Every age, after his own, has gone in search of Shakespeare. The first biography was written in 1709 by Nicholas Rowe. Now it is a poor year for the Shakespeare business when two or three more do not show up on bookstore shelves. We want to know who he was, hoping that the narrative of his life will somehow explain the genius of his writing. But it never does. We find him, but who we find only adds to the mystery. How is it that a man without a university education, a glover’s son from a small Warwickshire market town, could have written the plays and poems that have spoken to generations of readers and theatergoers?
When the mystery does not lead us to put forth someone else -- the Earl of Oxford or Marlowe or Francis Bacon -- as the actual author of the plays, we answer the question by reference to the strenuous curriculum at Stratford’s King’s New School or to the vibrant cultural life of post-Armada London. But others were similarly educated and others also experienced the heady national confidence that followed the unexpected defeat of the Spanish, and none produced a body of work comparable to Shakespeare’s. The search for Shakespeare has taught us a lot about the world of his England, but very little about what actually made him into the closest thing we have to an “ever-living poet,” as the title page of the 1609 edition of the sonnets terms him.
That question will not be answered. We must content ourselves with the fact that something did make him that poet and that happily we have the results preserved in his writing. More searching of the archives will not help, though no doubt there are a few things about Shakespeare still to be discovered. It is not that the biography is irrelevant. Someone wrote the works, someone living and working in particular historical circumstances, and it can only add to our understanding and appreciation of his artistry if we know the specific conditions that stimulated and challenged Shakespeare’s imagination. But biographical information can only take us so far. It can show who Shakespeare was but not what made him Shakespeare.
Recent biographical scholarship,however, thinks it may have found the key. Suddenly the pressing question is: “Was Shakespeare a Catholic?” It has the virtue of being a new question, and for that it marks a welcome change from the reshuffling of familiar facts that more or less go back to Rowe. No more do we need to worry if Shakespeare really was arrested for poaching deer from Thomas Lucy or if his bequest of his “second best bed” to his wife was intended as a slight. Now the issue is the matter of Shakespeare’s faith. As Michael Wood sees it, Shakespeare’s art was forged in the fires of Reformation controversy.
Wood’s engaging four-part BBC miniseries, In Search of Shakespeare (PBS, beginning February 4), and his accompanying book, called simply Shakespeare (Basic Books, 2003), make much of Shakespeare’s allegiance to “the old faith.” Wood lovingly whispers the phrase throughout the series, as if to emphasize its vulnerability in an England that Wood sees as “a police state” determined to root it out. Wood finds links between the Shakespeare family and prominent Elizabethan Catholics. Although he admits that “so often in the search for Shakespeare we can only talk of maybes,” that does not stop him from stringing his “maybes” together into a fabric of assertion: “William grew up in a Catholic family.” “All his life he loved this old world.” If perhaps he no longer practiced his religion as an adult, “what he imbibed with his mother’s milk and his Warwickshire roots stayed with him in his heart.”
Well, perhaps. But John Shakespeare had his children baptized at the Stratford parish church in a Protestant rite, and he himself oversaw the defacement of the Catholic images in the Guild Chapel. He held public offices not available to Catholics, and in 1571 he was present at the council meeting that ordered all remaining Catholic vestments in the chapel to be sold off. (The Catholic testament that was discovered in 1759 in the rafters of the Henley Street house where Shakespeare was born has recently been identified as a forgery.) John Shakespeare was of course raised in a Catholic family, being born in 1530 before the English Reformation. But it is not so clear that William was, and, more to the point, it is even less clear that this putative Catholicism left any mark on his plays.
Still, as television, the argument works. Literary biographies do not usually fare so well. Too many talking heads. But Wood succeeds in making his search a “historical detective story.” He tracks Shakespeare down, from the parish register recording his birth to the will providing for his children, from the Lancashire great house where Shakespeare might have taught to London’s South Bank, where the Globe was built. The process is physical -- and that is the source of its appeal. We see Wood, with hair tousled, in his scarf and open leather jacket, a backpack jauntily draped over his left shoulder, walking the routes Shakespeare walked. His boots get muddy on country roads. His collar is turned up against the wind. “We can follow Shakespeare,” we are told, even if the city streets Shakespeare walked are now bounded by steel and glass high-rises. Wood arrives at a door, looks meaningfully at us, and throws it open. But of course Shakespeare never is behind it. We see a surviving Tudor hall or a modern library, in which Wood dons his white gloves and shows us the Shakespeare reference in a manuscript.
