Shakespeare: The Biography, Peter Ackroyd -- Book Review
Shakespeare: The Biography.
By Peter Ackroyd. New York: Random House/Anchor Books. 2006 [2005]. 572 pp.
There is much that is not known about Shakespeare, a circumstance that always poses difficulties for a biographer, and one which often tempts the biographer to overreach the spare facts that are known with surmises and interpretations that become merged with known facts leaving a distorted, confused impression. Peter Ackroyd avoids this pitfall by masterfully recreating Shakespeare the person through the context of the time and circumstances in which he lived. The time and circumstances of Shakespeare's life can be discerned with much more clarity and much more fullness than Shakespeare himself, but that context illuminates the person that Shakespeare must have been, and together with the writings that he left and other documents that pertain to his life, a remarkably clear and convincing portrait of Shakespeare the person emerges. What makes this reconstruction possible and so rich and informative is Ackroyd's depth of knowledge of Elizabethan England, and particularly of the city of London. This far reaching grasp of the history and culture of the time in which Shakespeare lived, together with encyclopedic knowledge of Shakespeare's writings, as well as the writings of Shakespeare's contemporaries, gives his presentation of Shakespeare a convincing weight of authority.
Shakespeare was a country boy. Ackroyd vividly reconstructs the village life of sixteenth century Stratford and points out how Shakespeare's plays are full of references to life upon the land that are of such richness and specificity that they evince one who could only had lived and grown up there.
"There are images of stopped ovens and smoking lamps, of washing and scouring, of dusting and sweeping; there are many references to the preparation of food, to boiling and mincing and stewing and frying; there are allusions to badly prepared cakes and unsieved flour, to a rabbit being turned upon a spit and a pasty being 'pinched.'
An ill-weeded garden is an image of decay. He knows of grafting and pruning, of digging and dunging.
In all he alludes to 108 different plants. In his orchards hang apples and plums, grapes, and apricots.
The flowers of his plays are native to the soil from which he came; the primrose and the violet, the wallflower and the daffodil, the cowslip and the rose, sprang up wild all around him. . . He uses the local names for the flowers of the meadow, such as Ophelia's crowflowers, and Lear's cuckoo-flowers; he uses the Warwickshire word for the pansy, love-in-idleness. He employs the local names of bilberry for the whortleberry and honey-stalks for stalks of clover. In that same dialect, too, a dandelion is a 'golden lad' before becoming a 'chimney sweeper' when its spore is cast upon the breeze.
No poet besides Chaucer has celebrated with such sweetness the enchantment of birds, whether it be the lark ascending or the little grebe diving, the plucky wren or the serene swan. He mentions some sixty species in total." (p. 33-34)
Born in 1564, he was a first-born son to parents who had already lost two daughters. Infant mortality was high in the sixteenth century and adult male life expectancy was only forty-seven years. Shakespeare himself died on his fifty-second birthday. Death was always a looming presence in sixteenth century England. Plague struck London with regularity and often forced Shakespeare's acting company to go on the road for the summer while the city of London endured the plague.
As an adult, Shakespeare visited Stratford once a year and in 1597 bought a sumptuous house there where he resided until his death in 1616. Shakespeare was not at all the poor, struggling artist. His father, John, was a member of the glovers' guild. He also dealt in wool, barley, and timber. He is also known to have leant money at excessive interest rates. John Shakespeare was active in the governance of Stratford, serving in numerous official positions including mayor. He was apparently quite well respected and of some substance in the town. His son, Will, would later become quite adept and astute in money matters. Shakespeare, by the end of his life had actually become rather well to do.
The issue that overshadowed Shakespeare's life and touched him personally at numerous points was a culture war going on in England at the time between Catholicism and Protestant reformers. It began with Henry the Eighth (1491-1547) and continued for the next couple of centuries. It encompassed more than just religion; it was also about secular power and governance. Shakespeare's family was Catholic. Shakespeare seems to have had Catholic sympathies although he was not overtly devout or outspoken on matters of religion.
