In Love with Shakespeare

...Elizabethan audiences were good listeners...

...Or "There are modern attitudes to Shakespeare I particularly dislike: The worst of them maintains that the reputation of Shakespeare is fraudulent, the result of an 18th-century nationalist or imperialist plot...

...Shakespeare" on the title pages of his plays was really a pseudonym for someone more distinguished: Sir Francis Bacon, Sir Walter Raleigh, Christopher Marlowe (who, for this theory to be correct, would need to have faked his own death, then continued writing under another name), or even Queen Elizabeth...

...These speculations leave the reader with a conception not shared by the biographer, who is free to create another scenario...

...Shakespeare's "cackling" laughter continues to echo from the wings as he eludes us one more time...

...Or, like a method actor, perhaps he extrapolated deep feelings out of trivial ones...

...Maybe not, but Shakespeare's personality continues to tease the imagination...

...Indeed, Holden does offer theories to explain some of the things that shaped Shakespeare into the writer he became...

...He begins by challenging the often-made assertion that we have little knowledge of Shakespeare's life: "I maintain...

...From pictures, it is hard to discern a physical resemblance, but the reason for this may be that the younger man lost his nose to syphilis...

...Interestingly, he has dedicated his book to Holden, who in turn dedicates the biography to him...

...Catholicism was outlawed in England during that period...

...His elusiveness has, at various times, led some to speculate that the author called "Wm...

...There follows Ariel's eerie second song, in which the deep water transforms the supposedly dead king into coral and pearl...

...The son did not attend the universities, as Marlowe and Ben Jonson had done, yet Hamlet or The Winter's Tale displays as much erudition as Dr...

...In the latter half of the 17th century, when Elizabethan theater had fallen out of fashion, Davenant rewrote many of Shakespeare's works: an act that might justify Lear's famous line about "How sharper than a serpent's tooth it is/To have a thankless child...

...This is only one of many disappointments of Holden's study, which promises so much, then delivers considerably less...

...This music crept by me upon the waters, Allaying both their fury and my passion With its sweet air...

...He has done translations of Greek poetry and of Aeschylus, and a singing libretto of Mozart's Don Giovanni...

...Unfortunately, for someone of the 16th and 17th century who was not involved in affairs of state, much of the historical record boils down to this sort of thing...

...Kermode then illuminates that magical scene and what immediately ensues: "The beauty of this depends much on the unexpected verb 'crept'—it is as if the music came over the calmed water like a sea mist and had the same slow effect on the young man's grief...

...Where, in the handful of facts and stories about him that have come down to us, can we discover the source of Hamlet's indecisiveness, Othello's jealousy, the exaltation and misery of the Sonnets...

...He certainly understands the theatrical world, and his descriptions of the lives of actors are vivid...

...These theories were more popular in the days when class seemed the main shaper of destiny...

...Shakespeare's plays drew a varied audience, but it would be wrong to suppose that the folk who also came to the Globe when it featured bear-baiting disdained virtuoso speeches...

...It sounds no more...

...But chiefly it manages to accomplish what no biography of the Bard has done, or perhaps ever can do: It conveys a sense of the man who wrote these plays...

...The problem with what we "know" about Shakespeare is that most of it happens to be either uninteresting or dubious...

...A related theory of Holden's is that during the "lost years" of his youth, young William worked as a schoolmaster for several Catholic families, where, coincidentally, he may have had his initial experience with the stage in amateur theatricals...

...In his Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human (1998), Harold Bloom—a frequent Holden target—wrote, "What [he] was like, we evidently never will know...

...The most interesting one is that the playwright remained secretly loyal to the Roman Catholic faith after Queen Elizabeth suppressed it in favor of state-sponsored Protestantism...

...Holden's bluff refusal to engage with the ambiguities of his subject's sexuality—not unrelated to his plays and poems—gives this book a peculiarly old-fashioned air and seems unnecessarily defensive in an era when such matters are openly considered...

...The premise was that no one with the limited education normally available to the middle class could have read so widely or written so well...

...Discussing The Tempest, Kermode quotes one of the shipwrecked Ferdinand's speeches: Where should this music be...

...Holden understands the problem he is up against, but boldly claims to have solved it where others failed: "Shakespeare biography has recently got so bogged down in disputes about the digging of ditches and mending of hedges, payment (or nonpayment) of fines and tithes, the design and logistics of Elizabethan theaters, how his contemporaries brushed their teeth, whether they had bad breath, right down to the décor of the guest bedroom of an Oxford tavern where he may or may not have bedded the landlord's wife—not to mention the perennial Fair Youths and Dark Ladies—that the man himself is too often allowed to slip away and watch from the wings, no doubt with a smirk, for whole chapters at a time...

