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The impossibility of writing Shakespeare’s biography has not prevented a great many people (including yours truly) from trying.

(Richard Dutton 2010, p. 122)

Before conjuring up an April 1564 christening in Holy Trinity Parish Church, Stratford-upon-Avon, the traditional starting point for a biography, a few words about my own ambivalence about writing Shakespeare’s life. By all means, move straight to the baptismal register in Chapter One, or if it is the plays, and only the plays, that interest you, then head to Chapter Two when William Shakespeare begins his career as a dramatist.¹ But, if the biographical project itself interests you – and it fascinates me almost but not quite as much as the plays themselves – then stay with this Prologue in which, inspired and provoked by Dutton’s wry comment, I explore what happens when we, when I, attempt the impossible.

Putting aside for a moment the validity of any biographical project, why might it be specifically impossible to write a biography of Shakespeare? One common answer is the perceived paucity of the kinds of archival documents that are the traditional raw materials for the writing of a literary life. Not a single letter written by Shakespeare or written to him survives, except one which was not sent. We have no information, beyond their names, about his relationship with his parents, wife, children, or grandchildren. Shakespeare almost never writes about his creations as a playwright and poet, and only a handful of people in his own time bothered to comment on his work.

Therefore, although there are plenty of things we want to know about Shakespeare (his political views, his religious beliefs, whom he loved, what he did with his time when he wasn’t writing or acting, and so on) these things cannot be known. This list is based on that of James Shapiro (2015, p. 12) who argues that, once the people who knew Shakespeare died, it became impossible to write “that sort of biography.”

I will return to a couple of assumptions made here (about “that sort of biography” and concerning the need for evidence from people who “knew” Shakespeare), but first I need to pick up the gauntlet thrown down by Shapiro’s next sentence: “Modern biographers who nonetheless speculate on such matters, or in the absence of archival evidence read the plays and poems as transparently autobiographical, inevitably end up revealing more about themselves than they do about Shakespeare.” This is harsh and not very fair, the more so since it comes in the Prologue to his own literary biographical account of 1606: William Shakespeare and the Year of Lear. Most literary biographers shy away from reading the plays and poems as “transparently autobiographical.” All those who engage with Shakespeare’s life and works are, on one level, speculating. It is just that some do it more openly than others. There are plenty of critics who make their assumptions discreetly, hiding behind the screen of, say, a discussion of Shakespeare’s literary influences. Did Shakespeare know the work of his fellow writer, Thomas Nashe? Shakespeare would “probably have read” Nashe’s Unfortunate Traveller; “some believe” that Moth, a character in Love’s Labour’s Lost written “around” 1594, is based on Nashe; Nashe might even have been involved with Tamburlaine in 1587 (Hadfield 2004, p. 2). Or, what prompted Shakespeare to write the moment in A Midsummer Night’s Dream when Oberon asks Puck if he remembers when he, Oberon, sat “upon a promontory / And heard a mermaid on a dolphin’s back”? Could this be an echo of a production at Kenilworth in 1575? Kenilworth is in Warwickshire: we are in the right county, and William is 11 years old, so he could have been there. The evidence is unstable (one eyewitness noted the dolphin, another remembers a mermaid, but neither record seeing a mermaid on a dolphin’s back), but is nevertheless used to imagine scenarios rooted in Shakespeare’s lived experience. “Did Shakespeare’s memory play tricks on him over the years, or did he embroider the event for his own artistic purposes? Or, more prosaically, did Shakespeare simply read about these famous events in one or both printed accounts, and adapt them to his needs?” (Dutton 2018, pp. 25–27).

This kind of thing is not a million miles away from the assumptions made by previous generations that the playwright could not have created characters of such depth unless he had experienced at least something similar to those characters. Thomas Carlyle, for one, saw a bit of Macbeth, Hamlet, and Coriolanus in William Shakespeare, the man. This might be too simplistic for us now, but we still perceive that Shakespeare is concerned with, or preoccupied by, some aspect of life, and slide into the assumption that the concern is rooted in lived experience. His “particular sensitivity to ravaged landscapes of continental battlefields” for example, leads a critic to wonder whether Shakespeare went to be a soldier in France (Brennan 2004, p. 58).

