Some Books About… WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 
? 26 April 1564 – 23 April 1616

To read every book written about William Shakespeare would require several lifetimes.  No writer, and certainly no British writer, has generated more supplementary literature than Shakespeare and his work have generated in the four centuries since his death.  And nor does the flood of BardLit –– or, if you prefer, WillWrite –– appear to be in danger of slowing to a trickle any time soon.  Many new books are published about Shakespeare every year, written in English and a variety of other languages, as scholars, cultural critics and even novelists discover new parallels between his plays (particularly the tragedies and histories) and what occurs on a daily basis in our increasingly mad (and maddening) post-9/11 world.  

I would not presume to suggest that the books discussed below are the 'best' books ever published about Shakespeare and his work.  They are merely a sampling of those which have proven useful to me in my ongoing quest to come to terms with this most challenging and elusive of literary geniuses.  

 

Riverside Books USA, 1999

 

Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human (1998) by HAROLD BLOOM

'The plays,' states Harold Bloom in his introduction to this hefty and consistently thought-provoking study of them, 'remain the outward limit of human achievement: aesthetically, cognitively, in certain ways morally, even spiritually.  They abide beyond the end of the mind's reach; we cannot catch up to them.  Shakespeare will go on explaining us because, in part, he invented us, which is the central argument of this book.'  

It's a fascinating argument and a convincing one, presented by a prominent North American academic who was at the forefront of the study of literature in his native land from 1959 until his death half a century later.  But Bloom's fellow scholars are not his target audience.  Rather, his book is aimed at what he calls 'common readers and theatergoers' who, he hopes, will come to share his belief that is in the works of Shakespeare that we as a species first discovered what it really means to describe ourselves as 'human.'  He seeks to rescue 'Sweet Master Will' from the post-modern deconstructionists and give him back to the people –– or the groundlings to borrow a theatrical term –– for whom his works were, of course, originally written not for the sake of 'Art' or 'cultural significance' but for the more pressing reasons of earning a living and making the theatre company he co-owned a financially viable enterprise.  Shakespeare's purpose, Bloom seeks to remind us, was not to educate and elucidate but, first and foremost, to entertain and, by entertaining, to prosper in what was arguably the most exciting and competitive theatrical environment the Western world has ever seen. 

He analyses the events and themes of each play in scrupulous detail, expending the most ink on Hamlet (49 pages, as might be expected given its central position in the canon of Western literature) and the least on The Merry Wives of Windsor (4 pages) which he describes, not without justification, as a 'weak play' and a contender, along with The Two Gentleman of Verona, for the dubious honour of being 'Shakespeare's slightest comedy.'  But even here he offers intriguing insights into what may have been Shakespeare's reasons for writing a play that appears to deliberately humiliate one of his most popular characters, the rambunctious n'er-do-well Sir John Falstaff.  (He even refers to the humiliated Falstaff as 'pseudo-Falstaff' to differentiate him from the 'authentic Falstaff' who features in and, for as long as he's onstage, dominates parts one and two of Henry IV.)  He concludes that Shakespeare's decision to present Falstaff flummoxed by love and taken short by scheming women was his way of '…warding off personal horror' by making him the symbol of –– if not the scapegoat for –– his own romantic rejections and subsequent descents into depression.  Discounting the apocryphal tale which suggests the play was allegedly produced at the request of Elizabeth I who requested a work featuring 'Falstaff in love,' it is an interesting theory and one worth bearing in mind while reading what has been a little read work seldom staged since its 1597 (or 1598) premiere.

This is not to suggest that every theory that Bloom offers should be unquestioningly accepted because he taught at Yale, NYU and Harvard.  This a very personal book, possibly the most personal of the many he wrote about Shakespeare (his final book about the Bard, published a few months before his death, was Macbeth: A Dagger of the Mind) and, as such, is a subjective expression of his particular likes, dislikes and occasional self-indulgences.  (He freely states as much in his introduction.)  His essay on Timon of Athens (which he places under the heading of 'Tragic Epilogues') –– another knotty and seldom performed work very likely to have been co-written with Thomas Middleton –– contains a few pronouncements I find it difficult to accept, including but not limited to the unverifiable statement that the playwright '…experienced a personal revulsion at what he was finishing, and turned away from it to do some play doctoring upon what became Pericles.'  Bloom seems baffled, even slightly insulted, by Timon's unrelenting misanthropy, describing the play as '…an amazing torso, powerfully expressionistic' that Shakespeare –– '…a great self critic' –– dismissed as being '…largely unworthy of him.'
  
