Men and Matters 2007/10

Shakespeare’s biography unravels the myths surrounding his life Dominic Dromgoole Another week, another book about Shakespeare. This one will have sent shivers through the ranks of other authors preparing tomes on the same subject, since it is by the biggest beast in the nonfiction bestseller brotherhood, Bill Bryson. It is a tough task for Bryson, whose special talent (with the honourable exception of A Short History of Nearly Everything) is illuminating tiny corners of banality, looking hard at them from an askew comic angle, and thus gently revealing the madness in the everyday. His principal problem is that there is little that is banal in Shakespeare’s plays, his world or his story, crammed as they are with redblooded incident, cloudy intrigue and great sunbursts of life. Bryson’s tactic for dealing with this is largely to ignore his subject. He makes much of the essential mystery of the Shakespeare story: the discretion of the artist behind the work; the paucity of biographical information; the historical confusions that have obscured him even further. But there is a difference between observing the essential mystery of a biographical subject, and running away from him in terror. Bryson fails to deal with the plays at all, which seems peculiar when addressing the life of humanity’s greatest playwright. It’s rather like Napoleon without the battles or Muham-mad Ali minus the boxing. He occasionally gives the impression of not having read them, at one point saying “at that age Shakespeare was writing comparative trifles – Love’s Labour’s Lost, and The Comedy of Errors”. Well they may not stand comparison with the mightier tragedies, but as trifles go these two plays (the greatest celebration in English of the English language itself, and the most perfect farce ever written) are fairly de luxe. At another point, after listing the various perils of childbirth and the number of diseases that threatened children in infancy, he writes “in a sense Shakespeare’s greatest achievement in life wasn’t writing Hamlet or the sonnets but just surviving his first year”. It’s hard to read that sentence without coming to the conclusion that Bryson hasn’t fully understood quite what an event Hamlet is. He sideswipes casually at those who make too much of the bard’s philosophical insight, and his ability to conjure atmosphere and character out of nothing, thus invalidating 80% of the pleasure taken in the work over the past four centuries, and he pushes the argument that Shakespeare’s great achievement was as a celebrant of language: “What really characterises his work is a positive and palpable appreciation of the transfixing power of language.” Later, having made an enormous fuss about the diligence and industry involved in putting together the First Folio, thus rescuing for posterity many of the plays that would otherwise have vanished, he writes of its compilers, in a tellingly strange slip, “Heminges and Condell are unquestionably the greatest literary heroes of all time.” There’s nothing wrong with celebrating the backstage guys, but there are limits. Their achievement was incredible, but I think the man who wrote the plays may just have had the edge. What is left, in the absence of Shakespeare the author, is a brilliantly funny and gently insightful travel guide to 16th-cen-tury England. Bryson is great at picking out of the morass of Elizabethan fact the small details that illuminate and amuse. The Elizabethan world, and most especially its theatre, was astonishingly rock’n’roll, with enough wildness and freedom to make any health-and-safety inspector spontaneously combust. There was an extraordinary incident when the Admiral’s Men were playing, when one of the actors raised a musket to fire at another player, but missed. His bullet flew on and killed a child and a pregnant woman and stopped in the head of a third man. As Bryson wryly observes, “One wonders where they were hoping the musket ball would lodge.” He also uncovers from the world that surrounded the theatre some fascinating examples of Elizabethan eccentricity. There was a puritan called John Stubbs whose right hand was cut off for criticising the queen. Holding up his bloody stump and doffing his hat to the crowd, Stubbs shouted, “God Save the Queen”, fell over in a faint, and was carted off to prison for 18 months. During the tobacco craze that followed the first imports of the dark weed, everybody smoked it in the belief that it had a powerfully healthy effect. For a time, boys at Eton were beaten for neglecting to smoke their tobacco. Bryson is also good at making fun of some of the wilder corners of Shakespearian scholarship and biography. And he gives a fantastically light and sceptical survey of the whole history of the Shakespeareauthorship controversy. As an abbreviated tour around the world of Shakespeare, this could be hardly be bettered. It is a shame there is such a hole in the middle. Shakespeare: The World as a Stage by Bill Bryson Harper Press £14.99 pp208. Courtesy: The Sunday Times, September 2, 2007

Men and Matters 2007/10