Others, including the hugely popular Stephen Greenblatt (2004, p. 151), openly ask us to use our imaginations because what matters is “not the degree of evidence but rather the imaginative life that the incident has.” This comes very close to saying what matters is not the true story, but a good story, a stance complicated by the moments when Greenblatt does assert (his own) truths about Shakespeare. But it is at least honest, recognizing that each of our Shakespeares will be different, dependent on our imaginations.

The challenge remains, to read a consistent “Shakespeare” from his deeply inconsistent drama. Reading from the plays to the life, some argue that Shakespeare was aware of his own aging from, say, 1599, and is exploring this new awareness in As You Like It. But which experience of aging is William’s? Consider Jaques and Touchstone, both additions to Shakespeare’s source material. Jaques “constructs an existential stage-play world in which ‘All the world’s a stage, / And all the men and women merely players’” with life viewed as “a series of declining stages to an old age ‘sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything’” (2.7.139–166) (Smith 2012, p. 17). But “Touchstone has a parallel speech on the seven degrees of quarrelling: more expansive, more verbally witty, and ultimately more optimistic” (ibid.). Is Shakespeare Jaques or Touchstone, both or neither?

These kinds of micro-biographical turns abound, but often remain unexplored asides to more conventional literary critical analyses. The enduring consensus in the academy, to return to Shapiro’s words, is that a particular “sort of biography” should be avoided, not least because it is “impossible” to write. And perhaps unnecessary to write. The editor of one edition of Hamlet (Edwards 2003) refuses to engage with any discussion of Shakespeare the human being. The man who wrote the play is irrelevant. Instead, the focus is on deciphering the genealogy of the surviving texts and deciding which is “best” for performance.

In the face of this kind of thing, cautious biographers turn – tentatively – to the plays and – much less tentatively – to what we do know (or think we know) about the world around Shakespeare. James Shapiro has demonstrated, triumphantly, the powerful results of this approach in his two best-selling studies of the years 1599 and 1606. He argues that Shakespeare’s age, friendships, family relationships, location, and finances at any one time must have impacted in some way upon his writing: a new patron, a new king, a new playhouse, a new rival could – and did – change his drama and poetry. By focusing on both Shakespeare’s times in a general sense, and on a specific time in his life, we can get “a slice of a writer’s life.” Shakespeare’s emotional life in 1606, the “year of Lear,” may be lost to us but “by looking at what he wrote in dialogue with these times we can begin to recover what he was thinking about and wrestling with” (2015, pp. 15–16).

Shapiro clusters plays together, challenging simple generic clusterings, teases out their themes and preoccupations, and then maps those onto (the little we know about) Shakespeare’s lived experience or (the considerable amount we know about) the world in which he worked. Grouping plays chronologically rather than generically allows us to see the connections between Henry V and

plays like Julius Caesar or As You Like It, written at much the same time, and with which it shares a different set of preoccupations. Shakespeare himself seems to have taken for granted that ‘the purpose of playing’ was to show, as Hamlet put it, “the very age and body of the time his form and pressure” (3.2.20–24). To see how Shakespeare’s plays managed to do so depends upon knowing when each one was written.

(Shapiro 2005b, p. 10)

And that’s both the virtue of and the faultline in Shapiro’s approach. We simply do not know “when each one was written.” Was 1606 even “the year of Lear”? In the vast majority of cases, it remains unclear when, precisely, Shakespeare wrote individual plays or when a play was first performed. And the challenges don’t end there. It may be hard to date the plays with any precision, but what precisely are we dating? What do we mean by, say, Hamlet?² Some editors will prioritize the date of a first performance of a play. Others will seek to work out when Shakespeare actually put pen to paper. In fact, there are at least three separate significant dates for any Shakespeare play. The moment when he completed the manuscript (although the idea of completion is misleading, since playbooks were constantly adapted); the play’s first performance (again, performance can and did take many forms); and the first printing. With Hamlet, as Thompson and Taylor (2006, p. 44) point out, we are dealing with not one printed text but three, each of which might have had different performance histories then, and certainly have different performance histories now. There’s more: “behind the printed text there may be more than one ‘completed’ manuscript.” And still more: “it is generally held that there was an earlier Hamlet play, the so-called Ur-Hamlet, either by Shakespeare or by someone else, with its own necessarily different set of dates, and this hypothetical lost play continues to complicate the issue of the date of Shakespeare’s play and indeed the issue of its sources.” And that’s all before we even start factoring in collaboration with other playwrights.

