Читать книгу A Comedy of Errors - John Watt - Страница 6

The so-called ‘New Labour’ government under the leadership of Mr Tony Blair, at the time, was often accused of ‘spin’. This spin pales into insignificance when compared to the spin and rhetoric dished out by Shakespearian biographers and those financially benefiting from supporting him.

Shakspere has had numerous biographers, the three main and earliest ones being Sir Sidney Lee with his Life of William Shakespeare in 1898, O Halliwell-Phillips with his Outlines of the Life of Shakespeare in 1882 and Nicholas Rowe who published the first short biography in 1709, called Some account of the Life of Mr William Shakespeare written 93 years after Shakspere’s death. By describing each of these works as a biography, which is supposed to be an account of a person’s life, is wrong. How can you write a book about someone you know little about?

Almost all other so-called biographers, and there have been many, have used the same material but with a different spin. Little new information, if any, has surfaced since these three ‘biographies’ mentioned above were first produced. These biographies are based largely upon inferences from the works, assumptions and guesswork.

It’s not that Lee, Halliwell-Phillips or Rowe were short of spin, facts or evidence. Imagination was needed in abundance and these biographers certainly had plenty of imagination. Maybe we should class them as clairvoyants instead of biographers, as they seemed to see things not present to the senses of ordinary mortals. A reviewer in the LondonTimes once wrote, when referring to Sir Sidney Lee’s biography, ‘that it had been twisted by a master artificer into a cunning resemblance of a biography’. Unfortunately, this could be true of many of the outpourings about Shakspere.

Another such comment about Lee’s biography was made by a former British prime minister, Herbert (Lord) Asquith, who was quoted as saying ‘Few things in life are more interesting to watch than the attempts of great scholars and critics, like Sir Sidney Lee for instance, to reconstruct the life of a man so illustrious and so obscure as the greatest of our poets.’ Asquith is far from being a lone voice with these sentiments. The plain fact is that the traditional biography of William Shakspere and much of what we are told of him cannot be substantiated. His biographers give us hype over reality; as a result, more facts need to be brought into this conundrum, not more conjecture.

Lee’s contribution, which forms the basis of just about everything Shakespeare, can only be regarded as astonishing in its portrayal of Shakspere the person. He had previously promised to keep the ‘conjecture to the smallest dimension’ and, once again, failed miserably. The extent of the misinformation regarding the so-called author’s life is exceptional; his portrayal of Shakspere the person is a figment of his imagination and is strewn with supposition and inaccuracy.

As will become apparent, a great deal of knowledge was needed to compile the Works of Shakespeare and would have included having access to the great literary classics, most of which had yet to be translated into English. Lee would have us believe that there were copious amounts of English language literature around in Shakspere’s day, even available at the likes of Stratford grammar school. This could not be further from the truth and is said to give the impression that Shakspere had access to this literature in order to enhance his education. A number of libraries were catalogued in the early 1600s, one being the Bodlean Library and the other belonging to a Thomas Smith, an orator at Cambridge University. His library contained over 1000 volumes and not more than five were found to have been printed in English. It’s complete drivel and an allusion to imply that Shakspere’s knowledge could have come from English literature, as there was none.

It was only recently that I managed to obtain a copy of the Nicholas Rowe biography, entitled Some account of the Life of William Shakspere, published in 1709. It is equal to, if not worse than, Lee’s fictitious account of Shakspere. The following are some of Rowe’s assumptions, along with my observations:

 That he went to Stratford grammar school where he probably acquired a little Latin. Why only a little? This is because, as Rowe says, ‘his father removed him from the school to help in his business’, which Rowe summarises by saying that this ‘unhappily prevented his further proficiency in this language’.

 He then has the cheek to say that ‘it was certain that he understood French’ because he used it ‘in many of his plays’. So, he has no time to learn Latin at school but, by some miracle, he learns to speak fluent French.

 Rowe continues by saying that it was a good idea that Shakspere was convicted for stealing deer, otherwise he wouldn’t have been forced to leave Stratford and he might never have written the plays. Oh, so we got the works of Shakespeare by accident and a quirk of fate!

 He pontificates further by saying that, ‘Shakspere had without controversy no knowledge of the ancient poets’. Why does he say this? It’s because he can find no traces in his plays that ‘look like imitations’. You should have looked a little harder, Mr Rowe.

 Rowe tells us that he was also ‘a man of great sweetness in his manners and a most agreeable companion’. How on earth would he know this? There is only one reason why Rowe would come up with this fiction and that is to have Shakspere appear elegant enough to infiltrate the nobility ‑ which, in any case, could never have happened.

Rowe, along with other biographers after him, is trying to make the man fit the part, which is not how a biography should be constructed.

Various people have collected and listed the known ‘facts’ about William Shakspere. A Ms Jane W. Beckett appears to have captured the majority of them, which I have listed at the back of the book. Ms Beckett’s effort in compiling this list should not go unnoticed, as it is exceptional and was done with a degree of accuracy that we rarely see today. The information given by Ms Beckett lists every relevant piece of information that has come to light. They can be categorised into four headings:

 Births/deaths/marriages/wills - 11 facts

 Financial transactions - 26 facts

 Miscellaneous - 3 facts

 Acting and theatre related - 14 facts.

With regards to the last category, these fourteen pieces of information refer to plays which have been performed with Shakspere’s name, or a name similar to it, monies for acting performances, having interests in theatres, being left some money by a fellow actor and other related transactions. Adding to this conundrum we have the College of Arms, as late as 1602, referring to him as being an actor and not an author.