Did he?  That's a lot of information to infer from a five act drama created in either 1604 or 1605 by a writer who sometimes worked with collaborators (as he did here with Middleton and again with George Wilkins on Pericles, for example) and whose motivations and thought processes remain completely mysterious to us, even when the person doing the inferring happens to be one of the world's leading literary scholars.  But this is a minor quibble and in no way indicative of the value of the book as a whole.  It remains a useful and stimulating text even as it challenges your assumptions about your favourite plays and what you think, or like to think, you understand about them.  Bloom is to be applauded for reminding us that these astonishing dramas were the product of Shakespeare's uncanny ability to portray humanity in all its forms, be they high-born, low-born or somewhere in-between.

Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human may still be obtainable from your local library, bookstore or preferred online retailer.  Its author HAROLD BLOOM died on 14 October 2019 at the age of eighty-nine.

Vintage/Random House UK, 1996

 

Shakespeare (1970) by ANTHONY BURGESS 

Like Harold Bloom, English novelist and critic Anthony Burgess was an unabashed and self-confessed Bardolator –– a Shakespeare fan (or should that be fanatic?) who recognised in the plays and poems a melding of literature and human consciousness which has yet to be equalled and is unlikely to be surpassed.  This slim volume, originally written to accompany a glossy photographic study of Shakespeare's life, followed the 1964 publication of Nothing Like The Sun –– a brilliantly inventive novel subtitled A Story of Shakespeare's Love-Life as notable for its exuberant wordplay as for the refreshingly honest irreverence it displays toward its subject –– and an unproduced 1968 screenplay that Burgess wrote for a proposed big budget Hollywood musical provisionally titled Will! or The Bawdy Bard.  The film was permanently shelved in 1970 but Burgess, never one to waste an idea when he could recycle it, revisited the experience of writing its script in his 1984 novel Enderby's Dark Lady, final volume of a tetraology concerning his poetic alter-ego Francis Xavier Enderby whose picaresque adventures could be said to have something of a Shakespearean bent to them.

Burgess brings many of the same qualities that make Nothing Like The Sun such a delight to read to this biography, his primary aim being similar to that of Harold Bloom –– to accord this most human of writers his humanity by depicting him as a living imperfect man and not as the literary demi-god or fossilized relic of a bygone age the hagiographers and some of the more extreme cultural theorists seem determined to portray him as.  'What I claim here,' Burgess explains in his introduction, 'is the right of every Shakespeare-lover who has ever lived to paint his own portrait of the man.  One is short of the right paints and brushes and knows one is going to end up with a botched and inadequate picture, but here I have real pictures to help me out.  Or, to put it another way, my task is to help the pictures.'  

Be that as it may, the text is entertainingly readable without the accompanying illustrations, none of which are included in the 1996 Random House paperback edition or subsequent reprints of the book.  And Burgess's elegantly constructed prose doesn't suffer in the slightest from this lack of visual addenda.  He has a novelist's observant eye for the inclusion of character revealing detail (and the artful exclusion of what could easily prove to be distracting irrelevancies) and a rare skill for recreating the atmosphere of sixteenth and seventeeth century England in language that's never anything less than arresting in addition to being ferociously intelligent.  There are, of course, many other short biographies of Shakespeare available –– including a more recent and just as worthy one by Anglo-American travel writer and journalist Bill Bryson published in 2007 as part of the HarperCollins 'Eminent Lives' series –– but Burgess's biography remains one of the cleverest and, to my mind, most sympathetic portraits of Shakespeare ever published.

Shakespeare may still be obtainable from your local library, bookstore or preferred online retailer, as may the 1964 novel Nothing Like The Sun which was last reprinted in 2013.

 

Jonathon Cape UK, 2004

 

Will In The World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare (2004) by STEPHEN GREENBLATT

As should be evident by now, much of what's written about Shakespeare and his working methods is based upon little more than speculation if not outright guesswork.  This is an understandable necessity when so little is known about his day to day life that scholar and layperson alike have no choice but to turn to the plays themselves to discover who he was and what made him such a unique, time-defying genius.  Why did the possibly Catholic son of a glover and wool merchant turned usurer from provincial Warwickshire, a young husband and father with no more than a grammar school education, set off to London to become an actor and playwright in the toughest, most fiercely competitive theatrical marketplace in what was then the civilized world?  How did he come to take on and so quickly outwrite the 'University Wits' –– a group which included writers as gifted as Christopher Marlowe, Thomas Lodge, John Lyly and Thomas Nashe to name just a few –– to become the leading dramatist not only of the Elizabethan age but of every age that succeeded it? 