One way out of the textual dating mire is to ask more general questions. Why did this particular moment in our history produce a Shakespeare? How did the commercial theater produce plays of such extraordinary linguistic and emotional complexity? These are the questions asked, and answered brilliantly, by Bart van Es (2013). Shakespeare is special, in part, because of the unparalleled working conditions that he enjoyed, because he worked so well “in company,” and because that “company” was exceptional. Shakespeare is born into the right time, and the right place, for his particular talents to flourish. Other answers to similar questions appeal to the “richness of contemporary language” in Shakespeare’s time, or “the rhetorical treatises of the grammar school curriculum,” both of which both contributed to Shakespeare’s ability to capture “spoken cadences,” his “semantic attentiveness” (Smith 2012, p. 239).

Right time, right place takes us, however, only so far. Why did this moment produce only one William Shakespeare? Maybe we just need to go straight for the notion of “genius.” Jonathan Bate thinks so, thus his The Genius of Shakespeare (1997). For Stephen Greenblatt (writing in the same period) it is Shakespeare’s genius itself that has created a problem for biographers: “[S]o absolute is Shakespeare’s achievement that he has himself come to seem like great creating nature: the common bond of humankind, the principle of hope, the symbol of the imagination’s power to transcend time-bound beliefs and assumptions, peculiar historical circumstances, and specific artistic conventions” (Greenblatt 2000, p. 1). His very ability means that he floats somewhere above material history, somehow ineffable. A less direct route to the same destination is taken by Dutton. “There is, moreover, nothing that we know, suspect or have made up about Shakespeare’s early years that really helps us to explain the achievement of the plays and the poems” (Dutton 2016, p. 5). Once again, the biographical turn fails. It will not – perhaps cannot – explain “genius” and, more specifically, it cannot explain this genius: The Bard.

For some, this failure is a blessing in disguise. As Charles Dickens put it, the “life of Shakespeare is a fine mystery and I tremble every day lest something should turn up” (quoted in Garber 2004, p. 21). What if something turned up and compromised our idea of genius, made the man ordinary, of his time, and not an empty vessel into which we can pour our own vision of the great artist?

There are other reasons not to delve too deeply. What happens if the man we find is not merely ordinary, but unpleasant, even hateful? For many years, a convenient biographical syllogism (here unpacked by Emma Smith with exemplary brevity) kept this kind of thing at bay. “1. Prospero is a good guy. 2. Shakespeare is a good guy. 3. Therefore Prospero is Shakespeare.” But the same syllogism is far more problematic if Prospero is viewed as “irascible, tyrannical, subjecting Caliban to slavery,” or “a distinctly unlikeable, manipulative control freak.” As Smith puts it: “if this Prospero is Shakespeare, we wouldn’t much like Shakespeare” (2019, pp. 312–317). When it comes to his portrayal of women, the novelist Gayl Jones (2000, p. 103) has her character Joan say what a lot of us are thinking: Shakespeare “knows what a man wants, and what a man thinks a woman wants, even the best of women. He’s good at portraying bitches, but even they’re a man’s idea of a bitch. You know, even Shakespeare’s sweet bitches are still a man’s idea of a sweet bitch.”

The reluctance, even now, to countenance an unlikeable Shakespeare informs or suppresses the debate over (Christian, white, male) Shakespeare’s representation of Jewish people, of people of color, of women. Far better to duck a discussion of the writer’s opinions entirely rather than to consider his potential anti-Semitism, racism, or misogyny. Even the superbly clear-sighted Marjorie Garber squirms away. Acknowledging that Shylock would have been portrayed as a “comic butt” (2004, p. 4), that the actors would use the “standard signs of Jewishness on the Elizabethan stage” for laughs, she insists this tells us nothing about the man who created Shylock. For Garber, Shakespeare as a writer (and as a man?) is committed to balance and dialogue. Othello may have a “particularity as a black man and a Moor,” but this is balanced against “a certain desire to see him as a figure of universal humanity” (Garber 2004, p. 6). That “certain desire” is presumably that of the playwright, a man who believes in balance, in a universal humanity – even for a black man and a Moor.

