Shakespeare: For All Time (review)

For half a century Stanley Wells has been at the center of the Shakespeare world. Now professor emeritus of Shakespeare studies at the University of Birmingham, chairman of the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, and vice-chairman of the governors of the Royal Shakespeare Company, he has also served as chairman of the International Shakespeare Association and director of the Shakespeare Institute in Stratford-upon-Avon. He has edited Shakespeare Survey; been associate editor of the New Penguin Shakespeare; and courted controversy at Oxford University Press where, with Gary Taylor and others, he edited the Oxford Complete Works (1986), and where he oversees the Oxford Shakespeare single-volume editions, now virtually complete. Wells has co-edited The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare (with Margreta de Grazia), The Oxford Companion to Shakespeare (with Michael Dobson), and The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare on Stage (with Sarah Stanton). One might legitimately wonder if there is anything new left for him to say about Shakespeare. Indeed, in Shakespeare: For All Time Stanley Wells does not provide innovation. Instead, the lavishly illustrated coffee-table book is this Shakespeare doyen's summing up of Shakespeare's life and influence. Wells has spent his life as a teacher of Shakespeare at all educational levels. He describes his objective this way: "The fact that, one way and another, Shakespeare can mean so much to such different kinds of people has spurred me on to write a book which will, I hope, inform and even entertain what Dr Johnson, and Virginia Woolf after him, called the 'common reader'. I have tried not to assume specialist knowledge, but I admit to a hope that I may also be able to interest those who are already well informed about Shakespeare" (xx).

The first chapter looks at Shakespeare in Stratford-upon-Avon, going over well-explored territory while adding some personal insights. Wells lacks the late Sam Schoenbaum's gift for storytelling. Occasionally in this first chapter stories are embedded in other stories, like Russian nesting dolls. Wells is anxious to cast doubt on the idea that Shakespeare forsook Stratford during his London career. "I find it hard to accept the common view that for twenty years he virtually abandoned the town where he owned a grand establishment and extensive property, where his mother and father, his wife and children, and at least some of his brothers and sisters lived" (36). He observes that, "writing is a solitary occupation. It calls for peace and quiet. Shakespeare's plays are the product of intense imaginative and intellectual activity, deeply pondered and intricately plotted. To write them he needed space for thought. He also needed books" (36). Wells then conjectures that the writing took place in Stratford: "Can we really imagine that, having these needs, a writer who owned a splendid house in a small and relatively peaceful town in Warwickshire would not make every possible opportunity to spend time there? And is it not likely that his fellows, who relied on his literary productivity for their great financial success, encouraged him to do so?" (37). Wells is not above allowing his imagination to wander: "We know little about the contents of New Place, but my guess is that it contained a comfortable, book-lined study situated in the quietest part of the house to which Shakespeare retreated from London at every possible opportunity, and which members of the household approached at their peril when the master was at work" (37-38).

When faced with the question of what happened to these books, none of which are mentioned in Shakespeare's will—a point exploited by anti-Stratfordians—Wells suggests that "it would have been normal for such possessions to be mentioned in an accompanying inventory, which is lost" (43). There is no evidence that such an inventory ever existed. Unfortunately, the opening chapter is marred by a mix-up in the note numbering that results in most references being off by one.

The next chapter concerns Shakespeare's life in London. Wells covers the playwright...