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Introduction: does Shakespeare’s life matter?
Andrew Hadfield
Did people who lived a long time ago live different lives to the ones we live now? How much importance does historical context play when we are attempting to read a life? Do we think people are different just because the fragments of their lives survive in unfamiliar forms? Do we think they are different because the evidence of their lives is often fragmentary? These might seem very basic and banal questions, but they are fundamental ones that have to be asked by anyone who wants to think about what having a life means.
The questions are especially pressing if we consider the early modern period, c.1500–c.1700. There would appear to be a fundamental and unbridgeable divide between those who write biographies of early modern figures, and many who have been influenced by the impact of literary theories of various forms since the 1980s. While the former group write as if lives can be read transhistorically, and that humans are fundamentally the same once a degree of historical context has been considered, the latter argue that the early modern period witnessed the birth of the subject, a self-sufficient individual who has come to define modernity as we understand it. For the former group change is incidental and accidental in nature; for the latter it is a fundamental issue that defines the nature of human existence. A number of divisions exist, not simply between scholars who have their own disagreements about the significance and content of lives, or about the impact of specific historical changes, suggesting that there is a fundamental gulf between biographers and historicists.
The essays in this special edition of Textual Practice are united in their desire to explore these vital issues, but diverse in their approaches, methods and conclusions. Catherine Belsey is sceptical that a real life can ever be recovered as an authority that produces a text; René Weis argues, using similar sources, that one can be and the enterprise is not doomed to inevitable failure. Marshall Grossman, going further still than Belsey, argues that all lives are unknowable and that we should abandon the metaphysical fantasy of trying to comprehend them in our time or any past time; Andy Mousley, exploring the autobiography of Thomas Wythorne, suggests that we can reclaim a real life through a text, and attempts to situate Wythorne on the cusp of modernity. Gail Kern Paster explores the difference between early modern lives and ours through an analysis of the importance of theories of humours in Hamlet and Holbein’s painting, The Ambassadors. Alan Stewart analyses the obsession with life records, letters, and their significance in reconstructing the past when archives were established in the eighteenth century.
Life and art
The relationship between life and letters is intensely problematic. Works should, of course, stand alone from the author behind the text. But how then do we deal with writing that is conspicuously autobiographical, or, more complex still, writing that we may not even realise is autobiographical, yet which draws on the author’s experiences in ways that may or may not be apparent to certain groups of readers? What if certain readers were/are aware of the relationship between life and art? Does that make them better or more complete readers than those who are unable to understand such references and nuances? And, most difficult of all, perhaps, what if the author makes extensive use of his or her life in the text, challenging the reader to make connections between the two that may or may not be there? My contention is that if we explore these issues in the early modern period, the literature of that era starts to seem more like modern literature than is generally assumed. Forms and styles may differ, but the substance starts to look the same.
Consider two relatively recent examples. In Martin Amis’s memoir, Experience (2000), the author describes the horror he experiences when it dawns on him that his father’s novel, Jake’s Thing (1978), is far more autobiographical than he had ever realised, and represents his father’s divorce from his step-mother, Elizabeth Jane Howard, in embarrassingly graphic detail. Martin asks Kingsley if he really went to all the sexual therapy sessions that Jake has to attend in the novel before his wife finally leaves him for a nicer, kinder man and finds that everything is based on fact. It is little surprise that Martin then informs us that, after this humiliation, Kingsley reined in his libido, abandoning women forever in favour of television and huge bags of boiled sweets.1 Here, art is more truthful to life than had been realised.2 Literary works sometimes represent the lives of their authors as they thought they lived them.
There are, of course, very different examples, a case in point being that of another conspicuously self-referential writer, Malcolm Lowry (1909–57). Lowry was a consummate and polished liar, often believing his own myth-making, especially when in his cups. Perhaps his most absurd boast was that he had been a junior national golf champion in his youth, a story believed by most of his friends, and repeated in the first full biography by Douglas Day. It was only when Gordon Bowker tracked down Lowry’s brother, Russell, soon before he died that the truth emerged.3 Lowry had, in fact, been entered for the competition but had rather overdone it the night before and missed the tournament, a fact that he did not allow to get in the way of a good story. Lowry’s storytelling ability was easily transferred to his fiction. His first novel, Ultramarine (1933), narrates the coming of age of a young man, Dana Hilliot, on his first voyage at sea based on Lowry’s own experience of sailing to the Far East as a deck hand between school and university. Hilliot is despised by his fellow sailors, whose good opinion he craves. He dreams of rehabilitating himself, at one point seeing a chance if he rescues the galley boy’s carrier pigeon, which has fallen into shark infested waters, but fails to do so, an episode based on an incident in Lowry’s life.4 Despite such verisimilitude, Lowry has Hilliot eventually accepted by his fellow mariners at the end of the voyage, which was not how the voyage really ended.5 Hence, sometimes literature is designed as a fantasy, making use of the material from a life only to distort or falsify that life.
