Telling Shakespeare’s story ‘by tale or history’

This article begins by reviewing recent arguments that Shakespeare biographers simply do not know enough to write a true life and, thus, tend to make “bricks without straw”. This sense of incompletion can be traced back to Georgian-lawyer-turned-Shakespeare editor, Edmond Malone, who in the words of Margreta De Grazia championed “Facts”, which she straightaway defines as “information provided or supported by documents, unmediated by transmission”. Though published just 25 years ago, De Grazia’s definition is no longer beyond interrogation. While all facts are certainly forms of information, in the Information Age, the digitization of information goes well beyond the recording of documented facts. As we will see, this recent reassessment of what constitutes information has deeply affected our approach to Shakespeare. In many ways, our recent innovations in Shakespeare biography find their parallel in Malone’s era. This article is published as part of a collection to commemorate the 400th anniversary of William Shakespeare’s death.


Introduction
I n this brief article, I want to trace the acceptance of fictional elements in Shakespeare biography. That said, I am not claiming that Shakespeare was not Shakespeare; merely that life and story perhaps inevitably engage both fact and fiction. Read enough Shakespeare biographies and it becomes clear that reconstructing the playwright's life is a bit like playing chess: the rules of the game, the number of pieces and squares on the board are set, or so readers are often led to believe. But from the biographer's perspective, the game is played the way it is because many of the pieces are missing. In the words of Samuel Schoenbaum, once the unverifiable details are set aside, a Shakespeare biographer is left with only the briefest outline of a literary life: "a man born in Stratford who married and begot children, left for a career as actor and playwright in London, and returned to his place of origin, where he drew up his will, died, and was buried" (Schoenbaum, 1993: 277). Germaine Greer, in her own novelistic biography, Shakespeare's Wife, similarly argues that "all biographies of Shakespeare are houses built of straw" (Greer, 2007: 9); Ellis (2012) likewise argues that Shakespeare's biographers simply do not know enough to write a true life, and, thus, tend to make "bricks without straw" (11).
This dual sense of incompletion and exhaustion (that is, the sense that what can be said legitimately likely already has) can be traced back to Georgian-lawyer-turned-Shakespeare editor, Edmond Malone, who, in the words of Margreta De Grazia, championed "Facts", which she straightaway defines as "information provided or supported by documents" (De Grazia, 1991: 110). A prime example of Malone's method is his gloss on Ben Jonson's recollection that "the players have often mentioned it as an honour to Shakespeare, that in his writing (whatsoever he penned) he never blotted out a line"; Malone (1790) drily noted that the statement was best understood in relation to "a positive assertion grounded on the best evidence that the nature of the subject admitted; namely, occular proof" (I:140cf). Likewise, Malone (1790) reprinted the the gossip recorded by various seventeenth-and eighteenth-century magpies, including the belief that William Davenant was Shakespeare's bastard offspring but scrupulously walled them off in a section he dubbed "Additional Anecdotes" (I: 155-170).
The siring of a bastard was not the only loutish and illicit act banished by Malone. Sometime between 1692 and 1708, the Reverend Richard Davies found himself in Sapperton, about 40 miles southwest of Stratford-upon-Avon. There, over dinner and much drink, the man of the cloth heard a malicious tale concerning the adolescent Shakespeare. Apparently, the future playwright was given to poaching venison and rabitts on the estate of one Thomas Lucy. This happened so often that he was "oft whipped and sometimes imprisoned and at last made to fly his native country" (Schoenbuam, 1993: 69). Another version of the story was recorded by the old actor Thomas Betterton and published in Nicholas Rowe's edition of Shakespeare (1709): He [Shakespeare] had, by a Misfortune common enough to young Fellows, fallen into ill Company; and amongst them, some that made a frequent practice of Deer-stealing, engag'd him with them more than once in robbing a Park that belong'd to Sir Thomas Lucy of Cherlecot, near Stratford. For this he was prosecuted by that Gentleman, as he thought, somewhat too severely; and in order to revenge that ill Usage, he made a Ballad upon him. And tho' this, probably the first Essay of his Poetry, be lost, yet it is said to have been so very bitter, that it redoubled the Prosecution against him to that degree, that he was oblig'd to leave his Business and Family in Warwickshire, for some time, and shelter himself in London. Nor were these the only versions of the deer poaching story. Sometime in the 1690s, Mr. Joshua Barnes, a Greek Professor of the University of Cambridge, found himself at an inn in Stratford-upon-Avon and overheard an old woman singing the following ballad, in which Shakespeare plucks more than a dainty doe to ground: Sir Thomas was too covetous, To covet so much deer, When horns enough upon his head Most plainly did appear. Had not his worship one deer left?