These are just some of the many intriguing questions that Stephen Greenblatt, a Professor at Harvard University and one of the most renowned Shakespeare scholars of the modern era, asks and tries to answer in Will In The World.  He does this by relating the few verifiable facts about his subject's life to his work and showing how the two mutually interacted with and influenced each other.  His strategy, according to a 2013 interview posted on his website, is to '…combine a responsible research of these documentary traces and weighing what they mean with a conjuring act, with the possibility of actually bringing his person much more into focus, but not only into focus but into life, a life he had in his world.  Because the book is written with the presumption that Shakespeare, first of all, was born with an immense innate talent… and that he also did a lot of hard work, including reading books and studying, and working on his iambic pentameter.  But something about the way he was living in the world, something about his responsiveness to what was around him, made an enormous difference, so what I tried to do is simply to throw windows open and see what was outside the room that he was working in, and what he descended to when he descended onto the street.'  

Greenblatt brings both erudition and compassion to his task, offering us a new way of seeing and understanding Shakespeare's life in the very different world he inhabited between his arrival in London in 1587 and his death –– from a fever allegedly induced by consuming too much pickled herring and rhenish wine in the company of his old friend Ben Jonson and fellow Warwickshire poet Michael Drayton –– in the spring of 1616.  Like the Bloom and Burgess works discussed above, this book is an attempt to humanize the most god-like of writers by taking us deeply into the world that inspired his lifelong love of words and fired what was obviously a profoundly expansive imagination.  The research, as you would expect of any self-respecting scholar, is impeccable and the book reveals a Shakespeare who, despite his seemingly effortless ability to express human experience in the highest poetic terms, still feels like one of us –– a man who understood the vicissitudes of life, who suffered losses and setbacks, who had one foot planted in the world of the aristocrats and the other firmly planted in the grimy world of Southwark with its brothels, skittle parlours, bear-baiting rings and playhouses but nevertheless chose to abandon both worlds to return to Stratford-on-Avon to live out the rest of his life as a rusticated land-owning gentleman.  None of these experiences occurred in isolation and Greenblatt does a superb job of linking them, showing us that the phenomenon we know as 'William Shakespeare' was as much the product of upbringing, environment and social networking as it was of his unprecedented skill as a dramatist.

Will In The World may still be obtainable from your local library, bookstore or preferred online retailer.  Tyrant: Shakespeare on Politics, the latest BardLit book by STEPHEN GREENBLATT, was published by The Bodley Head on 8 June 2018 and remains widely available in both print and digital editions.

Cambridge University Press UK, 2009

 

The Shakespearean Stage 1574–1642 (Fourth Edition 2009) by ANDREW GURR

'Hamlet, like any other Shakespeare nobleman, wore his hat indoors… The unbonneted Hamlet familiar to modern audiences is a creation of the indoor theatre and fourth-wall staging, where every scene is in a room unless it is specified otherwise, and where everyone goes hatless accordingly.  Hamlet in 1601 walked under the sky in an open amphitheatre, on a platform that felt out-of-doors in comparison with modern theatres but indifferently represented indoors or out to the Elizabethans.'  

So begins Andrew Gurr's masterly and deservedly valued forty year study of the Elizabethan, Jacobean and Carolinian theatre –– an industry dominated by the plays of William Shakespeare despite the fact that he probably didn't arrive in London until 1587, seventeen years after the city's first theatres were established, didn't have his first play performed there until 1592 (or thereabouts) and left the city for good in 1616, a few months prior to his death and twenty-six years before the Puritans closed the theatres not, as has generally been assumed, for religious reasons but as a means of maintaining public order.  While Shakespeare cannot be said to have invented the conventions of the English stage, it was his work, more than that of his contemporaries or any of his theatrical descendants, that stretched and tested those conventions in ways that still resonate with and continue to delight theatregoers today.