Garber (2004, p. 7) insists that because the plays work “contrapuntally” it is impossible to say “Shakespeare said …” or “Shakespeare believed …” These are, however, two different impossibilities. Yes, we cannot say “Shakespeare said” because we have no documents, no utterances from the man, other than his literary texts. What of “Shakespeare believed”? Surely Garber’s Shakespeare, so wedded to “contrapuntal” drama, so careful to embed dialogue and balance into his plays, might just have believed in these qualities or virtues. Many of those who admire his work seem to accept this almost as a foundational fact. For many – not Garber – it is a short step to arguing that because William Shakespeare gave interiority to characters who were not fully human according to the mores of his own time – people of color; the Jew; servants; almost, but not quite, women – he must have understood and recognized those who were different to himself. It is a short step – and this time Garber makes it (2004, p. 6) – to seeing Shakespeare as every man, and every woman in his plays. “Shakespeare is Prospero, Caliban, Ariel and the wondering Miranda. He is Othello, Desdemona and Iago. Shylock, Portia and Antonio.” No one voice is “definitively right,” all are in dialogue with each other. All are Shakespeare.

This opens the door to more radical understandings of the plays. “Generations of readers and playgoers, many of them ‘cultural others,’ have experienced the powerful and pleasurable perception that in Shakespeare they are indeed represented. Witness Maya Angelou’s famous declaration: ‘I know that William Shakespeare was a black woman’” (Callaghan 2000, p. 6 drawing on Erickson 1992). It’s a powerful, and liberating, way of sidestepping conventional biographical understandings of authorship.

But it also sidesteps the tough questions. Was Shakespeare racist? Is Othello the play racist? Are those two questions related? Or in the words of Marjorie Garber, again: “What is Shakespeare’s own view of such political questions? The answer – which is not an answer – lies in his plays,” in all their “brilliance and capaciousness” (Garber 2004, pp. 6–7). If you read to the end of this book, you will find that I too come back to the plays and poems. They are what we have, and I believe they do offer us answers (although not necessarily to traditional biographical questions). Even more importantly, they offer questions – which is one of the reasons they are so powerful.

What Garber cannot or will not say is whether the “brilliance” (another word for genius, perhaps?) of the plays, is also that of William Shakespeare, the human being. Nor can she or will she suggest where this “capaciousness” came from or how it found its way into his drama. Better to avoid the biographical turn entirely than end up with answers we do not want.

There are other, very good reasons, to be wary of reading the man from the plays. One is the literary practices of Shakespeare’s own era. During his lifetime, writers were very unlikely to be driven by a desire for the confessional disclosure of the self, since the “primary impulse behind early modern dramaturgy – indeed, behind early modern writing more generally – is rhetorical rather than autobiographical” (Smith 2019, p. 312). This is absolutely true, but still leaves space for an author like Ben Jonson to write numerous prologues, epilogues, and essays about his own writing, and put his family and feelings into his poetry. It’s possible to pick apart the rhetorical gestures at work in Jonson’s sonnet on the death of his young son (even easier when considering his sonnet on the death of his daughter), but in the case of the former, the father’s grief is palpable and intensely moving.

Then again, Ben grieves for his son in poetry, and therefore the absence of any direct reference to the death of William’s son, Hamnet, in his plays may only be a reflection of a world in which “no playwright, including Shakespeare could make his own personal grief the centre of a play” (Potter 2012, p. 288). More generally, “no literature of this period has the elevation of the artist’s own inner feelings as its legible core, and drama even less so, where the animation of different voices and different people is more important than the single narrative consciousness of, say, the traditional novel or lyric poem” (Smith 2019, p. 313). Lyric poetry might, just, be starting to blur the boundaries, and Shakespeare’s sonnets certainly play with those boundaries, but the playwright keeps well away.

It might be alien to the culture for an individual’s personal grief to be expressed, but drama in Elizabethan and Jacobean England could be, and was, polemical. Not Shakespeare though, according to Potter (2019, p. 402), who, reflecting on her own biographical practice, sees a writer who likes “to work within parameters.” Shakespeare “throughout his career, like me in my biography, was trying to fill specific requirements, as opposed to conveying a secret message about his views on sex, politics, or religion.” This view is, to a degree, questioned by the work of Van Es (2013, p. 197) who argues that “to echo a theatrical fashion is not necessarily to endorse it: there is room for resistance alongside pragmatic imitation when Shakespeare responds to commercial trends.” Simply because Shakespeare was writing to order does not mean that he did not, at times, question the order of things.