Approximately fifty per cent of the information we have relates to business activities, suggesting that he was, in fact, more of a merchant and money lender than an actor, and certainly not an author. There exists no contemporary letters from anyone to anyone referring to the Stratford actor as being a poet or in any way connected with writing.

All of these known facts would cover no more than two or three sheets of A4 paper, so how on earth could anyone write a biography stretching to hundreds of pages of a person they know so little about! There is only one way and that is by the imagination of the writers, who have filled in the substantial gaps with a wish list of their own; by inserting unsubstantiated facts, conjecture and stories handed down from other dubious sources, brainwashing everyone who reads their outpourings. It’s a distortion of history and should be condemned without qualification. These biographies should be re-classified and listed as fictional novels to avoid polluting the minds of future generations.

I have recently purchased another Shakspere biography to add to my growing collection. How many do we need? The author of this biography makes the following statement: ‘in truth, as I maintain at the outset of this book, we know more about William Shakspere than that of any of his literary contemporaries bar Ben Jonson’. Well, I’m afraid this statement is incorrect and misleading. Marlowe, Bacon, Oxford, Spenser and Middleton to name but a few, were all playwrights at the time of Shakspere and we have plenty of data on them covering their birth, parentage, primary and university education and their subsequent achievements in life.

This statement is a re-phrasing of the one made in Sidney Lee’s biography, in which he stated: ‘The scantiness of contemporary records of William Shakespeare’s career has been much exaggerated’. Lee later has a fit of honesty by adding ‘nevertheless some important links are missing and at some critical points appeal to conjecture is inevitable’. Lee’s biography ran to over 700 pages, most of which was conjecture. In the case of Shakspere, it seems that we can rely on very little of what has been told to us.

Terry Deary the writer, actor and television presenter, seems to have a dislike for historians, suggesting that they are nearly as seedy and devious as politicians (a bit harsh on historians, I thought. How could anyone match politicians for deviousness?) and that ‘they pick on a particular angle and select the parts to prove their case and make a name for themselves, they don’t write objective history’. Reviewing the biographies on this man from Stratford, Mr Deary has hit the nail on the head: Shakspere’s biographers don’t write objectively. If they cannot lay out the case in a truthful and candid manner, what hope is there?

Many suggest that this portrayal of William Shakspere as the author is the biggest confidence trick in history. Read any of the biographies and you find them full of maybe, possibly, could have been, doubtless, in all likelihood, probably, it is commonly assumed, we have some reason to believe, and a host of other conjecture. The situation has now developed where conjecture is being dropped and submitted as fact ‑ which, in most cases, it plainly isn’t.

The case is based on the flimsiest of evidence, yet we continue to educate millions of people with data based on a myth, along with taking millions of pounds from unsuspecting tourists visiting Stratford-upon-Avon, which has now become the Blackpool of the Midlands. They will be selling sticks of rock there soon with the word ‘Stratford’ running down the middle.

This spin and conjecture is a distraction and is being used to camouflage the lack of information these biographers have on the man, leaving the public with the impression that there is no case to be answered as far as an alternative author is concerned. As Germaine Greer astutely points out in her recent book, Shakespeare’s Wife, ‘all biographies of Shakspere are houses built of straw’. I think it’s time to burn this particular house down.

Whilst alive, Shakspere was only ever known or identified as an actor, a shareholder in theatres, a property owner, money lender and merchant, and never as an author, which is something the film Anonymous got fundamentally wrong. As we shall see, facts are thin on the ground as far as Mr Shakspere is concerned. Despite endless searches by academics, researchers and historians of all persuasions, no evidence has been found to prove that he was the author. There is not even a consensus on what he looked like. There are very few cases in history of famous people not being recognised during their lifetime. So desperate were they to find something tangible directly linking Shakspere to the plays that, in the late 1800s, a man called Ireland drip-fed a list of documents supposedly relating to Shakspere, which were embraced by so-called Shakespearian scholars. They later turned out to have been fraudulent, causing a great deal of embarrassment amongst our so-called ‘experts’.

The following is a quote from Mark Twain, taken from a short book he wrote called Is Shakespeare Dead? in which he set out the case against the man from Stratford:

I took the occasion to air the opinion that the Stratford Shakespeare was a person of no public consequence or celebrity during his lifetime, but was utterly obscure and unimportant and not only in great London, but also in the little village where he was born, where he lived a quarter of century and where he died and was buried. I argued that if he had been a person of any note at all, aged villagers would have much to tell about him many a year after his death, instead of being unable to furnish inquirers a single fact connected with him. I believe and still believe, that if he had been famous, his notoriety would have lasted as mine has lasted in my native village in Missouri. It is a good argument, prodigiously a strong one and the most formidable one for even the most gifted and ingenious and plausible Stratfordian to get around or explain away.

Ian Mortimer, in his book The Time Traveller’s Guide to Elizabethan England, highlighted some important facts about this particular century. Anyone interested in this period would find the book very informative, one statistic being ‘that the average density was just under 60 people per square mile compared to 1000 today’. In a small town like Stratford, this density would have been even lower and yet no-one can recall him as a playwright or, indeed, as a famous local man.

This obscurity is nothing short of astonishing considering he was a man who, as we will see, was obsessed with money, never took the credit for his work and died leaving no inclination or suggestion that he was an author of any kind, let alone the works of Shakespeare. This is not a conspiracy theory put forward by mad and demented people, as Stratfordians and historians would have us believe. This as Ralf Waldo Emerson the American essayist and poet once noted, “are people who cannot marry the evidence to the facts”. We have been served a diet of misinformation for hundreds of years by his biographers and supporters, the amount of which beggars belief and, unfortunately, still continues.