WM. SHAKESPEARE, ESQ.

...For example, he appears to have been rather well-regarded by his contemporaries...

...In 1615 Hamnet Sadler, was one of the witnesses to Shakespeare's will, which left a small bequest to him, representing him as "Hamlett Sadler...

...The incontestable records of Shakespeare's life, documents dating from his own time, pose singly and occasionally in combination legitimate problems for any biographer to address himself to...

...those biographers determined to find him have invariably gone elsewhere, to the work itself, to the plays and poems where (they have said) the life is writ wholly if obscurely (thus demanding a biographer and justifying his labors...

...Schoenbaum, too, provides an ample historical and social context, considerably updated over nearly half a century...

...A Documentary Life along with Shakespeare's Lives will furnish the authoritative source for reference on biographical matters, and it does contain facsimiles of the documents, which will greatly speed and ease the scholar's task...

...Certain sorts of material abound: deeds to property, his will, references made during his lifetime to him and his Work, his name on the title pages of some of the quarto editions of his plays, family birth and burial records, evidence of frequent litigation, and so forth...

...But see what I give you in exchange!'" Too many books on the man Shakespeare (who can't approach Hamlet as a subject for biography) have left him out and given us something else in exchange, a phantom adrift from the facts, an entertainment, a fictional creation that will very rarely possess the candor of Anthony Burgess's novel Nothing like the Sun, "A Story of Shakespeare's Love-life," which happily owns up to its fictional identity...

...it was given to us in minute detail and comprehensive scope by Samuel Schoenbaum in 1970 in Shakespeare's Lives, an account of every substantive contribution to the subject whether or not influential and honest in purpose...

...The whole picture is present but in the sense that a whole picture is present in a photographic negative where lights and shades are reversed...

...It is almost inexplicable," A. L. Rowse once grumbled from his Olympian perch, "that his biographers should have written their biographies of Shakespeare without taking account of his autobiography"-i.e., the Sonnets-"except that they were men of little imagination and I suppose they found the full story too uncomfortable...

...Rowse, we can't-as we might if there were letters, journals, almost anything to show us the meager cloddy earth before it was turned to glittering gold -and so a reliable life will not draw biographical inferences from them...

...Not, of course, that everyone has turned to Hit Sonnets for help or realized the riches they contain...

...or that some acute personal crisis precipitated the great tragedies of the early 1600's...

...The records of his life are, of course, much fuller still than those for Shakespeare, and the more deeply one gets into them, the more likely one's own temperament is to collide at some point with his, the more likely the student is to perceive, or imagine himself perceiving, deep paradox where Milton himself saw complementary parts...

...A great deal is indeed known about Shakespeare the man...

...The desire to say fully and well all that can be said about Shakespeare is perfectly understandable, but it is not this desire that has actuated all his biographers...

...Hamnet and his twin sister Judith were apparently named for Shakespeare's Stratford friends and neighbors, Hamnet and his wife Judith Sadler...

...Elizabethan handwriting is so difficult to read that there perhaps cannot be the utterly authoritative transcription...

...but despite this difficulty, as Schoenbaum points out, the documents have been picked over so often by now that many are in a state of advanced decay and promise to be still further by time's fell hand defaced unless, as we may now hope, they can be left alone...

...Even the mighty Shakespeare, one supposes, noted stronger resemblances between himself and certain of his characters than others, though Kit-tredge warned wisely and long ago against our taking any of the work as autobiographical...

...There survive more than 200 documents germane to Shakespeare's life-directly so, as with his will, and more obliquely, as with the will of Anne Hathaway's father...

...Neither can it give us the inner man...

...it has been told also, perhaps as often, by a varied array of special pleaders, fanatics, zanies and cranks...

...or that, above all, there exists some demonstrable similarity between the facts of Shakespeare's life and the story in his Sonnets, that there was a real-life anticipation of the poet-young friend-rival poet-dark lady quadrilateral...