It’s good fun and often informative, if a bit too much like a Geraldo Rivera special (and with the same kind of middle-aged hipness in the presenter). Where Geraldo took us to Al Capone’s secret vault, Wood takes us into “the hidden landscapes of Elizabethan England.” Capone’s vault proved empty, but Wood’s landscapes are indeed rich in historical suggestiveness. We don’t find Shakespeare, but we do see his England. This is history as travelogue, and England can be wonderfully telegenic.
But the parallel with Geraldo is perhaps even clearer if we think of him in his last major television role as one of the reporters “embedded” with the troops invading Iraq. Like so many of those unaccustomed to the front lines, Geraldo confused reporter and doer. Wood does the same, and that is both why the series works and why it disquiets. He too is a reporter -- and a good one. He is an experienced telejournalist, a fine writer and filmmaker. Among his successes are In the Footsteps of Alexander the Great and Saddam’s Killing Fields. But, though he is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, in reality he is no more a scholar than Geraldo is a soldier. And the search for Shakespeare must inevitably be a scholarly search, a search among books and manuscripts for the traces of Shakespeare. In the bibliography to the book accompanying the series, Wood generously acknowledges the scholars he has learned from, in whose footsteps he has followed. But in the series, he is the detective searching out the clues that will lead him to Shakespeare.
Real scholarship does not make for good television. It is too slow and uncertain. It is, frankly, boring -- at least to watch. Probably 95 percent of research is negative, excluding possibilities. For Wood there are no dead ends, and it is all perfectly paced. Each book he opens immediately reveals the necessary clue. Each house he enters yields its secret. Each step he takes moves us forward on the trail that leads to Shakespeare.
Television demands it be thus, and the uninitiated viewer must wonder why scholars have been so dense not to see what Wood has seen. He does interview academics. Richard Wilson, of Lancaster University, is there, confidently making the case for William’s Catholicism (and along the way revealing that he has bought the house next to the site of the supposed Catholic safe house Shakespeare purchased in Blackfriars in 1613). Peter Blayney, of the University of Toronto, ushers Wood around St. Paul’s Cathedral, showing him where the Elizabethan bookshops were. Various curators open manuscripts, allowing Wood immediately to spy the relevant sentence. Wood greets those experts with respect, his obsessive, hearty laughter perhaps revealing his nervousness before them. But the story is always his. He is the detective stalking his prey, his academics just expert witnesses for the case he is making.
It doesn’t seem quite fair. “Michael Wood takes an entirely fresh approach to the Bard’s life,” the publicity for the book asserts. But many scholars have cleared the paths Wood walks. Indeed without them, he would have gotten lost. Little is new in Wood’s approach; nothing is original.
Nonetheless, Wood has indeed made a life of Shakespeare that is genuinely interesting, in large part because of the vivid sense of place that he evokes. Wood’s Shakespeare inhabits a living England, not a heritage diorama. In part that is achieved by finding continuities between Shakespeare’s world and our own, like the clothier that has been in business since the 17th century; in part by exposing the discontinuities, as when he talks about the timbers for the Globe being transported from Shoreditch while the camera lingers on modern transport, large trucks traveling down the motorway. But, mainly, Wood’s Shakespeare comes alive because his Bard is not some solitary genius writing in his garret but a man in and of the world, alert to the turbulent events happening around him, and determined to succeed, as Wood puts it, in the burgeoning “Elizabethan entertainment industry.” If the series ends with an almost obligatory gesture to a Shakespeare who is “of all time,” it has given us a Shakespeare very much “of an age,” even as its presenter is revealed as a bit too much of his own.
David Scott Kastan is a professor of English and comparative literature at Columbia University and a general editor of the Arden Shakespeare.
http://chronicle.com Section: The Chronicle Review Volume 50, Issue 22, Page B13
