A Documentary Life?
Times Literary Supplement, 12 Feb. 1993
As I have been pointing out for the past ten years, without a word of rational rejoinder, modern Shakespeare scholarship relies on literary fantasy and ignores historical fact; hence the wrong dates and wrong attributions of the Oxford English Dictionary and the Complete Works and Textual Companion of the Oxford Shakespeare (TLS, March 6, 1992). This basic bias has warped the life as badly as the works. It began with E. K. Chambers's William Shakespeare: A study of facts and problems (1930), and it continues with S. Schoenbaum's William Shakespeare: A documentary life (1975; the abridged version of 1977, revised in 1987, is still current). Each of these standard sources contains indispensable documentation. But each also documents its compiler's limitations and prejudices. Thus each identifies "memorial reconstruction" (by forgetful actors) of Shakespeare plays unknown until 1623 as the cause of certain so-called "Bad Quartos" published in the 1590s. These literally preposterous theories, which defy all the rules of reasoning, and for which no documentary evidence has ever existed, have blocked the road to rational dating and attribution for the past seventy years. They are acclaimed by Samuel Schoenbaum's Documentary life (p 123) as “demonstrated”. What this dictum in fact demonstrates is the supine academic acceptance of supposed academic authority. Its corollary is the active rejection. of historical counter-evidence, for example, John Aubrey's account of Shakespeare's early life. Here too, Schoenbaum follows Chambers in dismissing such potentially vital information out of hand as mere “mythos”.
This mistaken methodology can be illustrated from Schoenbaum's own documentation. His facsimiles include (p 58) the actual page that Aubrey wrote about Shakespeare, no later than 1681. Readers can see the genuine homage implicit in the fair-copied handwriting and the carefully drawn marginal bay wreath, as well as explicit in the text itself. This begins by saying that Shakespeare was born at Stratford where "his father was a butcher, & I have been told heretofore by some of the neighbours, that when he was a boy he exercised his father's Trade, but when he kill'd a Calfe, he would doe it in a high style, & make a Speech".
“Nothing improbable in that" is the entirely matter-of-fact reaction of the historian A. L. Rowse. For the literary Schoenbaum, however, it is all entirely a matter of fiction, indeed manifest falsehood. He drily observes that “Genius will out, even from the mouths of butcher boys” (p 60). "The seventeenth-century gossip John Aubrey... reports that John Shakespeare was a butcher, but this is unlikely…” (p 14). “Although (as he indicates) Aubrey was in touch with local Stratford tradition, his confusion here runs deep… the picture of a poetical prodigy moved to extempore effusions in the shambles is sufficiently ludicrous.” “Does there lurk in [Aubrey's] account an obscurely disguised recollection of the boy Shakespeare taking part - with basin, carpet, horns, and butcher's knife and apron - in the Christmas mumming play of the killing of the calf?” (p 60). 'The gossip Aubrey, who obtained his information from “some of the neighbours”, informs us that There was at that time another Butcher's son in this Towne that was held not at all inferior to [Shakespeare] for a naturall witt”… Aubrey's anecdote, however, belongs not to the biographical record proper but to the mythos: that accretion of legend and lore which comes to surround the names of famous men" (p 54).
But what Aubrey twice tells us, after due consultation, about Shakespeare's early employment, is surely entitled to a respectful hearing; and it was corroborated by the Stratford parish clerk who in 1693 told a visitor that Shakespeare had been apprenticed to a butcher there. Yet this too is derided as a “late-blooming tradition, a mutation of Aubrey's butcher-boy story [which]...seems to have its origin in the familiar misconception about John Shakespeare's occupation, and so has no more persuasive force than implausible gossip” (p 87) or “parish clerk's gossip about the butcher-boy” (p 111).
All this, and very much more in the same vein, is evidence of Schoenbaum's deep-running confusion, not Aubrey's. Take, for example, the unqualified assertion that John Shakespeare was unlikely to have been a butcher. In fact, that well-documented farmer, yeoman, glover, wool-dealer and hide-dresser was very likely indeed to have been a butcher, on all five counts; and eldest sons would naturally give their fathers a hand, at need, then as now. But Schoenbaum insists that John Shakespeare cannot possibly have been a butcher, because he was a glover who "served out his apprenticeship”, and indeed probably “undertook an apprenticeship of at least seven years”, while "stringent regulations governing the wholesomeness of meat kept the two occupations separate" (p 14). “Glovers, as we have seen, were restrained from looking after their own slaughtering… It seems a reasonable enough supposition that William was apprenticed [to his father, as a glover]" (p 60).