Of course, a strongly anti-Catholic play might not reflect the strongly anti-Catholic views of its creator, merely a writer keen to pander to his audience’s prejudice, but Shakespeare – according to many – never writes a drama from which the audience can take a single, straightforward political message. Instead, not only does he refuse to be overtly autobiographical (standard practice for his time), but he pursues a “model of authorial near-anonymity,” a model that was evidently “congenial to his purposes” (Bevington 2010, p. 4). Those purposes may have included survival in an era when a political or religious word out of place could have the most drastic consequences.

Bearing this in mind, the strangely lacking archive deserves another look. Could the lack of documentation be strategic – a sign of Shakespeare’s caution in a dangerous era? Or is it precisely what we might expect from an individual of his class and profession? Either way, the archive only appears to be thin because we are so interested in Shakespeare: “what we know falls a long way short of what we would like to know” (Dutton 1989, p. 1).

Yet the problem with the archival evidence may not be its scarcity. Indeed, some would argue there is no dearth in the first place. It is simply that biographers have given “a special weight to what we might call documented fact: those details of Shakespeare’s life that can be supported by footnoted reference to archival materials” (Stewart 2016, p. 57). Schoenbaum’s William Shakespeare: A Documentary Life from 1975 is the perfect example, keeping strictly to the “facts.” But this “documentary life” “obscures an earlier biographical tradition, which fails to meet Schoenbaum’s insistence on documentation – one that may be exploited by biographers for anecdotal colour, but which is routinely dismissed as apocryphal.” This earlier tradition, stretching through the seventeenth century and beyond, is in fact “remarkably coherent, and serves to conjure a notably different Shakespeare from the one attested to by ‘documents’” (Stewart 2016, pp. 57–58).

This notably different Shakespeare is conjured from a tradition of life-writing rooted in homosocial cultures of the seventeenth century. That tradition excludes the domestic. It should be no surprise therefore that early modern sources for Shakespearean biography ignore the presence of his wife and children. Stratford appears, but “until Rowe cites the still unnamed daughter of Hathaway, this is Shakespeare without a wife: a woman who is mentioned only once in the seventeenth century, and then only to be banned from the posterity of his grave.” Hamnet is not mentioned. Instead, there are hints of an illegitimate son, Davenant, “a poet-playwright son conceived adulterously in a tavern on the road from London to Stratford” (Stewart 2016, pp. 72–73).

Stewart offers a powerful corrective to our placing of familial relationships at the heart of biography and, even more importantly, reveals the mechanics of this particular biographical turn. The recorded events in early lives “routinely take place at various ‘merry’ meetings of men – in chambers at Eton, at a baptism, at a tavern.” But there is a twist. These venues would, in real life, be open to women but when turned into biographical anecdote, almost all female presence is written out of the story. More than that, Shakespeare’s network, his dynasty even, is not his family, but the theater.

He is consistently presented in rivalries with fellow players (Burbage) and playwrights (Jonson); anecdotes attesting to his worth come down through theatre luminaries (Jonson, Davenant, Shadwell); in the first full life, even the archival research is carried out by a Hamlet, Thomas Betterton, and written up by another playwright, Nicholas Rowe. The seventeenth-century Shakespeare is thus insistently embodied as a man of the theatre – but a theatre that takes place in the largely homosocial conviviality of the tavern; is judged in the homosocial conviviality of its critics in Eton; and talked about in the homosocial conviviality of its target audience in Middle Temple chambers.

(Stewart 2016, p. 72)

In some ways, contemporary approaches to life-writing (including my own) return Shakespeare to this biographical tradition. I admire hugely, and have drawn unashamedly upon, the work of scholars such as Van Es, Potter, and Dutton, all of whom offer profound insights into Shakespeare the working playwright, the man of the theater.

Samuel Schoenbaum (1991, p. 5), who should know, argues that the records “nevertheless possess a pattern and significance of their own.” The problem is that the pattern and significance is not always to our taste:

Perhaps the reason we so desperately want the plays to speak to us, is that the story the legal documents tell us is not always the story we want to hear. Many biographers have been troubled by Shakespeare’s lack of civic or institutional philanthropy (given his affluence) in his will or by the evidence of Shakespeare hoarding grain in 1599, at a time when a series of bad harvests meant that many of Stratford’s poor were starving, especially as he writes about exactly this scenario at the beginning of Coriolanus. Or by the fact that in a Stratford protest against proposed land enclosures by William Combe in 1614–15, Shakespeare hired a lawyer to protect his own land and appears to have supported Combe.