...Milton is exactly opposite Shakespeare in this regard...

...but the solutions offered by too many biographies have been at variance with these real problems or they have been given to pseudo-questions of the biographer's contriving...

...When one first learns that Shakespeare had a son named Hamnet, who died in 1596, it must be impossible not to wonder what was in Shakespeare's mind when, about four years later, he decided to tell the story of Hamlet...

...products of the particular sort of scrupulousness and rigor that Chambers brought to his task do not easily become- obsolete...

...And although, as the commonplace: has it, more is known about Shakespeare than any other playwright contemporary with him except Ben Jonson, he is not therefore the most splendid, or even the most obvious, of subjects for biographers, not, anyway, for many biographers...

...Much of Chambers is concerned with the canon of the plays-matters of text, date and so forth-but there are three separate parts that are essentially biographical: the first three chapters on Shakespeare's origin, stage and acting company...

...But there has not been, before this, one volume in which all the relevant documents have been reproduced...

...It contains little narrative as such...

...Here is one sentence on the Henry VI plays: "Strictly speaking, the documentary biographer should stand aloof from criticism, whether interpretive or judgmental, but it seems permissible to savour the fact that Shakespeare, while still in his twenties, had conceived and executed a sequence of historical dramas of a scale and complexity entirely hovel to the London stage...

...on the other hand, it is argued, that it is only the second best bed shows that Shakespeare was, at least by that very late moment in his life, cross, petty, even contemptuous...

...It was recently observed, and rightly, mat "the Great Divide between the old and the hew" in most areas of Shakespeare studies is Sir Edmund Cham-bers's two-volume William Shakespeare: A Study of Facts and Problems (1930...

...It is instructive, nevertheless, to compare even superficially the work of Chambers and Schoenbaum, and to do so will correct the impression I may have inadvertently created that A Documentary Life, with its original records, many in a bewildering secretary hand, is exclusively for the scholar...

...One source of nearly endless speculation has been another bequest in the will, the famous gift to his wife Anne of "my second best bed...

...That Schoenbaum has now provided such a volume is an incalculable contribution to scholarship, for it will always be necessary to refer controversy over the contents of a document to the document itself or to its exact likeness...

...On the one hand, some think, the best bed would have been saved for guests, and the second best would indeed have been the one of tender memories...

...A surpassingly masterful biography, like William Riley Parker's recent work, is possible, but it will always contain material-because Milton's life contained material-to excite further responsible interpretations...

...But the trap is that even if the Sonnets are in a way autobiographical, or if the plays are, we don't know what that way is, pace Dr...

...But we might say that the life of Shakespeare there is secondary to the lives and works of his biographers...

...In his 1961 biography, Shakespeare in Warwickshire, however, Mark Eccles described another will, written about forty years earlier, in which one William Palmer made a virtually identical bequest to his wife and in the same place made also, as Shakespeare did not, an unmistakably loving reference to her...

...All of this allows a reasonably detailed account of the man's life, albeit one with regrettable gaps, but it is the man seen almost wholly from the outside...

...Furthermore, the documents are widely dispersed, and many scholars cannot afford the travel essential to examine them all...

...There are, again, some overtly tantalizing matters...

...Several modern books contain full or partial transcriptions of some, or most, of these documents...

...The will is almost certainly not in Shakespeare's hand, but someone- Shakespeare himself?-had to represent Hamnet Sadler to the scribe as "Hamlett" unless the forms were interchangeable...

...all that is recorded about the life in contemporary documents...

...and the mythos of probable and improbable supposition and hearsay, carefully differentiated one from another, but he presents them simultaneously as part of a single unfolding narrative, which is immensely readable, not only because it is informed by "the entire tradition of Shakespearian biographical scholarship," but also because of the biographer's own majestic prose...

...When Bernard Shaw objected to John Barrymore's London production of Hamlet, he wrote the actor, "Instead of giving what is called a reading of Hamlet, you say, in effect, 'I am not going to read Hamlet at all: I am going to leave it out...

