( I decided to write this essay in two parts because a single essay will be too long to read in one go. The first part is about Shakespeare the man, and what we know or do not know about him. In the second part, I plan to explore the wonderful fictional recreation of a certain period in Shakespeare’s life in Maggie Farrell’s 2020 novel “Hamnet”, a beautiful piece of writing and creative tour de force about how one of Shakespeare’s greatest plays – Hamlet – came to be written. Her book is a classic piece of historical fiction.)
It is one of the greatest ironies of English literature that the man who re-invented the language for the modern world and is known throughout the world as one of the greatest playwrights of all time, is a man, about whom we virtually know nothing at all for sure. William Shakespeare’s life, identity, image, even the reality of his existence is still debated in scholarly circles, even four hundred years after his death. Let’s start with the image of the man. Search for Shakespeare in Google, and you are likely to get various shades and forms of a predominantly bald man, with a short beard( in some), gentle and confident eyes, a slightly chubby face, a golden earring on his left ear, and perhaps dressed in a black coat with white pointed collars brushing against his ears. We are not sure if this image is indeed Shakespeare as he was known during his time. This picture is based on a consensus that this is how Shakespeare might have looked based on only three known sources: one from a portrait donated by Lord Ellesmere ( a wealthy English lord) in 1846 to the National portrait gallery in London, the second source is a malformed and mediocre engraving in the famous first folio ( or collection) of Shakespeare plays published in 1623, eight years after Shakespeare’s death, and the third is a portrait of him made, again in 1623, for the central church at Stanford ( where Shakespeare was born and died) which has been painted and whitewashed over the centuries that nobody knows for sure how the original looked. All three portraits purport to be that of Shakespeare, but there is certainly no irrefutable provenance established, or any known validation of the likeliness of the image to the actual Shakespeare himself, the man in flesh and blood who wrote those magnificent plays. The image that has come down to us then is an image we have come to believe to be that of Shakespeare, just as we believe in the images of Jesus, or Krishna or any of the Gods. We are repeatedly told that it is them, and we nod for want of no better evidence to refute such a claim.
Now let’s talk about the spelling of the name William Shakespeare. In the sixteenth century, the English language was in a state of flux, and therefore, it is not uncommon to have different spellings applied to the same word, however, in Shakespeare’s case, the discrepancy in the way his name was spelled is extreme. His name appears in several documents in all possible phonetical combinations we can conceive of, except the one we have now adopted – which is William Shakespeare. Once again, we assume that all those variations point to the same man, and the spelling we use today is a consensus, and nothing more. Furthermore, during his lifetime, Shakespeare wrote 38 full-length plays ( at least that is what has come down to us) and innumerable sonnets. It is estimated that he wrote more than a million words, but all that we have in our possession today in Shakespeare’s original handwriting is just fourteen words – and those fourteen words are his own name signed six times, and an additionally “by me” at the end of his will. This is the only remains of the handwriting of perhaps the greatest writer in the English language. Not one play or poem in his own hand has been preserved.
Now about the plays themselves. For more than a century scholars and critiques have argued that Shakespeare, based on what we know of him – a son of a glove maker, unschooled and without a classical education – couldn’t have written the rich and multi-layered plays associated with his name. They argue that such works could have only come from a mind that is seasoned and educated at the halls of Cambridge or Oxford, with an intimate knowledge of the social and political conditions of England and its allies. How could a runaway from a small town like Stratford have written these sumptuous plays filled with historical allusions, social satire, and visionary themes? Impossible, they said! The name of Lord Edward De Mere, the 17th earl of Oxford, who lived during that time, is often considered as a potential author, and so do the names of Thomas Marlowe and Ben Johnson, famous playwrights in their own right, come up as alternate authors of the Shakespearean dramas. The fact that none of Shakespeare’s plays were ever published during his lifetime, and the first print ( the famous first folio ) came out in 1623, edited and arranged by his associates John Heminges and Henry Condell at the Chamberlain drama company, of which Shakespeare was a part and a partner, only adds to the mystery of authorship. Did Shakespeare really write these plays, or did he only act in the plays that today carry his name? Add to it the fact that Shakespeare, we know, left something in his will to both the drama associates. Did they do him a favor by attaching the actor’s name as the author? Speculations abound!
We cannot however deny It is very strange and bewildering that given Shakespeare’s universal appeal and popularity, we know only four indisputable facts about his life. We know when he was born – 1564 – from his baptism records. Fortunately, the English had begun keeping such records very meticulously by that time. We know when he got married, in 1582 to a girl eight years elder to him named Anne ( or Agnes – “g” was often silent those days) Hathaway, who was probably pregnant at that time. The couple had three children: Susanna, the eldest was born in 1583, and then the twins Judith and Hamnet were born in 1585. We know Shakespeare died in 1616. There is an epitaph in Stratford to prove it. We don’t know if the marriage between Anne and Shakespeare was amicable, warm, and caring. There is no account of Anne’s visit to London anytime to meet her husband. We don’t know if Anne knew what Shakespeare did in London during the years between 1586 to 1592 (a black hole in the life of her husband and the rest of us till date), and suddenly in 1592, he emerged as one of the major playwrights in the Elizabethan court. What we do know about their marriage is that it lasted till the very end of Shakespeare’s life and that he sent money regularly to his wife, and slowly, the family in Stratford was lifted out of limited economic means to much better economic circumstances than before. We also know that Hamnet, one of the twins, died in 1596, and around four years later, Shakespeare wrote his most mature play – Hamlet, the story about the prince of Denmark and a deep meditation on the nature of life, death, and retribution. We also know that it was a time when the devastating plague was wiping out villages and towns and spreading with virulence all over England.