What then? He had a wife Took pains enough to find him horns Should last him during life. (Quoted in Schoenbaum, 1993: 69-70) Here, Shakespeare is not just a thief but also a lecher who seduces the wife of Sir Thomas. Complicating the transmission of the ballad, it is unclear whether Barnes wrote the poem down or committed it to memory; 40 years later, the ballad was included in a manuscript entitled "History of the Stage", penned by one William Rufus Chetwood, a bookseller and dramatist. Chetwood did publish a General History of the Stage in 1749 but did not include or refer to the ballad. However, circa. 1790, the archivalminded Malone uncovered Chetwood's draft (Halliwell-Phillipps, 1853, Vol. 1: 109;Schoenbaum, 1993: 69).
We pick up Shakespeare's trail in Rowe, where our loutish Robin Hood-more hood than hero-eludes criminal prosecution, turns up in London and finds work doing menial tasks. Proficient in fetching and carrying, the hardworking Shakespeare leads an anonymous life, until, Rowe tells us, his criminal urges resurface in the form of plagiarism: "His Tales were seldom invented …. And he commonly made use of 'em in that Order, with those Incidents, and that extent of Time in which he found 'em in the Authors from whence he borrow'd them" (Rowe, 1709, Vol. 1: XXVII). Rowe is here papering over Robert Greene's alleged remark that Shakespeare's early plays were "beautified with our feathers"-that is, that Shakespeare had taken credit for works that were not his own (cited in Schoenbaum, 1993: 24). I write "alleged remark" because Jowett (1993) raises the possibility that Henry Chettle, not Greene, wrote the famous passage; if so, Chettle is a forger.
Putting the Chettle/Greene issue to the side, these poaching tales are not without their problems. In 1782, Thomas Warton asked, "how could that idle and illiterate fellow Shakespeare, who was driven out of Warwickshire for deer-stealing, write the tragedy of OTHELLO?" (Warton, 1782: 103) It was not merely the seeming disconnect between theft and composition (a point to which we will return) that plagued Malone; it was the variance of the tales themselves. If the tales had evolved over time, then perhaps they evolved out of something or, equally possible, out of nothing. Only documents could be trusted. Trained in the law, he looked into the "facts" as then-definedthat is, information recorded on documents. Malone could not confirm that there were deer on Lucy's estate; therefore, he dismissed the story, along with the idea that crime had inspired Shakespeare's verse.
There are still other tall tales, both new and old, many of which we will briefly examine on the coming page, but the underlying point here is that Malone's Shakespeare was a prosperous landowner, a careful and meticulous businessman, a lawabiding and loving husband, a staid and even-tempered gentleman, not unlike the prudent and prurient Malone himself. Biographical impulse to the side, what is more importantly at play is the notion of history itself: there is, after all, a distinct difference COMMENT PALGRAVE COMMUNICATIONS | DOI: 10.1057DOI: 10. /palcomms.2016 between confirmable historical records and unverifiable and frankly unreliable oral traditions. That said, historical memory also has its value. After all, without a lively historical interest, there is no rational reason to look into the historical record.
This put (and continues to put) the Shakespeare biographer in a quandary. Without yarn, not many tales could be spun. What was needed was a way to relegitimate the debunked anecdotes. That's exactly what happened in December of 1794 when a teenager, William-Henry Ireland, "discovered" a trunk brimming with seemingly old documents. Among the items he "discovered" were legal deeds and promissory notes, a profession of religious faith, a love letter from Shakespeare to Anne Hathawaycomplete with a lock of the poet's hair-correspondences between Shakespeare and Leicester, Shakespeare and Southampton, Shakespeare and Queen Elizabeth, Shakespeare and his printer, signed and annotated books from Shakespeare's library, the original manuscript of King Lear and a fragment of Hamlet, both with significant variants. The greatest prize of all was an unpublished play in Shakespeare's hand, Vortigern.