It can be easy to overlook the fact that Shakespeare was first and foremost a working playwright, someone who earned his living by composing verse dramas performed by actors in London playhouses and, after 1599, in one particular playhouse called The Globe that he co-owned with other members of the Chamberlain's Men, the London-based acting company (and favourite of Queen Elizabeth I of England and her successor King James I of Great Britain) for whom he wrote exclusively if not always alone.  This book examines the nuts and bolts aspects of Shakespeare's profession in fascinating but always accessible detail, providing the reader with one of the clearest pictures available not just of the theatres and the men who built, managed and acted in them, but also of the customs, mores and social attitudes of those who would pay a penny to the wherryman to be rowed across the Thames each week in order to attend performances and partake of the many other pleasures, illicit and otherwise, that the Bankside area had to offer.  

With chapters covering original staging practices, the personnel structures of the city's many professional acting companies, descriptions of styles of acting, the history of playhouse construction, the use of props and costumes and audience behaviour it is an indispensable guide to the very different (and sometimes dangerous due to the unpredictable presence of the plague which could break out again at any moment) theatregoing experience of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.  Nor is its focus exclusively confined to Shakespeare.  The plays of Christopher Marlowe, Ben Jonson, John Webster, John Marston, Thomas Middleton, George Chapman and even lesser known playwrights like Richard Brome (who was Jonson's servant and probably his protègé) are also discussed, making this an invaluable single volume reference for anyone eager to move beyond the texts themselves to understand how they were staged, performed and received by Elizabethan and Jacobean audiences who demanded that plays not only be gripping and action-packed but that each performance should conclude with all the players once again taking the stage to dance a boisterous jig together. 

The Shakespearean Stage 1574–1642 may still be obtainable from your local library, bookstore or preferred online retailer. 

Penguin Books UK, 2008

 

The Lodger: Shakespeare On Silver Street (2007) by CHARLES NICHOLL

A new style of Shakespeare biography has emerged in recent years in which the idea of examining his life in toto has been substituted for the examination of one particular period or aspect of it.  The Lodger is one such book and, I believe, a book that's destined to be regarded as a classic of Shakespeare scholarship by future generations.  Written by Charles Nicholl, a first-rate literary detective whose 1992 book about Christopher Marlowe remains the best examination of that poet's mysterious and probably royally sanctioned death, it focuses on the time Shakespeare spent as the tenant of the Mountjoys, a French 'tire-making' family who had emigrated to England, along with many of their Huguenot brethren, to escape religious persecution following the bloody St Bartholomew's Day Massacre of 1572.  

The Mountjoys settled on Silver Street in the Cripplegate district of London and it was here, probably some time in 1603, that they rented a room in their combined house and shop to a thirty-nine year old actor/playwright from the provinces whose most recent offering Measure for Measure had been another popular success.  Why did Shakespeare choose to rent a room from them, a family of 'strangers' as foreigners, be they French or Dutch or anything else, were disparagingly labelled at the time?  (Then as now, immigrants were scorned by the majority of the populace, who blamed them for everything from higher food prices to ruining English trade to intentionally spreading the plague.  Stupidity, it seems, is a timeless human attribute.)  This was hardly the norm in Jacobean London, even though many of Shakespeare's fellow playwrights –– including Thomas Nashe, Robert Greene and Ben Jonson –– were in the habit of taking lodgings close to London's theatre district where they could work in peace without necessarily placing themselves in the 'thick of the action' so to speak.  

Christopher Mountjoy, Shakespeare's landlord and the family patriarch, was a successful if parsimonious and somewhat belligerent figure, a hardheaded businessman whose skill at manufacturing 'tires' –– the common name for 'head attires' which were elaborate headpieces worn as fashion accessories by any woman who could afford one (including prostitutes) that often featured in paintings of the time –– was consistent enough to see him prosper and earn regular commissions from theatrical costumiers along with many high profile members of the aristocracy.  

But Shakespeare, it seems, was more than just the upstairs lodger of Mountjoy and his wife (and chief salesperson) Marie.  He also took a hand in persuading their apprentice, a man named Stephen Belott, to marry their daughter Mary in 1604 –– an involvement that would see him called to testify in court on the couple's behalf in May 1612 following Christopher Mountjoy's failure to pay the dowry of £60 they had been promised eight years earlier.  'It was,' Nicholl informs us, 'a family dispute: trivial, pecuniary, faintly sordid –– standard fare at the Court of Requests, whose function was broadly equivalent to the Small Claims Courts of today.'  Why was Shakespeare called in as a witness?  And what drove him to take on the unlikely role of matchmaker in the first place?