That authors might use their lives in diametrically opposed ways is an obvious enough point, and many other examples from modern literary texts can easily be found, suggesting that authors play with the material of their lives, moulding it into a variety of forms. In fact, one influential way of reading a great deal of modern writing is to point out how much more autobiographical many works are than even those who assume that authors obsessively use their own lives realise: think of T.S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf, Henry James, James Joyce, Marcel Proust. Equally significantly, it is notable how inconsistently such a notion is applied the further back one travels in literary historical time. Either works are assumed to reflect the life unproblematically, as in the vast array of biographies of Shakespeare of varying degrees of sophistication; or, the life and the work are prised apart, often because it is hard to write about the life when no records of it remain. But, just because no life remains does not mean that the work does not refer to it. As much recent research has demonstrated, in the days before the widespread use of the printing press, literature was often written for a small group who could decode its meaning which might remain opaque to other readers.6 The stubborn refusal of the life to remain behind – after all, we know far more about the lives of politicians and the aristocracy than we do most writers who were not always from such exalted social ranks – may have further distorted our interpretations of literary works.
Public lives/private lives
When records of the life do survive, as is more often the case with aristocratic writers, especially if they were public figures, we can often see how closely related the life and the work are. The evidence suggests that, as now, writers took certain liberties, and did not always use experience in a straightforward manner, but played with an audience’s expectations of who they were, what they had done and what they thought. The most obvious, well-recorded and analysed example is Sir Philip Sidney (1554–86), whose life was recorded extensively in contemporary documents, and was also the subject of a biography by his friend, Sir Fulke Greville (1554–1628).7 Sidney based his sonnet sequence, Astrophil and Stella (c.1582), a work which had an enormous influence on subsequent poetry, on his failed courtship with Penelope Devereux, daughter of Walter Devereux, the first earl of Essex (1539–76).8 The sequence clearly challenges the reader of the manuscript, who may well have been a friend or acquaintance of the author, to read the poems in terms of the author’s life. Furthermore, there is a studied ambiguity as to whether the life in question is a publicly constructed one, or whether the poetry is providing privileged inside information. The reader has to play a cat and mouse game with the author, the game being to guess what the author actually intends. Astrophil is cast as an alter ego of Sidney himself, although he is often made to look ridiculous. Two sonnets, numbers 24 and 37, make a series of outrageous puns on the word ‘Rich’, transparent satires of the wealthy man, Lord Robert Rich, who became Penelope’s husband when the negotiations with the Sidney family broke down:
Rich fooles there be, whose base and filthy hart
Lies hatching still the goods wherein they flow;
And damning their owne selves to Tantal’s smart,
Wealth breeding want, more blist, more wretched grow…
that rich foole, who by blind Fortune’s lot
The richest gemme of Love and life enjoyes,
And can with foule abuse such beauties blot;
Let him, deprived of sweet but unfelt joyes,
(Exil’d for ay from those high treasures, which
He knowes not) grow in only follie rich.9
(Sonnet 24)
Sidney does not make himself sound like a gracious loser in the game of love. No reader could possibly doubt that the text refers to the author’s own life, but what does it actually tell us? Is Sidney describing his own feelings in verse, or playing on what people thought they knew about him? Can we believe what Astrophil says? If we compare sonnet 24 to sonnet 30, a rather different picture emerges. Six sonnets later Astrophil claims that he has no real interest in political events because he is so obsessed with Stella:
Whether the Turkish new-moone minded be
To fill his hornes this yeare on Christian coast;
How Poles’ right king meanes, without leave of hoast,
To warme with ill-made fire cold Muscovy:
If French can yet three parts in one agree;
What now the Dutch in their full diets boast;
How Holland hearts, now so good townes be lost,
Trust in the shade of pleasing Orange tree;
How Ulster likes of that same golden bit,
Wherewith my father once mad it halfe tame;
These questions busie wits to me do frame;
I, cumbred with good maners, answer do,
But know not how, for still I thinke of you.
For someone who is not interested in politics Astrophil clearly knows a great deal about contemporary developments. Moreover, the sonnet is a lengthy example of the rhetorical trope, paralipsis or occultatio, ‘when one pretends to pass over a matter and so draws attention to it’, in itself, a means of warning the reader that this is a carefully crafted work and may not be quite what it seems.10 As anyone who knew him would have realised, Sidney, even more than most courtiers, was closely interested in contemporary political eve...