Among Vortigern's "Believers", as they called themselves, were Shakespeare critics, biblical and Greek scholars, novelists, journalists, the Poet Laureate, the Prince of Wales, the future George IV and the Duke of Clarence, the future William IV. James Boswell, biographer to Samuel Johnson, and himself a champion of the anecdote, was so impressed with the pieces that he fell to his knees and kissed the "sacred relics". Among the doubters: Shakespeare scholars Edmund Malone, George Steevens, and John Phillip Kemble, who was contractually obligated to play the lead in Vortigern's debut on the floorboards of Theatre Royal Drury Lane on 2 April 1796. As audience members alternatively booed and jeered Kemble, who played the lead with purposeful incompetence, a riot broke out and further performances were cancelled. Soon after, Ireland stepped forward, admitting that he had authored the play and the accompanying Shakespearean documents. Rather than being hailed as a new Shakespeare, he was blacklisted from both Drury Lane and Covent Garden.
While we might here express some relief that the forgeries did not significantly damage the historical record, we might also read the "discovery" itself as a way to reintroduce those recentlydiscarded Shakespearean tales. We can see the process at work in the following, hitherto unpublished forged Jonsonian (composed 1795), which Ireland attached to a "lost" portrait of Shakespeare. The piece obviously echoes Jonson's First Folio poem, "To the Reader", which argues that the Droeshout engraving is a good likeness of Shakespeare: The main point of the poem is not merely to have Jonson identify a second Shakespeare likeness, but to undermine "pois'nous Slander's breath", expressed in Jonson's aforementioned barb: "I remember, the players have often mentioned it as an honour to Shakespeare, that in his writing (whatsoever he penned) he never blotted out a line. My answer hath been, Would he had blotted a thousand. Which they thought a malevolent speech". This slight of Shakespeare-as Jonson himself admitsreflected poorly upon him. In the same text, he amplifies his remarks: "I loved the man, and do honour his memory, on this side idolatry, as much as any. He was (indeed) honest, and of an open and free nature; had an excellent phantasie, brave notions, and gentle expressions; wherein he flowed with that facility" (Jonson, 1756, Vol. 7: 91).
Fortunately, there were a variety of accounts that allowed biographers to reframe their relationship along the lines of Jonson's clarification. In Peter Whalley's "The Life of Benjamin Jonson", for example, Jonson was an unknown and struggling playwright, until one day he worked up the nerve to approach the great Shakespeare with some verse that he had written. The giant "cast his eye upon it; and found something so well in it as to engage him to read it through, and afterwards to recommend the poet and his writings to the public" (Whalley, 1756, Vol. 1: XXXVII). In another story, recorded in 1655 by Nicolas L'Estrange in a manuscript collection entitled "Merry Passages and Jeasts", Shakespeare is godfather to one of Jonson's children (Schoenbaum, 1975: 206).
Even after Ireland admitted that he forged his "discoveries", interest in Jonson's friendly relationship with Shakespeare continued, so much so that other forgers contacted Ireland with "discoveries" of their own. In 1820, Edward Allen wrote to Ireland about a new Shakespeare portrait that he had found in France: "a miniature!-a Gem!" Attached was an inscription of "about fourteen lines of Poetry by Ben Johnson"-and signed by him "Thyne owne Ben Johnson!!!" (Allen, 1820). The transcription of the poem reads: Ah haplesse, happie youthe whose luckie faulte did baniyshe thee to fortune and to fame, Had those ne'er fled Grimme Law's assaulte, had the worlde echo'd with a Shakspear's name, Butte for thy tryck of youth so wylde, had we ne'er known thee fancy's chylde Butte for the Buck's delicious haunch, with which thou wont to glutt thy Paunch Had Tragyck Comicke or historicke muse e'er charm'd the Brytish Thronge We must not nay we cannot choose, butte saye to Naughtie Appetyte To thee we owe our soul's delyghte, to thee the prayre belonge Thyne Owne B. Jonson.
