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Reviewed by:
  • Shakespeare’s Letters
  • Juliet Fleming (bio)
Shakespeare’s Letters. By Alan Stewart. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2008. Illus. Pp. xvi + 405. $49.95 cloth.

In 2009, one can imagine all sorts of things about a book with this title—except what Alan Stewart offers us. For Shakespeare’s Letters is a thematic account of letters as these are written and delivered within the action of six of Shakespeare’s plays: Julius Caesar, Antony and Cleopatra, 1 Henry IV, The Merchant of Venice, King Lear, and Hamlet. Two introductory chapters set the scene. The first reminds us that no letters written by Shakespeare, and only one written to him, survive: to have hoped otherwise is to be party to that search for “Shakespeare the man” that in the 1790s produced a ready market for the forged Miscellaneous Papers and Legal Instruments under the Hand and Seal of William Shakespeare—an assortment of personal correspondence, legal documents, and manuscript drafts written by William Henry Ireland to please his father Samuel. But, says Stewart, Shakespeareans have been looking for the wrong letters, in the wrong place, “for [End Page 502] Shakespeare’s letters survive in abundance—in his plays, or, more precisely, on his stage” (4).

Stewart estimates that Shakespeare depicts 111 letters on stage, and they appear in all but five of the First Folio plays (4); they were, as Stewart notes, vital to the social functioning of the early modern world and, as Jonas Barish, Stephen Orgel, Stanley Wells, and others have noted, deeply woven into the action and verbal texture of early modern drama. Stewart makes two methodological claims in order to put some distance between himself and other critics, especially Lynne Magnusson, whose Shakespeare and Social Dialogue: Dramatic Language and Elizabethan Letters (1999) reads the plays in the context of the prescriptions of early modern letter-writing manuals. First, Stewart notes that “the period in which Shakespeare is writing is importantly removed from our modern understanding of letters, fixated on notions of privacy and personal subjectivity, and anonymous postal systems”; second, he suggests that “what happens to letters when they are placed on the stage is specific to that cultural institution, and is further removed than has previously been assumed from the ideologies that permeate the letter-writing textbooks of early modern England” (8).

In fact, it should not take Stewart to remind us that letters were the medium through which news was relayed, orders were conveyed, plans were laid, and trade was transacted—that they were, in fact, powerful agents of social and personal events, and liable to miscarry. But modern critics have tended to argue that letters do not exert much “theatrical appeal,” and even Muriel Bradbrook once complained that “‘whenever Shakespeare can think of nothing else to do, he puts in a misdirected letter’” (6). Stewart writes of a series of consequential facts concerning early modern letters: that they could be intercepted, forged, or read by the wrong person; that servants often wrote personal and other letters for their masters and mistresses; that letters not only accompanied but often were themselves instruments of credit or of other binding arrangements, and could be adduced as legal evidence of such; and that they took material formats—highly legible to their recipients—with which we are no longer familiar.

Having established so much, Stewart is then able to offer interesting correctives to some overlooked or misunderstood events in Shakespeare’s plays: “We need to rethink what it means for Ophelia to return Hamlet’s letters; for Falstaff to ambush carriers; for Kent to fail to deliver letters; for Maria’s handwriting to be misread for Olivia’s” (38). We also need to rethink Shylock’s arrangement with Antonio. The only known surviving letter to Shakespeare was written by his fellow Stratfordian Richard Quiney on 25 October 1598; it asks him to help raise thirty pounds to pay “‘all the debts I owe in London’” (156). Quiney offered as security against the loan his own credit-worthiness and that of two others. Shakespeare apparently granted this request, and the letter has subsequently been read as evidence of Shakespeare’s achieved financial security, his generosity towards...

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