“Shakespeare led a life of Allegory: his works are the comments on it.” Keats’s remark has licensed too much irresponsible speculation and novelettish embroidery masquerading as biography. E. K. Chambers and Samuel Schoenbaum are the major exceptions to this statement, although neither is immune from the odd flight of fancy. Chambers called his book of 1930 William Shakespeare: A Study of Facts and Problems, and if the factual deposit has grown imperceptibly since then, so have the problems. Schoenbaum never wrote a formal biography, but his scrupulous commentary on the documents, William Shakespeare: A Documentary Life (1975), makes a telling contrast to the lunacies of biographers which he charted so entertainingly in Shakespeare’s Lives (1970, revised 1991). Park Honan certainly can’t be accused of sensationalism; he moves at a stately pace through the chronological sequence of events, and is willing to let the record speak for itself, even to the extent of being dry.

That legendary postcard on which all we know about Shakespeare can be written must now be at least A4 size; new information is always liable to turn up—for example, the exact locations of the 107 acres of land he bought in 1602 came to light only in 1994. Yet Honan, no less than Keats, combs the life for clues to the works, and vice versa: how that person could have written those plays and poems remains an insoluble enigma. There is no doubt, however, that he did. Honan is not so wickedly mocking of the anti-Stratfordians as Jonathan Bate —about whose stimulating book The Genius of Shakespeare (1997) he is unfairly haughty —but he routs them as comprehensively.

Like all his predecessors, Honan is fairly confident of the story up to about 1580. He is informative about Stratford, slow to break with its medieval past and reacting to the Reformation with a kind of wary acceptance, and about Shakespeare’s parents, giving us a fuller picture than usual of John Shakespeare, by inheritance a farmer, by trade a glover, illicitly a dealer in wool and a money-lender, whose deteriorating circumstances are carefully detailed. Honan can take for granted that William went to the grammar school at Stratford, because there was nowhere else for him to go and because his works show that he had followed the Elizabethan national curriculum. The normal school-leaving age was fifteen or sixteen, although we do not know that he stayed that long; one tradition has him leaving earlier to help his father. William married the pregnant Anne Hathaway of Shottery in 1582; they had three children, Susannah (b. 1583), and twins, Judith and Hamnet (b. 1585). So far, so good. Then Honan opens Part II, “Actor and Poet of the London Stage,” with discussions of Elizabethan London, its theatres, their troupes and repertoires. Where was Shakespeare in all this? “For a few years he is not traceable in our records,” probably because he was a jobbing actor rather than a shareholder who would be included in a cast list.

Scholars exceed even Nature in their abhorrence of a vacuum, and the most determined attempt to fill this one was made by E. A. J. Honigmann in his book Shakespeare: The “Lost Years” (1985), which has just been reissued with a new preface. He believes that, after leaving school, Shakespeare was employed as a tutor in the household of the Hoghtons, a prominent Catholic family in Lancashire, who then recommended him to connections in London. (The fact that their resident “player” was called William Shakeshaft is not as weighty as it seems; Shakespeare’s grandfather had been known as Richard Shakstaff. Names were variable.) Honigmann’s evidence was taken up and developed by Eric Sams in The Real Shakespeare: Retrieving the Early Years, 1564–1594 (1995). Honan rehearses Honigmann’s arguments, but is unpersuaded, and does not mention Sams’s book at all, which is unfair, for although Sams is impolite, it is equally so to ignore him.

A major reason for this reluctance to accept Honigmann’s case is obvious, but rarely admitted: the implication that Shakespeare was a Catholic outrages those— Erastians one and all—who are committed to a view of him as guardian of the national cultural heritage. He is a product of the Renaissance (or the Reformation—it’s all the same to them), the great poet of the Elizabethan settlement; how can he have been a Catholic?

We cannot say for certain that he was; the emerging historical evidence, particularly from local records, has made us ever more aware of the coexistence of Catholics and Anglicans in many parishes for long after the Henrician reforming legislation and even after the Elizabethan Settlement. But we cannot deny that Shakespeare moved in Catholic circles. Consider the following circumstantial evidence, all to be found in Honan’s book. Rowington, a village to the north of Stratford, “a hive of Catholics,” was also the “home of more sixteenth-century Shakespeares than any other Warwickshire parish” and the likely place of origin of the poet’s paternal grandfather, Richard. Shakespeare’s father’s “spiritual testament,” made in the 1580s, is now accepted as genuine; it is a vigorously Catholic document. John Shakespeare was cited for non-attendance at church in 1592, giving as his reason the wish to avoid his creditors, a reason which Honigmann, Sams, and Honan all agree to be improbable. Shakespeare’s maternal grandfather was a staunch Catholic who raised his daughter accordingly and would have been most unlikely to allow her to marry a Protestant. At the grammar school, Shakespeare was taught first by Simon Hunt, who may be the person of that name who later left Stratford for Douai and became a Jesuit; then by Thomas Jenkins, whose father was in the service of a Catholic nobleman; then by John Cottom, whose brother was a Catholic priest and martyr. The Cottoms had estates in Lancashire where they were neighbors of the Hoghtons. Shakespeare’s marriage took place not in Stratford but at Temple Grafton, whose parish priest was reported to the authorities as an obdurate Catholic. Anne Hathaway’s father, though apparently an Anglican, had a Catholic as one of his executors. Shakespeare had strong connections with Gray’s Inn, which contained more Lancastrians than any other and had a high proportion of Catholic members. William Underhill, from whom Shakespeare bought New Place in 1597, was a Catholic recusant. Shakespeare’s elder daughter, Susannah, was accused of recusancy in 1606, although the charge was later dropped.

