If you have never read a book about William Shakespeare, please read this one: "Shakespeare: A Life," by Park Honan (Oxford University Press, 450 pages, $39.95). It's an exceptional work about a man and his times and plays that are still as remarkable today as they were 400 years ago.
As you may know -- assuming that you were paying attention in school -- Shakespeare was born in Stratford in 1564, the child of Roman Catholic parents, who became a Protestant. He went to schools in Warwickshire in a small-town environment. His father was a glove maker and an ultimately bankrupt entrepreneur, his mother, an extraordinary scholar for a woman of that era.
He married, at 19, Anne Hathaway, who was older by seven years. He fathered three children. He went to London by the late 1580s as an actor, then began to write plays, in which he often played relatively small parts.
By the end of the 1580s, he began to be recognized as the leading playwright of his time. He went back to Stratford and retired in 1614 or perhaps 1615, and died in 1616, at age 52, probably of typhoid.
Beyond that and a fair amount of other well-established detail, there may be no figure in human history but for Jesus of Nazareth to have more speculation, fantasy and nonsense woven about his life.
I am not a Shakespeare scholar. But what reader, or playgoer, is not an enthusiast -- at some level? If there is a coherent rebuttal to the contention that William Shakespeare is the greatest writer ever to have lived, I have yet to hear of it.
Even if you know absolutely nothing about Shakespeare, you will have no difficulty with this book. It makes no presumptions of knowledge or understanding. It is written with directness, clarity and simplicity of language.
And if you care absolutely nothing about Shakespeare's works -- there are, I suppose, literate people who do not -- you may well skip through much of Honan's exploration of Shakespeare's plays and poetry and find the book a fascinating tale of life in England 400 years ago, an engagingly sophisticated and institutionally intricate time that was.
Shakespeare has been presented as a drum-beater for any number of causes -- political, ideological and amorous. His work has been attributed, seriously, to a handful of contemporaries, and to combinations of them. Responsible, if skeptical, analysts have coined the term "the Shakespeare industry" to cover these proliferating products.
Honan firmly puts all that aside, nailing down Shakespeare's identity and life works with convincing data. He reveals Shakespeare's life as remarkably accessible, even though he was never the subject of a contemporary biography, and he didn't keep a serious journal or diary.
Honan makes it very clear that if Shakespeare had been as active, amorous, thirsty and involved as myths would have it, he never would have had time to write his stuff.
"Small Latin and less Greek" was a charge brought against Shakespeare by Ben Jonson (1573-1637), who was for considerable time Shakespeare's principal rival as a playwright. Jonson was sometimes bitterly critical, sometimes praiseful of Shakespeare's plays -- sometimes even awe-struck -- but he spoke condescendingly about his lack of university education.
Honan demonstrates persuasively that Shakespeare's education, under Oxford scholars in Stratford's grammar school -- and a period as a school master himself -- ensured he was fluent in Latin and knew at least some Greek. Other misapprehensions are addressed, even-handedly and lucidly.
It is a heartening biography, a work of delightful attention to detail and original research. It is addressed more to the general reader than to the academy, but it contains much important new scholarship, dug out by Honan from the astonishingly rich records of taxes, land titles, contracts and sacraments and peripheral references that still exist in England and in libraries elsewhere.
I have little doubt that most scholars, except for those devoted to narrow political or ideological agendas, will regard this as the definitive biography -- at least for the many, many years it most probably will take for another major accumulation of new data. I found it to go far beyond my recall of what I believe is regarded as the biographical standard: William Schoenbaum's 1977 "William Shakespeare: A Documentary Life."
Honan, an American, is an emeritus professor of English at the University of Leeds. He has previously published biographies of Robert Browning and Jane Austen -- both regarded by many critics as the leading works on those subjects -- and one of Matthew Arnold.
Honan examines virtually all of Shakespeare's work in impressive detail, weaving his staggeringly clear knowledge of establishable historic fact with literary scholarship. The most intense attention goes to the major tragedies.
Honan's Shakespeare was very much a man of his time. One of the most engaging qualities of the book is to provide rich context of social, educational, theatrical and business practices of the period, and to put its subject solidly in their main stream.
Regarding "Hamlet," for example, Honan writes, Shakespeare, "is able to draw upon the complicating pressures of Elizabethan domestic life. He appears to write from inside his own experience of a family's bonding, and pathos arises from his hero's idealization of a prior normalcy. Shakespeare's parents were both alive when he wrote the play, and involved in its 'unrivaled imaginative power' is his ability to show, from within, the pressure of a family's emotional ties."
What Honan does not explain is Shakespeare's genius. Nor, really, does he try to do so. Which is, I ended up believing strongly, much to his credit. For if there is one phenomenon on earth that most surely defies logical explanation it is genius. Such is its glory. And such is Shakespeare's -- has there ever been any greater?
Pub Date: 03/21/99