemer.”

There are many more delightful details in this dazzling satire, and I
won’t spoil the ending, but indeed, this development is on a par with
what any professorial initiate in the cult of Shakespeare might fear
were he to consider raising a doubtful suspicion about the Bard. This
is clearly not just about Shakespeare: it is also about Holderness
himself.>>
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