...It is fatal, I have found, to look away even for a moment...

...Sitting on a bank, Weeping again the King my father's wrack...

...But if we immerse ourselves in his verse, we can glimpse the marvelous play of his mind...

...Lest we remain in doubt about Kermode's own attitudes, he avers that "you can't get rid of Shakespeare without abolishing the very notion of literature...

...After all, Shakespeare is as much a "national treasure" as the House of Windsor or Princess Di...

...Kermode has captured the workings of a ceaselessly fertile imagination constantly searching for new ways to express the range of human emotion and experience...

...In showing how Iago swears constantly, he observes that this language evokes "that almost invariant type, the foul-mouthed NCO," adding, "I myself have memories, happily remote, of Iago-like warrant officers, sycophantic selfseekers, the main difference being that Iago has a surprisingly educated vocabulary...

...we must assume...

...That quality is absent in Romance languages...

...The conversion of eyes into pearls has just that touch of inhuman perception one associates [with a spirit of the air...

...Does it matter...

...Moreover, Holden has scholarly credentials...

...In writers like Shakespeare and the authors of the King James translation of the Bible, though, the ability to convey or suggest many ideas in a single sentence or image created a dense subtlety of thought which has continued to be a vital aspect of our literature...

...Nonetheless, the portrait is still blurred...

...Kermode illustrates the playful range of the use of "will" in Love's Labor s Lost, where "its colors vary from the sense given it by the Articles of Religion in the Church of England's 1549 Book of Common Prayer ('We have no power to do good works pleasant and acceptable to God, without the grace of God by Christ preventing us, that we may have good will,' runs Article X) to the frankly sexual senses, for "will' by association can include not only sexual desire but the genital organs themselves, identified, in some of the Sonnets, with those of the author, Will...

...In the former category lie all the court documents concerning land sales, property disputes and the like...

...They are based on a series of bold suppositions...

...This was largely facilitated by Shakespeare's genius for language more expressive than that of any English writer before or since...

...and sure it waits upon Some God ? th' island...

...At its core, however, is filth...

...Although there are a few accounts of the man from colleagues like Ben Jonson, they are sparse and leave no vivid impressions...

...This notion explains not only many of the playwright's later patrons and associates among "recusant" noble families, but also Will's own tendency toward secrecy and concealment...

...On a single page, Holden qualifies: "the received wisdom is...

...Sermons were considered entertainment, rhetorical tropes were enjoyed for the way they could put images through their paces...

...The meaningless refrain of landward, farmyard noises give way to the fainter ding-dong of the sea nymphs' knell, like the distant clang of a buoy...

...In London, the Globe Theater has been reconstructed on the South Bank of the Thames where it once stood...

...Shakespeare's genius remains confined to his plays and poems...

...Such readings radiate a kind of love that makes for perfect understanding, whether of a beloved person or text...

...In fact, it was the Royal Court that first tired of his kind of theater...

...Holden keeps telling us what an innovator Shakespeare was, yet this is obscured by wheezy ancient gossip, court records, or the minutiae of folios and quartos...

...I have attempted to keep him squarely in sight, pin him firmly to the page, no matter how hard he has struggled to escape...

...Both conjectures are consistent with some of the evidence, yet we do not possess enough data to be certain of either...

...We know a fair amount about Shakespeare's professional career, but the private life remains shadowy...

...He is gone again, vanished to one of his imaginary horizons...

...Holden is particularly scornful of those who interpret the Bard's relationship with the Fair Youth of the Sonnets as homosexual...

...Faustus or Volpone...

...Even in the early plays, Shakespeare's command of words exceeded that of his fellow playwrights...

...we know more about the life of Shakespeare than that of any of his literary contemporaries bar Ben Jonson...

...Taking us through the plays in order, Kermode demonstrates how Elizabethan theater developed from rather artificial oratory to an exalted emotional realism...

...Critics, theater directors, actors, historians, and readers have been trying to find the answer to that question ever since his contemporaries died...

...The second category includes such stories as the one about the young man being forced to run away from Stratford to London because of a conviction for deer poaching—a popular anecdote over the centuries that is impossible to verify...

...Notonly does the biographer give a rather belligerent reading of the much disputed Sonnet #20, but as if to prove Shakespeare's rampant heterosexuality, he drags out all the old stories about putative affairs with landladies, and the claim of Restoration dramatist William Davenant that he was the playwright's illegitimate child...