Shakespeare’s acquaintance with, even sympathy for, Catholics thus must be acknowledged, although there are difficulties in the way of the conclusion that he was one. He must have attended the Anglican church as required by law, for if he had not we would know about it; and “church papists” were not kindly regarded by their hardline co-religionists.[1] In the nature of things, Catholics were increasingly reticent after the execution of Mary, Queen of Scots, and the Armada, and the Gunpowder Plot. True, Ben Jonson was a Catholic between approximately 1598 and 1610, but he was not famous for his tact. Shakespeare was al- ways more elusive, even geographically. He shuttled between Stratford and London throughout his performing and writing career, sometimes leaving traces such as the Warwickshire of The Taming of the Shrew, or the little schoolboy William going through his Latin declensions in The Merry Wives. John Aubrey claimed that Shakespeare revisited Stratford only once a year, via Oxford, where he was said (on evidence Honan shows to be flimsy) to have fathered an illegitimate son, later the playwright Sir William Davenant.

Honan has to bring off some delicate balancing acts, judging what proportion of his book to give to critical accounts of the works, and how far to intertwine them with biography. There are some bold moves. The attack on materialism in The Merchant of Venice is attributed to Shakespeare’s “revulsion at his affluence in the wake of his son’s death,” from which “he seems never to have recovered.” The murder of Stratford’s Mayor Richard Quiney in 1598, we are told, “helps to account for a deepening social pessimism” in such plays as Troilus and Cressida and Timon of Athens. Shakespeare’s absences from home, and the consequently tense relationships with his two headstrong daughters, are dimly discerned beneath King Lear. But “the most tangled and contradictory of his relationships, one suspects, was with his mother.” The sonnets appeared eight months after her death, and reveal, to Honan, an “obsession with sexual pollution or contamination” which links them with Hamlet, Measure for Measure, and Timon. If such flirting with Freudianism is risky, the declaration that the Bohemian episodes in The Winter’s Tale reveal Shakespeare’s “underlying disbelief in redemption” is disappointingly unimaginative for a critic elsewhere so quick to conjecture, and the statement that Shakespeare’s outlook on humanity “comes at last to a darkening” in Henry VIII and The Two Noble Kinsmen shows that a streak of Romanticism can invade the most hard-headed of biographers.

Honan never forgets, however, that his subject was a practical man of the theater, and he is particularly good on Shakespeare’s professionalism. Here is no divinely inspired warbler of native woodnotes wild: “he evidently took pains with scripts; he was a reviser, with a poet’s concern for verbal style. He usually read omnivorously to make a play.” Honan’s biographical conjectures built on Shakespeare’s career—“he could not have worked six months in the theatre without normal pluck and simple, shoulder-shrugging endurance”—are at least not contradicted by evidence, and his picture of Shakespeare—sensitive beneath a stoical exterior, discreet and adaptable, winning when necessary but with an actor’s ability to be all things to all people—is vivid and plausible. Honan has some interesting speculations, too, on which roles Shakespeare may have acted in his own plays. Computer analysis points to Aaron in Titus Andronicus, Antonio in Twelfth Night, Ulysses in Troilus and Cressida, the Chorus in Henry V, among others, and claims to confirm the long traditions which assigned to him Adam in As You Like It and old Hamlet’s ghost. “Anyway,” Honan concludes with caution worthy of Chambers himself, “so much for theory. Facts are another matter.”

In his brutal but haunting play Bingo (1973), Edward Bond has Shakespeare disenchanted with the human race, regarded with hostility for corrupt land deals by his Stratford neighbors, and estranged from his uncomprehending family. Finally, shutting himself in his room, he commits suicide by taking an overdose, asking repeatedly “Was anything done? Was anything done?” while his daughter scrabbles to locate his will. It is like a scene from an updated Lear (a comparison, as we saw above, which Honan actually invokes at one point); it does not square with the myth of “gentle Shakespeare,” but Honan has presented a protean character, unattractive in many respects, and Bond may be more accurate than we would like to admit. The famous will is chiefly remarkable for what it omits: no books or manuscripts, “as if they did not greatly matter,” although they may have been inventoried separately. They would presumably have gone to his elder daughter, Susannah, married to John Hall; and we hear of “Divers bookes” which were seized from the Halls by the bailiff in 1637. It is highly improbable that there are any lost masterpieces or revealing personal documents— and, after all, we have the works: what more do we want? But all the evidence is that we do want more, that we retire baffled from each attempt to discern a face behind all those voices. The direct line of descent died out, the man was subsumed by the myth, and the long procession of biographers began, each claiming to reveal the truth at last. To his credit, Park Honan knows, and says, that this is a self-delusion. All he can give us is his truth about Shakespeare— which is that he was a turbulent man, introspective, psychologically strained, intellectually alive even to the point of agony, tormented by the burden of his own perceptiveness, disquietingly a stranger to happiness or ease, and expressing his sense of life’s complexities in works of art which, like himself, are both intimate and lonely.

Notes
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This neglected topic has lately been studied by Alexandra Walsham in Church Papists: Catholicism, Conformity and Confessional Polemic in Early Modern England (Royal Historical Society and the Boydell Press, 1993). Go back to the text.