(Maguire and Smith 2012, p. 109)

Whatever the reasons for the lack of traditional “documentary” biographical materials, it has had an effect on our understanding of Shakespeare’s life. Since nature abhors a vacuum, “later ages have filled the picture with guesswork, legend and sentiment,” writes Dutton (2016, p. 2), who is tolerant of guesswork, but critical of legend and sentiment. And harnessed “Shakespeare” to their cause.

Emma Smith (2012, p. 223) offers a scathing critique of this kind of thing: claims that “he retained the old religion of Roman Catholicism, or that he was gay, or that he was politically conservative, or whatever, tend to reveal more about the priorities of the speaker than the subject.” Smith’s list is a little slippery. “Gay” is a modern term: if we call Shakespeare gay we are very obviously co-opting modern terminology to understand a man 400 years dead. But keeping the “old religion” and “politically conservative” are less straightforward. Both concepts meant something very different then than they do now. Shapiro (2005b, pp. 9–10) is excellent on this:

Even the meaning of such concepts as individuality was different. Writers, including Shakespeare, were only beginning to speak of “individual” in the modern sense of “distinctive” or “special”, the exact opposite of what it had long meant, “inseparable”. This was also an age of faith, or at the least one in which church attendance was mandatory; religion, too played a greater role in shaping how life, death and the afterlife were imagined. All this suggests that, as much as we might want Shakespeare to have been like us, he wasn’t. We call this period early modern or pre-modern for good reason.

Let’s go back to April 1564, the documentary record, and conventional life-writing. “Gulielmus filius Johannes Shakspere” is baptised in Holy Trinity Parish Church, Stratford-upon-Avon, Warwickshire. He is named William by his parents John and Mary perhaps in honor of their friends and business associates, William Smith the haberdasher and William Tyler the butcher. Baby William, one of eight children to be born to the Shakespeares, but one of only five who would survive into adulthood, will become the most famous British playwright, perhaps the most famous writer in English, ever known.

That Latin quotation means William, son of John Shakespeare. The archive begins with a statement of patriarchal lineage because this is what “family” means in Tudor England. The patriarchal archive was then elaborated with anecdote. In 1657, the first story about Shakespeare’s family would be recorded: he “was a glover’s son – Sir John Mennes saw once his old Father in his shop – a merry cheeked old man – that said – Will was a good Honest Fellow – but he darest have cracked a jest with him at any Time” (Plume MS 25, fo. 161^r; transcription in Tromly 2010, p. 278). No matter that Mennes was only two years old when the elder Shakespeare died in 1601, this story informed and still informs the kinds of the Lives we write. Stewart (2016, p. 66) points to Stephen Greenblatt’s (2004) understanding of “merry-cheeked” as an allusion to John Shakespeare’s heavy drinking, which leads him to surmise an alcoholic legacy that Will sought to evade. Duncan-Jones (2001) offers a more niche interpretation: John is a prototype for the husband of Juliet’s Nurse.

There is not an absence of archival evidence as such (and what we do know grows each year). Instead, the evidence which survives skews the telling of Shakespeare’s life in particular directions. Those two examples above, for example, are rooted in patriarchal understandings of what is significant to a man’s life. But there are new questions that can be asked of what has been known for centuries, and familiar anecdotes can be viewed in different ways. Shakespeare’s life, and his Lives, start looking a little different when those questions are asked.

Smith offers a powerful reminder of what’s at stake. “Shakespeare’s stock is so high that to recruit him to your ideological team is a real coup” (Smith 2012, p. 223). Suddenly having the man on our team, not just his writing, becomes important. We feel the need to recruit the author himself, not just his works. This may be why biographies should still be attempted. Yes, any and all biographies are fictions, but the lives they tell were not. Our picture of Shakespeare the man is, in the end, created by the questions we ask of the archive we have, by the value we place on different kinds of documentation: those questions and values have, for centuries, been predominantly driven and informed by elite, white men. We need different eyes looking at Shakespeare. His plays matter to us, but what we write about the man matters too.