Shakespeare, Marlowe, Jonson: New Directions in Biography (review)

The majority of the new directions in biography indicated in this anthology seem in practice to be new directions away from authorial biography as conventionally understood. In general, the contributors regard with a healthy skepticism the exploration of the writer's life in order to illuminate the work. Stephen Greenblatt's avowedly conjectural story of How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare in Will in the World (2004) has had the inadvertent effect of throwing into relief just what a shaky business critical biography always is, and J. R. Mulryne's introduction to this collection wittily exposes the distinctive predispositions of Shakespeare's biographers in the varying characters attributed to their subject.

The most scholarly contributions recoil from inventive embroidery of the few pieces of genuine information we have about Shakespeare, as well as from the view that it makes sense to explain fictional works in terms of personal experience. It is not just that biographical arguments are generally circular (because Shakespeare dramatizes a father's incestuous desire in Pericles, he must have had incestuous inclinations towards his own daughter) or vacuous (King Lear is about retirement, so Shakespeare was thinking about the perils of retirement when he wrote it). The problem also centers on the widely shared but naïve assumption that the primary source of fiction has to be the author's own personal story. As Alan H. Nelson judiciously asks, "Is life . . . more likely to provide fodder for drama than earlier drama and other forms of literature?" (57).

In the case of Shakespeare, the best of these essays are concerned with correcting the wilder speculations of the critical biographers by pointing out how little we actually know. Nelson and Richard Dutton both distance themselves from imaginative reconstruction, while drawing what historical inferences we reasonably can from the information we have. Blair Worden calls into question the prevailing assumption that the play performed on the eve of the Essex rebellion must have been Shakespeare's Richard II. Instead, he suggests that this work, variously described by witnesses, is likely to have been a dramatization of John Hayward's historical narrative, The First Part of the Life and Reign of King Henry the Fourth, one of the publishing sensations of 1599. Helen Cooper speculates that Shakespeare might have taken the part of Sparrow, " 'a high mounting lofty minded sparrow' " (119), the Clown with intellectual aspirations, born in Stratford-upon-Avon, who features in a play of the early 1590s attributed to "B. J." John W. Velz asks whether Shakespeare gained his knowledge of French and the Geneva Bible from associating with Huguenots. And Alison Shell takes to task proponents of the Catholic Shakespeare. If his writing is intelligible as coded Catholicism, she demonstrates, contemporary Catholics signally failed to register this and were more inclined to condemn Shakespeare for being too secular. And Shell mildly but firmly reprimands academics who grasp at this fashionable way of deciphering the plays without bothering to contextualize them in early modern Catholic literary culture.

Precisely because the contributors are so scrupulous, however, a reader might be left wondering about the point of this research. Properly refusing to link the life with the works, the essays cast a certain amount of light on the history of Shakespeare's time but virtually none on the writing that has made him such an object of speculation. If good biography rightly eschews the difficult task of accounting for these dense, challenging works, just how illuminating is it? This is a question Peter Holland might have addressed in his essay on "Shakespeare and the DNB."

When it comes to Christopher Marlowe, the record is more sensational, and the skepticism makes correspondingly better reading. Charles Nicholl uncovers the life and times of Thomas Drury, involved in accusing the dramatist of blasphemy and a confidence trickster of the first water. Lisa Hopkins detects Scottish politics in Edward II and The Massacre at Paris. Patrick Cheney appears to make more concessions to the...