Ungentle Shakespeare: Scenes from His Life by Katherine Duncan-Jones (review)

Abstract

MLRy 98.1, 2003 169 inevitably reduce Berry's arguments to banal statements, closing down discussion at the very point that it ought to be opening up. Similarly, throughout there is a tacit assumption that most readers will merely dip in and out, so the same extracts from e.g. James I and Erasmus, and the points drawn from them, are simply and needlessly repeated, not expanded. My own rueful conclusion is that this stylistic quirk creates, as well as reflects, current reading practices and exemplifies in differentterms this book's argument that culture affects literature more directly and more deeply than we may like to admit. University of Liverpool Gillian Rudd Ungentle Shakespeare: Scenes from his Life. By Katherine Duncan-Jones. (The Arden Shakespeare) London: Thomson Learning. 2001. xiv + 322 pp. ?20. ISBN 1-903436-26-5. There seems to be no end to the making of biographies of Shakespeare. The evidence from documents is enough to establish the broad outlines of his life and involvement in some specific affairs,such as the Belott-Mountjoy suit, but leaves all kinds of gaps to be filled by speculation. What were his relations with his much older wife Anne Hathaway? Where was he during the 'lost' years, 1585 to 1590 or so? What sort of a person was he? How does his life relate to his extraordinary plays and poems? These and many more questions invite interpretation, and usually Shakespeare has been treated sympathetically as 'gentle Shakespeare' (Ben Jonson's 'To the Reader' in the First Folio) rather than as Greene's 'upstart Crow'. Now Katherine Duncan-Jones, giving much weight to what one might call the evidence against the Bard, recreates an ungentle Shakespeare, very roughly as follows. Having seduced Anne and been forced into an unwelcome marriage, he resented being stuck in the impoverished home of his father between 1583 and 1589, years 'dominated by the day-to-day needs and prob? lems of parents, siblings, wife and children' (p. 24). He escaped to join the Queen's Men as a player, becoming perhaps their 'book-keeper and stage-keeper' (p. 43). The plague of 1593 diverted him into writing poems, and gained him the patronage ofthe Earl of Southampton, who by the mid-1590s was encouraging Shakespeare to become a gentleman and acquire both a coat of arms and New Place in Stratford. As he became famous, growing rich and 'portly' (p. 197), he showed a stinginess in neglecting 'the needs both of his own family and ofthe poor ofhis native town' (p. 150). Between 1604 and 1608 Shakespeare 'worked in collusion and friendly competition with a younger man', George Wilkins, who was a bad lot and a keeper of a brothel, where Shakespeare picked up the syphilis that may have lefthim terminally ill by the time that Troilus and Cressida was published in 1609. In his angry last years he neglec? ted his daughter Judith, and wrote a mean-spirited will, 'brutaP in bequeathing Anne only his second-best bed (p. 275), as Shakespeare, ailing with the pox and depressed, consoled himself in a drinking bout with Jonson and Drayton that led to his death. He is portrayed as resenting a bad marriage and early poverty to become a social climber, ambitious and grasping, hoarding corn and neglecting his family while living it up in London, and ending as a nasty, syphilitic, and angry old man. This crude outline hardly does justice to a book rich in details of life in Shakespeare's age and handsomely illustrated. In fact, the book has a kind of double vision, for if the poet is presented as anything but a nice person, his professional career is marked by early success as an actor and dramatist and aristocratic support during plague years when the theatres were closed, leading his company to 'a dazzling high point' with the per? formance of A Midsummer Night's Dream for the Carey family in 1596. Thereafter Shakespeare was a star for everyone, 'rehearsing and directing' (p. 115) at the Globe; 170 Reviews and by the end of the reign of Elizabeth he had overcome his humble origins to be 'worshipped' by 'stage-struck students and...