(I note that the spelling of "Johnson's" name, as cited in the first letter, as well and the number of lines, has changed. An alternative lineation is found in a printed version; see Wivell, 1827: 23.) Allen asked 100 francs for the items (Allen, 1820). There is no indication that Ireland bought the locket or poem. It is worth noting here that Ireland did have a habit of forging letters to himself (Kahan, 1998: 211). By creating this correspondence, Ireland might have been trying to pass himself off merely as a literary middleman or conveyancer, the same trick he pulled back in 1794. Whether this Jonsonian is by Ireland or not, the poem here hints at more than just Shakespeare's crimes and wild youth. It brings to bear the very issue Malone wanted to remain hidden: Shakespeare's so-called crimes of writing. By reasserting the validity of the deer-poaching story, this Jonsonian suggest that stealing was the essence of Shakespeare's muse and goes so far as to suggest that Shakespeare's early "tryck of youth so wylde" was the key to his later, successful career as playwright and poet. Indeed, to some, Jonson and Shakespeare were more alike than different: In 1774, Francis Gentleman noted that Jonson was being unfairly judged because he was the more learned writer: "Because Shakespeare did not borrow from the classics, he was deemed all originality; while poor Ben, from translating several passages … was pronounced a plagiarist throughout" (Gentleman, 1774, IX: 16). The implication is that Shakespeare is just as guilty of literary theft as Jonson. Comparatively, however, Shakespeare commits a weightier crime. Jonson stole from the dead; Shakespeare, by pilfering lines and plays from his contemporaries-for example, the aforementioned Robert Greene -built his literary reputation and early financial success on the unacknowledged and unrewarded labors of others.
We might here wax on concerning the implications of these remediations of oral tradition into "factual" history, or simply dismiss them as one elaborate act of self-justification-after all, if Shakespeare was a literary thief, then forgers like Ireland were not criminals but merely writers practicing their Shakespearean craft -but, at least for our own era, the more urgent lesson is that biographical "facts" are themselves subject to interrogation. Had not the printed word (and legal document) taken precedent over oral history, our notion of Shakespeare's creative process would look very different today, and may well have made attempts to re-legitimate these tales unnecessary. As De Grazia reminds us, Malone's definition of "facts" was aligned to the rise of documentation and verification; both processes were deemed necessary in a world increasingly comfortable with and dependent upon the manifestation and safekeeping of words on paper.
At the advent of a cyber age, in which digital images and sound files have eclipsed traditional print, biographers have embraced more creative approaches. Graham Holderness's much lauded Nine Lives of William Shakespeare (2011) regularly relies on "reconstructive fiction" (106). That's a curious phrase and begs the question, a reconstruction of what? If the reconstructed fiction is constructed out of earlier fictions, it can hardly serve as biographical fact. If, on the other hand, Holderness is suggesting that the histories that he presents are based on actual documents (that is, "facts") that have somehow been lost, then how were they lost, and how does he reconstruct what he has never seen? One more possible reading is that he simply invents details. If so, then what he writes is certainly a fiction, but it is hardly reconstructed.
This may all seem like a rhetorical shell game, but it is potentially serious business when Holderness states in version six of his Nine Lives that he's working from an "interleaved and annotated copy" (106) of Robert Wheler's Guide to Stratford-on-Avon (1814). Unfortunately, he doesn't alert us as to where the interleaf begins and ends but, comparing his passage to the printed text, we come across this curious and unpublished passage: It has pleased some biographers of Shakespeare to allege against our immortal poet the character of a licentious libertine, a philanderer who was forced to wed the lady he had ruined, a poacher prosecuted for robbing the local gentry of their game. … Had William Shakespeare been the reprobate some of his biographers would have us believe, he would scarcely have made the journey from Stratford-on-Avon to Worcester, to bind himself to a woman whom he had dishonoured. (Holderness, 2011: 108) Holderness provides no further information. As stated, it's not in Wheler's published version, nor does it appear in Schoenbaum's (1975Schoenbaum's ( , 1993 studies, widely praised for their exhaustiveness. When and where did Holderness come across this book; who did this annotation; was it Wheler or someone else; has the interleaf been verified by a paleographer? Or are we, to return to our chess metaphor, playing the wrong game entirely; is this interleaved passage part of Holderness's "reconstructive fiction"?
In addition to adding unique and unverified prose to historical documents, Holderness (2011) also incorporates passages from a variety of Shakespeare plays, and "some passages … from Germaine Greer's Shakespeare's Wife" (106). Never mind the validity of using lines from Shakespeare's characters to shape the life of their creator; by the standards of traditional biography, the appropriation of passages from Greer's Shakespeare's Wife (2007) raises a number of concerns. While Greer promises a "systematic review of the evidence against Ann Shakespeare" the finished product is, in the words of New York Times Book Reviewer Katie Roiphe, all-too-often "ingenious", "fiercely imagined" and "implausible"-in sum, a novelistic recasting largely unsupported by Malone-approved documentation (Greer, 2007: 7;Roiphe