Ungentle Shakespeare: Scenes From his Life (review)

Shakespeare's best modern biographers have gone about their work in the spirit of Sergeant Joe Friday, the laconic detective in the 1950s American television series Dragnet: "Just the facts, ma'am, nothing but the facts." Samuel Schoenbaum, Russell Fraser, and Park Honan tell the reader everything there is to know about the life of Shakespeare but have relatively little to say about his subjective preferences, which tend to be a matter of speculation. Firsthand testimony about Shakespeare's character derives from a handful of respectful contemporaries, who said, for example, that "[D]iverse of worship have reported his uprightness of dealing which argues his honesty" (Henry Chettle); or that "He was (indeed) honest and of a free and open nature" (Ben Jonson); or that he "was not a company keeper lived in Shoreditch, wouldn't be debauched" (John Aubrey, via William Beeston). Pursuing these and other leads, current biographies have emphasized Shakespeare's moral probity, self-abnegation, and empathy. Case closed?

Not for Katherine Duncan-Jones. Her engrossing new biography Ungentle Shakespeare: Scenes From his Life seeks "to bring Shakespeare down from the lofty isolation to which he has been customarily elevated, and to show him as a man among men, a writer among writers" (x). In the course of his descent, Duncan-Jones's Shakespeare becomes increasingly preoccupied with "social class, sex and money" (xi). From chapter 3, "Plague and Poetry," onward, she meticulously fleshes out her portrait of Shakespeare as social climber, as homosexual misogynist-cum-womanizer, and as skinflint. Although her argument relies on speculation, she invariably produces textual evidence—from Shakespeare, contemporary playwrights, local history, court records, and other sources—to enforce her points. In many cases she simply asks us to give demeaning or sleazy material, such as John Manningham's anecdote about Shakespeare's womanizing, the same kind of respectful attention that we pay to other records of his life. Park Honan, for example, accepts the likelihood that Shakespeare collaborated with the loathsome George Wilkins on Pericles but stipulates that Shakespeare cannot be blamed for the company he kept. Why not?

Katherine Duncan-Jones, a Fellow of Somerville College, Oxford, acknowledges that her own approach to the evidence is selective, or, as she puts it, "thematic": "Rather than chronicling each recorded event, play or poem in sequence, I have identified what I feel to be important topics or issues associated with particular periods, structuring each chapter as a collection of short related essays on such topics" (x). Although this method serves her well, she could have been more forthcoming about her principles of selection. At the outset, she discredits the attribution to Shakespeare of Hand D in the manuscript fragment of Sir Thomas More on the grounds that "half a dozen late signatures do not seem to me to provide an adequate sample on which to base an identification of Shakespeare's secretary hand" (xii). She then dismisses Simon Forman's Book of Plaies as a forgery, finding it "strangely suspicious that Forman, who nowhere else in his copious papers reveals any interest in the theatre, should suddenly have taken to playgoing in the last year of his life" (xiii). There are two problems here. In the first place, as Stanley Wells commented in the Times Literary Supplement, Duncan-Jones's arguments fall short of the mark: the case for Shakespeare's hand in More does not simply depend on paleographical arguments, and Forman does reveal an interest in the theater elsewhere in his papers. In the second place, Duncan-Jones poses the question of selectivity in terms of rationalistic textual analysis—no shaky evidence need apply!—but this is not the criterion that she uses in Ungentle Shakespeare. If"half a dozen late signatures" cannot persuade the author that Shakespeare was Hand D in More, why is she ready to identify Shakespeare (and not Will Kemp) with "William my Lord of Leicester's jesting...