Shakespeare and Biography, and: Nine Lives of William Shakespeare (review)

David Bevington’s Shakespeare and Biography is not a book about biography in the formal sense. It does not discuss the problem of combining life narrative with critical analysis or with the various kinds of “background” that we think our readers need, or the question of whether they actually do need it. Nor does it consider the specific problems involved when the subject is Shakespeare: how to carve out a new approach, whether there is any point in tracing the author’s “development” when the dates of the plays are often uncertain, or indeed whether the project is worth doing at all. It does not take up James Shapiro’s claim that the old cradle-to-grave biography of Shakespeare is obsolete, or consider what the alternatives might be, apart from writing sixteen sequels to Shapiro’s 1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare. And of course there’s no answer for those who, aware of the shortness of their own lives, want to know which of the many books mentioned here are actually worth reading.

However, Bevington does offer what this useful Oxford series is intended to provide: a brief but reasonably comprehensive survey of modern biographies in English. His opening chapter, “The Biographical Problem,” is a summary of earlier archival work, showing who supplied which pieces of this giant unfinished puzzle, and the second chapter, “The Art of Biography,” surveys the early attempts to create a story from the available material. After that, the discussion breaks into chapters on the various attempts to deduce from the plays and poems what Shakespeare’s views on sex, politics, and religion might have been. Bevington concludes by examining the surprisingly influential labels that Edward Dowden gave to the phases of Shakespeare’s career, focusing in particular on the last two, “Out of the Depths” and “On the Heights.” In summarizing the views of others, the book becomes a kind of intellectual biography variorum, as well as a summary of the current state of research and debate.

Most of the works discussed here seem to fit Leeds Barroll’s description of the typical modern biography of Shakespeare: “a psychological journey allegorically expressed by his work.”¹ By contrast, most biographers pay very little attention to the nonpersonal factors that must have constrained Shakespeare’s choices (Barroll’s own example is the effect of being unable to perform during the long periods of plague closure). One omission, which Bevington points out, is the tendency to ignore the fact that most of the plays have sources—I am reminded of the students who used to ask me why Milton was afraid to let Satan win the war in Heaven. Biographers are also unsure about how much to use evidence from performance. To omit it is to ignore the main reason for the plays’ survival, yet it is surely reception history rather than biography that needs to know that present-day actors playing Antonio in Twelfth Night “opt almost without exception for a gay interpretation” (50). One reason for the antitheatrical attitude of many Shakespeare scholars is that almost any interpretation can be made to work, given good enough actors. Thus, anyone with a strong theoretical position is likely to be annoyed by much of what happens in the theater. (In this context, I regret the absence of any discussion of Meredith Skura’s Shakespeare the Actor and the Purposes of Playing which, although more thematic than chronological in organization, interprets the plays in terms of the social and psychological situation specific to actors. Whether actors had the same hang-ups in the sixteenth century that they do now is of course debatable—I would guess that they did not play Antonio as gay—but at least this approach relates the plays to one thing that we know to be true of the life of the historical Shakespeare...