Ackroyd summarizes it thus:
"It is true that he used the language and the structure of the old faith in his drama, but that does not imply that he espoused Catholicism. His parents are likely to have been of the old faith, but he did not necessarily take it with him into his adulthood. The old religion was part of the landscape of his imagination, not of his belief." (p. 472)
"Despite the myriad allusions to the old faith, Shakespeare in no sense declares himself. In the tragedies, for example, the religious imperatives of piety and consolation are withheld; these are worlds with no god. He never adverts to any particular religious controversy . . . The safest and most likely conclusion, however, must be that despite his manifold Catholic connections Shakespeare professed no particular faith. The church bells did not summon him to worship. They reminded him of decay and of time past. Just as he was a man without opinions, so he was a man without beliefs." (p. 474)
"Shakespeare grew up with a profound sense of ambiguity. It is one of the informing principles both of his life and of his art. In the plays themselves the themes and situations are endlessly mirrored in the plots and sub-plots, so that the reader or spectator is presented with a series of variations on the same subject without any one of them given preeminence." (p. 268)
"Entire plays seem to be made up of parallels and contrasts and echoes. All of his characters have mixed natures. Despite the apparently orchestrated harmony of his endings, there are in fact very few genuine resolutions of the action. The closing scenes are deliberately rendered ambiguous, with one character generally excluded from the happy picture of reconciliation. That is why some critics have agreed with Tolstoy that Shakespeare really had 'nothing to say.'" (p. 269)
Shakespeare seems to have had a strong sexual constitution. We'll leave aside his "orientation."
"There are more than thirteen hundred sexual allusions in the plays, as well as the repeated use of sexual slang. There are sixty-six terms for the female vagina. . . There are a host of words for the male penis as well as insistent references to sodomy, buggery, and fellatio. " (p. 314)
"The poems to his 'black mistress' contain allusions to sexual disgust and sexual jealousy that are also to be found in his drama. There is a hint of homosexual passion in The Merchant of Venice, Twelfth Night, Othello, and elsewhere -- a passion not unlike that evinced by the writer of the sonnets to his favoured boy. There are also veiled references to venereal disease in connection with the 'Dark Lady.' Shakespeare's sonnets are suffused with sexual humour and sexual innuendo. The language of the poems is itself sexual, quick energetic, ambiguous, amoral. From the evidence of the drama alone it would be clear that he was preoccupied with sexuality in all of its forms." (p. 314)
"The Elizabethan Age was one of great and open promiscuity. London women were known throughout Europe for their friendliness, and travellers professed to be astonished by the freedom and lewdness of conversation between the sexes. It was not only in the capital, however, that sexual activity was commonplace."
"It was not always a clean or hygenic period in matters pertaining to the body, at least from a modern perspective, and the sexual act veered between mud wrestling and perfumed coupling. In order to avoid the more unpleasant sights and odours, it was customary for men and women to have sexual congress almost fully clothed."
"In certain of the sonnets that act provokes shame and disgust. Hamlet is a misogynist. Loathing for the act of sex is apparent in Measure for Measure, and in King Lear, in Timon of Athens, and in Troilus and Cressida. " (p. 315)
Sexual jealousy is a common theme in Shakespeare's plays. His own sexual identity seemed to be, shall we say, flexible. Ackroyd points out that Shakespeare created more memorable female roles than any of his contemporaries. He used cross dressing more frequently than any other dramatist. He could identify with and express the hearts and minds of females as well as males with great sensitivity. In his later plays, especially, there is a preoccupation with father-daughter relationships. Ackroyd notes that many biographers of Shakespeare surmise that he suspected his wife, Anne Hathaway Shakespeare, of infidelity, but he points out that this is unprovable. But infidelity, both real and imagined, is a significant element in many of his plays as well as in the sonnets. (p. 317)
This brings up a point that I was hoping to hear more about from Ackroyd, and that is Anne Hathaway and Shakespeare's marriage. Ackroyd has very little to say about Anne and Will's marriage. He does research Anne's family background and notes the relationships between some of her relatives and Shakespeare. But the marriage between Anne and Will remains shrouded in fog. This is not due to any deficiency or neglect on Ackroyd's part. If anything were known about it, I'm sure he would be aware of it and included it. Shakespeare's marriage is one of those dark patches that have resisted the penetration of posterity's curiosity.
Ackroyd reveals a lot about how Shakespeare worked as a dramatist and it is very interesting. He often wrote roles with specific actors in mind. He adapted, revised, and rewrote. Numerous versions of his plays have been found apart from the Folio edition. A play could change depending on the venue and the actors available. Shakespeare always had his eye on the performance. He was not just a scriptwriter, and was perfectly willing to adapt a script to the needs of a performance. He tended to write about the aristocracy: kings, court intrigue, etc., but he was equally familiar and convincing in his portrayals of common people and lowlifes. His characters are often ambivalent and ambiguous as he was himself. Some have noticed in Shakespeare an ambivalence about the theater itself.
"One of his persistent metaphors for human futility and pretension is the theater. When he compares one of his characters to an actor, the allusion is generally negative." (p. 313)
While much of Shakespeare's life remains murky and beyond the reach of our prying curiosity, Ackroyd has compiled an impressive wealth of information richly set in the cultural context of Elizabethan England. I have only touched on a few of the many interesting subtopics that he covers. There is so much that is informative, engaging, interesting in this book that it is bound to please anyone drawn to Shakespeare and his writings or the history of England.