All this sounds very judicious and scholarly. In fact, however, both these seven-year apprenticeships are sheer inventions. Nor are any such regulations identified, or identifiable; it appears that they too are inventions. Nor is there the least reason to believe that Shakespeare had ever heard of, let alone enacted, the obscure ritual of “Killing the Calf”. So which commentator represents “the biographical record proper”, and which the “accretion of legend and lore”? That accretion is compounded by open contempt for butcher-boys (by definition, no great Shakespeares) as well as for John Aubrey, Stratford neighbours, parish clerks, local gossips and in general anyone who has ever dared to differ from Schoenbauan's own infallible feelings four centuries after the event.
Thus the modern literary biographer begins by knowing better than any seventeenth-century English witness, even Shakespeare's own godson William Davenant, whose testimony “must awaken suspicions in the wary” (p 133). A whole monograph could be, and indeed in a sense has been, compiled from Schoenbaum's inventions, mistakes, omissions, assumptions, illogicalities and attempts to discredit uncongenial testimony.
I can document over eighty such examples just - from the forty pages (mainly on the earlier life) - which I have analysed for this article. Thus Shakespeare must be protected from the gamy taint of slaughtered venison, as of veal. The story of Shakespeare the Deerslayer… is a picturesque relation deriving, one expects, from local Stratford lore” (p 78). Although “the essential story of poaching, capture, prosecution and flight has come down in tour separate versions” (p 83), all four are dismissed as “presumably deriving from Stratford gossip of the late seventeenth century”. Even that should be better informed than academic opinion of the late twentieth century; and on any objective appraisal the evidence, which famously includes the first scene of The Merry Wives of Windsor, is as plausible as it is copious. Indeed, the case is grudgingly conceded. But “even if these legends I embroider, however fancifully, a genuine escapade, they describe sports and recreation, not the serious occupations of life” (p 87). This judgment too is remote from reality. Eating would certainly have been a serious occupation for the large, growing and impoverished Shakespeare family: and deer-hide was a raw material of their family trade, as Schoenbaum himself points out (p 14). But the unargued and unsupported preconceptions regularly prevail, even over express and acknowledged evidence to the contrary. Thus “we need not doubt that Shakespeare received a grammar school education” (p 50), even though “a report from early in the eighteenth century holds that he did not complete the course” (p 60). Even his illiterate father John, who signed with a mark, "may have mastered reading and writing - there is some force to the arguments supporting that conclusion" (p 36), although no rational argument could support any such conclusion, since all the extant evidence is unanimous to the contrary.
Again, “The faith in which William Shakespeare was raised is, after all, a matter of no small moment, to ordinary readers as well as to theologians” (p 46). But “John Shakespeare was a tradesman, not an ideologue” (p 39), although he apparently signed one of the most ideological documents ever devised, namely an explicit profession of Roman Catholic faith (pp 41-6) at a time when any such affiliation was cruelly punishable. This testament contains the unnoticed yet familiar phrase “cut off in the blossome of my sins”; Hamlet's father (I v 75-6) was just as Roman as Shakespeare's father. But Schoenbaum's view of Romans is shown by my italics, as follows: They "insinuated themselves" [or "gained admission", in the 1977 text] into the houses of Catholics or "likely converts… once lodged,they donned the priests' vestments they always carried with them. They held secret conference…" (p 46). Edmund Campion was tortured and executed in 1581 for exactly such heinous crimes.
All these manifest prejudices spring from the same latent source. Schoenbaum himself helps to locate it. He astutely notes the tendency of other commentators to create Shakespeare in their own image; for example, as a young lawyer, by the “barrister turned literary scholar” Edmund Malone (p 87), and as a cradle Catholic by the “Jesuitical [1977 ”Jesuit"] commentator” Peter Milward SJ (p 50). But at least they have special insights into their subjects, and can conduct their cases cogently. Schoenbaum, with neither expertise nor evidence, pleads thus: "If Shakespeare had for some years occupied a desk in some Warwickshire solicitor's office . . . surely his signature would have appeared on deeds or wills he was called upon to witness, but no such signature has ever come to light" (p 87). This absurd argument assumes that Shakespeare must have been a high-level lawyer, not a lowly clerk or copyist. But this is the actual question at issue: and by being begged, it provides the answer. The Schoenbaum image is the well-educated genteel Shakespeare, a cut above butchery, popery or copy-clerking, who is imagined as a late developer despite his marriage and fatherhood at eighteen. The glover's trade keeps his hands clean; unlike any other Tudor yeoman's son, he cannot have soiled them by contact with actual animals. On the same assumption, he could never have looked after playgoers' horses for a living, even when first alone in London. Despite the attribution of this datum to Davenant, and its endorsement by Dr Johnson, the latter's detailed assurances on the subject are just “sonorities”… “the colourful elaboration that gives sustenance to the mythos” (p 111). “The anecdote is clearly a pendant to the myth of the deerpoaching… the story makes no serious claim” (p 112). Nor, sadly, does Professor Schoenbaum's Documentary life, which for the past eighteen years has dismissed historical documents as myth and treated literary myth as truth.