These are just some of the questions Nicholl confronts in this exhaustively researched and brilliantly written book, offering us a view of Shakespeare's life and the Jacobean world in general –– its culture, its fashion industry, its xenophobia, its fascinations with adultery and both the commercial and non-commercial forms of sex –– that ranks among the most vivid and engaging I have ever read.  Part biography and part mystery story, it presents us with an image of Shakespeare that, while not exactly at odds with other, more traditional representations of the playwright's life and legacy, comes much closer to revealing him as the flesh and blood human being he was than those more scholarly studies generally succeed in doing.  It's a rivetting investigation of an infrequently examined period of his life that, as one reviewer put it, 'Throws a new light on the man who was both a universal genius and just like us.'

The Lodger: Shakespeare on Silver Street may still be obtainable from your local library, bookstore or preferred online retailer. 

Oxford University Press UK, 2001

 

The Oxford Companion to Shakespeare (2001) by MICHAEL DOBSON and STANLEY WELLS [editors]

If I had to select one book about Shakespeare to take with me to a desert island then this fine Oxford Companion would undoubtedly be it.  While numerous general reference guides about the playwright and his work have been published over the years (some more diligently researched than others), none that I've used has come close to achieving what this book achieves in its 541 closely spaced pages.  It offers the reader Shakespeare in his entirety –– his past and present selves as playwright, poet, impresario, theatre owner and family man, drawing on what in 2001 was the latest scholarship to present him in all aspects of his life and as the enduring central figure of what remains a vitally important literary and cultural legacy.  (An updated edition of the book, containing more than 80 new entries, was published in 2016 and is obviously the edition to seek out by anybody wishing to consult or purchase a copy.) 
 
The Companion is a compendium of facts both vital and trivial, a pleasing combination of scholarly data and knowledge for its own sake that never fails to delight even as it informs and elucidates.  If you have a burning desire to know who Samuel Gilburne was then all you have to do is turn to page 164 to learn that he was a member of the King's Men named in the actor list of the 1623 Folio.  If you want to know what role inns played in the development of Elizabethan theatre, the answer is waiting for you in a pithy entry appearing on page 213.  One of my favourite entries is the one about dogs written by Anne Button, who tells us that they '…are given names in Shakespeare more often than any other kind of animal in the plays… The principal dog brought onto the stage is Crab in The Two Gentleman of Verona, though the dog in "Pyramus and Thisbe" in A Midsummer Night's Dream might also have been a real animal in Shakespeare's day.'  

The book also features dedicated entries for every play and poem, accompanied by usefully condensed synopses, notes on sources and texts, artistic features, critical and stage histories plus film and television adaptations, if any.  These entries, like those concerning Shakespeare's fellow writers and business associates, serve as excellent starting points for further investigation, containing precisely the right amount of information in what is seldom longer than four single spaced, double columned pages.  Just as helpful are the dozens of maps and black and white photographs the book contains, all of which shed further light on Shakespeare's parallel lives as son, husband, poet and playwright and his ongoing after-life as the most persistently revered cultural icon in the Western world.  It makes the ideal reference guide for anybody interested in Shakespeare who is unable or unwilling to commit to one of the more scholarly studies of his life and career that can sometimes be daunting in terms of length and a bit of a linguistic slog for the inquisitive but time poor non-specialist.  

But why believe me when you can have the quality of this volume confirmed by no less a personage than Dame Judi Dench, who played Juliet in Franco Zeffirelli's acclaimed 1960 RSC production of Romeo and Juliet and called the book 'A wonderful treasure house of information and insight.'  Ne'er a truer word was't spoke, fair lady.  Hie thee, gentle reader, and seek'st thou thine own copy forthwith. 

The updated edition of The Oxford Companion to Shakespeare, containing more than 80 new entries, was published in 2016 and may still be obtainable from your local library, bookstore or preferred online retailer.  (It has a different cover to the original 2001 edition displayed above which is shown below to eliminate confusion.)

Oxford University Press UK, 2016

Use the link below to visit OpenSourceShakespeare, a self-proclaimed 'Experiment in Literary Technology' offering free digital editions of every play and poem written by WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE plus a handy search engine which allows visitors to search each play and poem via '…the exact spelling of a word, the first part of a word form or any other part of a word form.'  

http://www.opensourceshakespeare.org/concordance/

 

Digital versions of the plays and poems are also available from Project Gutenberg and other free book sharing sites.

 

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