...We will never know whether he suffered Othello's jealousy or Hamlet's ambivalence, nor even whether the Sonnets are autobiographical or one more experiment in creating a dramatic situation...

...Not surprisingly, Kermode often invokes William Empson whose passionate study, Seven Types of Ambiguity, demonstrated the power of English to pack multiple meanings into a phrase or word...

...As for attempts to deduce the Bard's feelings from evidence in the plays, one could find passages to support almost any conjecture, depending on whether you assume Shakespeare identified most with Hamlet or Macbeth, Falstaff or Lear or Iago...

...Kermode and Holden both point out that by the time of the Bard's retirement back to Stratford around 1610, the Masque—a sort of dramatic spectacle, half revue and half opera—was replacing his kind of play, and Jonson had already embraced the new form...

...Holden intends this work to be "a popular, accessible, yet academically sound biography...

...The analysis of how horror is piled on horror in King Lear is equally insightful...

...They might create interesting readings of the early plays, but Holden does not make as much of the opportunity as one might wish...

...Movie stars "do" his plays—often transposing settings, so that Romeo and Juliet's Verona becomes Miami, Richard IIIIs contemporaneous with World War I, and, most recently, Hamlet's Denmark has transmogrified into the multinational Denmark Corporation based in contemporary Manhattan...

...For in the minds of many he is the supreme writer, able to fathom human character and evoke emotions with a skill unsurpassed by anyone except, perhaps, the ancient Greek tragedians...

...His love for the man is evident from the passion of his prose...

...There, modern English audiences and tourists may make like Elizabethans, and the Bard is once again filling the pit as well as the higher priced seats in the house, so possibly a biographer like Holden—best known for his treatments of Britain's Royals—sets the proper tone for our day...

...Shakespeare is elusive...

...There follows the distant sound of cackling...

...In doing so, he makes us fall in love with Shakespeare all over again...

...Kermode quotes a remark by Charles Lamb, who felt that by the end of Shakespeare's career his thoughts seemed to tug and twist at his lines as if impatient to free themselves from a leash: "Before one idea has burst its shell, another is hatched out and clamorous for discourse.' By concentrating on language, Kermode is able to make wonderfully illuminating observations about many different aspects of the plays...

...Frank Kermode's Shakespeare's Language (Farrar Straus Giroux, 324 pp., $30.00) opens with a series of curmudgeonly assertions, such as: "Every other aspect of Shakespeare is studied almost to death, but the fact that he was a poet has somehow dropped out of consideration...

...would surely have wanted to...

...These bits and pieces can be important in certain contexts, but the creative personality never comes through them...

...How could Shakespeare know so much about human nature, or have such mastery of language, and still reveal nothing about himself...

...Yet most authors who dominate their culture—Cervantes, Goethe, Dante, Pushkin—seem comprehensible to us as individuals...

...When the critic gets down to talking about the poetic and dramatic speeches, however, his grumpy tone gives way to an infectious enthusiasm...

...Shakespeare's Language contains too many riches to discuss in one review...

...Others, however, took comfort in the idea that a nobody could succeed...

...I'th' air, or th' earth...

...It galled some British critics, as well as a few Americans, to think that a player who, according to legend, got his start in theater as a groom holding patrons' horses (the Elizabethan equivalent of valet parking) could have become the greatest writer in the English language...

...It could be, and often was, punishable by death...

...We may be incorrect in believing we know what Ben Jonson and Christopher Marlowe were like, and yet we seem to have a clear sense of their personalities...

...Anthony Holden's William Shakespeare: The Man Behind the Genius (Little Brown, 367 pp., $29.95) is the latest in a long tradition of attempts to make this enigmatic figure come alive...

...A related notion, almost equally presumptuous, is that to make sense of Shakespeare we need first to see the plays as involved in the political discourse of his day to a degree that has only now become intelligible...

...With Shakespeare, we know a fair number of externals, but essentially we know absolutely nothing...

...Iago's interior rottenness has seldom been more clearly defined...

...He may well have been one of those people whose awareness was based largely on vicarious observations of others...

...The historical Shakespeare's parents apparently did not know how to write, because they made their "mark" on documents rather than signing their names...

...This is a bit ingenuous, since the lack critics have complained about has less to do with a paucity of facts or anecdotes than with a feeling that the personality eludes us...

...The book appears at a time when Shakespeare is in vogue...