...In William Shakespeare: A Documentary Life Schoenbaum now gives' us in an exquisitely handsome print the positive of that picture...

...and another appendix on "The Shakespeare-Mythos," those legends of greatly varying authority and likelihood that have collected about the poet ever since his own lifetime...

...So, for example, we may learn that Shakespeare wrote himself into certain dramatic characters, like the infinitely complex Hamlet or the almost omnipotent Prospero...

...At the beginning of the book Schoenbaum stated explicitly, in fact, that such a life would emerge...

...The history of genuine and ersatz Shakespearean biography-with its triumphs and excesses, its devoted scholars and well-intentioned frauds, its acts of homage and impertinenceis a fascinating story in its own right (apart, that is, from its necessarily adding to our knowledge of Shakespeare...

...we need the original or its image...

...and a couple of the documents, the will, for instance, have been frequently photographed for supplementary inclusion in other biographies...

...Indeed, Chambers may continue to be the most easily accessible source of (often only partial) transcriptions of most of the Shakespearean documents-production costs and the size of an already large book prevented Schoenbaum from providing them-although there are others...

...Either circumstance stimulates one's interest, but neither allows us to penetrate the man Shakespeare...

...It may always be that the passions and circumstances of the Sonnets were Shakespeare's own, although so perfectly do his sonnets parody the other sonnet sequences of his day, so utterly do they invert standard conventions, so strenuously do they insist that life isn't art, that I myself usually doubt it...

...As the title implies, however, that is not all he gives us...

...Added up, the material tells us much that we want and need to know, and much that is of intrinsic interest, but it does not point toward a figure of tangible ambiguity, an enigmatic presence riven by unresolved contraries...

...But for anyone interested in Shakespeare the man, for the amateur, it is also a life story accurately and elegantly told.rately and elegantly told...

...With Matthew Arnold, we can only ask and ask...

...Chambers's sustained success in separating fact from legend is partly responsible for the lasting achievement of his work, but that he treated different materials in different places suggests correctly that his book is for reference to part, not consumption of whole...

...Shakespeare provides no subject for the analyst or psycho-historian, and yet how often he has done so...

...Although much estimable work has been done since then, it has all been in the nature of supplementing Chambers, as Schoenbaum remarked of the Eccles biography in Shakespeare's Lives, rather than superseding him...

...it is real but it exists in the interstices of another subject...

...There may well be some small Elizabethan custom that yet eludes us, but Eccles's discovery rather diminishes, though it cannot eradicate, the likelihood of Shakespeare's bitterness...

...MARK TAYLOR William Shmhespemre: A Doeumentary Life S. SCHOENBAUM The story of Shakespeare's life has been told by many of the greatest Elizabethan scholars, Malone, Halli-well-Phillipps, Sidney Lee, Chambers and G. E. Bentley among them...

...It is not, however, that the biographer never illumines some small part of what is dark in Shakespeare...

...an appendix of transcriptions of records...

...in an age characterized by extraordinarily rancorous attacks of writer against writer, that is, Shakespeare has the not negligible distinction of having been very little savaged and of having had paid to him a number of handsome tributes...

...In that volume, judiciously weighing the successes and failures of the biographers, Professor Schoenbaum implicitly offered us his own life of Shakespeare: if so much of the work of biographer X is correct, then so much is true about Shakespeare...

...The proven curiosities in Shakespeare's life are of different order...

...That is a fact about the man, and it may be, as things go, a bizarre fact, but it is not something that demands a solution or interpretation...

...Milton's poetry is far more attractive to most people today than his politics or his theology, and it is perhaps a natural tendency to probe for the human essence that can have produced impressions of such imbalance...

...But where he does, it is usually because new evidence has appeared, not because of shrewdly interpretive psychologizing...

...This oddity has been explained in essentially two ways as evidence of strong positive or negative feelings...