So with all this lack of information, obscurity, and anonymity surrounding Shakespeare’s life, should we then conclude that the life of Shakespeare was merely mythical. Not at all. Just because there is no documentary proof does not dilute the quality of work that has come to us. We really don’t know who wrote the Bible, or the Upanishads, or for that matter any of the epics. The demand for documentary evidence is a modern fashion. In Shakespeare’s day, it was the performance that counted. Art had a purpose, and Shakespeare’s plays fulfilled it and then overflowed to embrace immortality. Despite the huge amount of disagreement on Shakespeare’s life among scholars, there is no doubt that there existed a man called Shakespeare, and he was an actor and playwright. And the thirty-eight plays that we possess as treasures are indeed valuable treasures written by someone named Shakespeare. Nothing like them has ever been produced in the last 400 years. The quality of Shakespeare’s drama, the modernity of its plots, the cadence of its language, the richness of its metaphors, the beauty of the dialogues and the soliloquies ( especially the soliloquies), the depth of historical detail, the acute observation of the human condition and motives, the wonderful delineation of characters that have stood the test of time, and more – clearly point to the mind of a man who was supremely artistic and a genius, if the word means a kind of transcendence. It is alright if the actual life of such a man is still a mystery. The mystery only adds to the delight and enjoyment of the plays.
When the real, tangible facts about a historical figure are missing, or found wanting, fiction has a chance to creep in. And so does scholarship about all the peripheral details available. Shakespearean scholars over the centuries have investigated the text of Shakespeare’s plays in all possible angles to find something autobiographical about the man, and in the process, they have dissected the text to unravel all kinds of trivia. For instance, we know that there are 1,38,198 commas, 26,974 colons, 15,785 question marks spread across his plays. We know Shakespeare spoke about human ears 401 times, his characters evoked love 2259 times, used the word bloody 226 times, but bloody-minded only twice. Admitted, that a word processor can give us this information on a click, the fact there is even interest in such details says a lot about how much we are obsessed with his life. There are more than eight thousand works about and on Shakespeare, excluding journals like the nerdy Shakespeare quarterly, which unearths new tales about the bard for literary enthusiasts to chew on.
If you reached this point in the essay, the reader is entitled to ask what is my relationship with Shakespeare, and do I love the plays that bear his name? The answer is an unequivocal Yes. I have six Shakespeare editions in my personal library and several books on his life and times. Reading Shakespeare is a literary obsession with me. But, this was not the case when I was first introduced to Shakespeare in school. In my tenth and twelfth classes, we had “The merchant of Venice” and ”Macbeth” respectively in their original texts to be examined upon. I hated the man. I couldn’t understand a word, and our teachers knew no better. The beautiful meditations of Macbeth and his wife were tortures to be endured and regurgitated on paper to pass an exam. I swore to myself, I wouldn’t touch this obnoxious writer with a ten feet pole, ever. But that was during my school days. I later rediscovered the bard in my late twenties when my grasp of the language was on firmer grounds, and a love for literature took root. Those very texts which gave me nightmares when young became balms to the soul. I learned to recognize the musicality and brilliant language innovations of the master, his fresh metaphors, in each line and phrase. Like a scripture, each re-reading of the plays began to unveil new layers of beauty and meaning. My favorite Shakespeare plays are his four tragedies; to me, they contain the deepest and most mature flowering of Shakespeare’s art, followed by the histories and the comedies.
Coming back to our main theme, the elusiveness of Shakespeare’s life can be good material in the hands of a creative writer. There are so many gaps, so many hints, so many contradictions, in his life that could be richly imagined and presented. There are innumerable books out there that reference Shakespeare through his works, but almost none that judiciously uses the little-known facts of his life as the raw material for a tale. This kind of writing falls in the category of Historical fiction. The art of writing historical fiction is the ability to take a figure or an event from the past and create a rich tapestry of fact and fiction, with one seamlessly blending into the other, leaving the reader indifferent to where fact ends and fiction begins. It is a superior literary form, and artists who attempt to write a work of historical fiction must necessarily be multifaceted. They have to immerse themselves in the mundane world of facts, bury their noses in available evidence; and, at the same time, give loose rein to the creative juices, mix the right quantity and quality of facts with the spice of fiction. Historical fiction, when written well, can vividly bring forth the past in the reader’s mind with all its vibrancy, colors, and emotions. Sometimes it is more profitable to learn history through historical fiction than through drab textbooks that pile one fact upon the other in interminable succession.
In the next part, let’s look at Maggie Farrell’s “Hamnet” – an extraordinary effort of historical fiction in recreating a portion of Shakespeare’s life. Her books recreate a time and an event in Shakespeare’s life that perhaps provided the context to one of his greatest plays – Hamlet.