Shakespeare Read Free Page B

supposition—that Shakespeare was Catholic or happily married or fond of the countryside or kindly disposed toward animals—and convert it within a page or two to something like a certainty. The urge to switch from subjunctive to indicative is, to paraphrase Alastair Fowler, always a powerful one.
    Others have simply surrendered themselves to their imaginations. One respected and normally levelheaded academic of the 1930s, the University of London’s Caroline F. E. Spurgeon, became persuaded that it was possible to determine Shakespeare’s appearance from a careful reading of his text, and confidently announced (in Shakespeare’s Imagery and What It Tells Us ) that he was “a compactly well-built man, probably on the slight side, extraordinarily well-coordinated, lithe and nimble of body, quick and accurate of eye, delighting in swift muscular movement. I suggest that he was probably fair-skinned and of a fresh colour, which in youth came and went easily, revealing his feelings and emotions.”
    Ivor Brown, a popular historian, meanwhile concluded from mentions of abscesses and other eruptions in Shakespeare’s plays that Shakespeare sometime after 1600 had undergone “a severe attack of staphylococcic infection” and was thereafter “plagued with recurrent boils.”
    Other, literal-minded readers of Shakespeare’s sonnets have been struck by two references to lameness, specifically in Sonnet 37:
    As a decrepit father takes delight
    To see his active child do deeds of youth,
    So I, made lame by Fortune’s dearest spite,
    Take all my comfort of thy worth and truth.
    And again in Sonnet 89:
    Say that thou didst forsake me for some fault,
    And I will comment upon that offense.
    Speak of my lameness, and I straight will halt.
    and concluded that he was crippled.
    In fact it cannot be emphasized too strenuously that there is nothing—not a scrap, not a mote—that gives any certain insight into Shakespeare’s feelings or beliefs as a private person. We can know only what came out of his work, never what went into it.
    David Thomas is not in the least surprised that he is such a murky figure. “The documentation for William Shakespeare is exactly what you would expect of a person of his position from that time,” he says. “It seems like a dearth only because we are so intensely interested in him. In fact we know more about Shakespeare than about almost any other dramatist of his age.”
    Huge gaps exist for nearly all figures from the period. Thomas Dekker was one of the leading playwrights of the day, but we know little of his life other than that he was born in London, wrote prolifically, and was often in debt. Ben Jonson was more famous still, but many of the most salient details of his life—the year and place of his birth, the identities of his parents, the number of his children—remain unknown or uncertain. Of Inigo Jones, the great architect and theatrical designer, we have not one certain fact of any type for the first thirty years of his life other than that he most assuredly existed somewhere.
    Facts are surprisingly delible things, and in four hundred years a lot of them simply fade away. One of the most popular plays of the age was Arden of Faversham , but no one now knows who wrote it. When an author’s identity is known, that knowledge is often marvelously fortuitous. Thomas Kyd wrote the most successful play of its day, The Spanish Tragedy , but we know this only because of a passing reference to his authorship in a document written some twenty years after his death (and then lost for nearly two hundred years).
    What we do have for Shakespeare are his plays—all of them but one or two—thanks in very large part to the efforts of his colleagues Henry Condell and John Heminges, who put together a more or less complete volume of his work after his death—the justly revered First Folio. It cannot be overemphasized how