I am a big Shakespeare fan, but I will be among the first to admit we don’t know a whole lot about William Shakespeare the man. What we do have amounts largely to legal documents and little else. There have been attempts to try to figure a few things out based on his poetry and plays, but unlike some of his contemporaries, he didn’t exactly spell out his political or spiritual views in those works. As an old professor of mine used to say, about the only thing we can say for certain is he didn’t seem to care for mobs because whenever one appears in his work, nothing good comes of it.I do recall Stephen Greenblatt’s Will in the World makes a number of assumptions based on various poems and plays about Shakespeare’s attitudes towards others and perhaps how King Lear represented his own anxiety over retirement and letting his own adult daughters take care of him, but all that is mere speculation.
Sir Stanley Wells had a few ideas of his own about how to write about Shakespeare’s life without using the man’s writings to make educated guesses.
Wells works off the idea that even if we don’t know much about Shakespeare, we can look at some of his contemporaries, especially other playwrights, and use that to see what we can learn about the time Shakespeare lived in, perhaps getting an idea about the Bard of Avon himself. Wells doesn’t really make any definitive statements about Shakespeare’s opinions on the times so much as examine the time he lived in as seen with the various writers he rubbed elbows with, notably writers like Marlowe who probably inspired him, writers like Fletcher and Webster who were probably inspired by him, and various others like Thomas Middleton who he probably colaborated.
I say “probably” because in many cases, this is based on educated guesses. The aforementioned John Fletcher did succeed Shakespeare with the King’s Men theater troop, and it is generally believed he and Shakespeare collaborated on a few of Shakespeare’s late plays, with some scholars even speculating which scenes and acts were written by which writer based on writing style as Shakespeare, in his latter years, used a good deal of complex verse and Fletcher was writing in a simpler style.
So, what Wells has here is a work that is less about Shakespeare than it might suggest. Other authors of that era, like Ben Jonson, were much more likely to let the world know about them. Heck, Jonson gets his own chapter in the book, and the man seemed to have personally published just about everything he wrote. Other chapters use the work of writers to show, say, what life in London was like at the time. And that is essentially what this book is.
As a result, I don’t think readers will learn much about Shakespeare the man. What Wells says is speculative, but so is anything anyone says about Shakespeare as a person. As a portrait of the time for artists, this book is pretty solid. As anything that says anything beyond Shakespeare as an artist, well, maybe not so much. Just keep that in mind, and you should be fine. I think Wells intended it that way regardless.
Grade: A-
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