Contested Will (7 page)

Where earlier eighteenth-century editors such as Nicholas Rowe and Alexander Pope had prefaced the plays with a brief and anecdotal ‘Life', Malone chose to fuse life and works through extended notes that appeared at the bottom of each page of text. So, for example, when Malone first discovered in the Stratford archives that Shakespeare's son Hamnet had died in 1596, he thought it likely that Constance's ‘pathetic lamentations' about the loss of her son Arthur in
King John
(which Malone dated to this same year) were inspired by Shakespeare's own recent loss. Perhaps they were. Perhaps the play had been written before Shakespeare learned of his son's death. Perhaps he waited until composing
Hamlet
to unpack his heart. Or perhaps Shakespeare had been thinking of something else entirely when he wrote these lines. We'll never know.

Malone's argument presupposed that in writing his plays Shakespeare mined his own emotional life in transparent ways, and for that matter, that Shakespeare responded to life's surprises much as Malone and people in his own immediate circle would
have. So that for Malone, Shakespeare was not the kind of man who could suffer such a loss without finding an outlet for his grief in his work: ‘That a man of such sensibility, and of so amiable a disposition, should have lost his only son, who had attained the age of twelve years, without being greatly affected by it, will not be easily credited.' There was no corroborating evidence in any case to confirm or refute Shakespeare's amiability (an anachronistic term, not used in this sense until the mid-eighteenth century), how hard the death of his son hit him, and how or even whether he transmuted loss into art. Indeed, there was no effort to consider that even as literary culture had changed radically since early modern times, so too had a myriad of social customs, religious life, childhood, marriage, family dynamics and, cumulatively, the experience of inwardness. The greatest anachronism of all was in assuming that people have always experienced the world the same way we ourselves do, that Shakespeare's internal, emotional life was modern.

Malone's decision to include the Sonnets and other poems alongside the plays proved even more consequential. As Margreta de Grazia has eloquently put it,

Nowhere was this revised portrait of the artist more apparent than in the notes Malone first appended to the opening lines of ‘Sonnet 93' in 1780, which set the direction of Shakespeare biography – and debates over authorship – on a new and irreversible course.

‘Sonnet 93' begins with its speaker comparing himself to a familiar type, the cuckolded spouse: ‘So shall I live, supposing thou art true, / Like a deceived husband'. There's nothing especially difficult in the meaning of these opening lines that warrants an explanation; Malone's interest in providing an explanatory note
was solely biographical. To this end, he collapses the very real distinction between the elusive persona of the speaker and Shakespeare himself (for we have no idea to what extent Shakespeare is writing out of his own experience or simply imagining a situation involving two fictional characters). By doing so, Malone gives himself licence to treat the sonnet as something that gave him direct and unmediated access into Shakespeare's emotional life.

Malone tried to justify his novel approach by explaining that he had come across a manuscript of the biographer William Oldys, who had written that these lines ‘seem to have been addressed by Shakespeare to his beautiful wife on some suspicion of her infidelity'. That's not actually something that Oldys had uncovered in some now lost papers. Oldys's manuscript notes on Shakespeare, now housed in the British Library, are almost all dryly factual and bibliographic, except for one stray and gossipy remark that ‘Shakespeare's poem called
A Lover's Affection
seems to be written to his beautiful wife under some rumour of inconstancy'. Oldys was clearly misled by the title under which ‘Sonnet 93' had appeared in John Benson's 1640 edition of the Sonnets: ‘A Lover's Affection though his Love Prove Unconstant'. Seizing on this hint, though knowing it's the only one like it in Oldys's notes, Malone wondered whether ‘in the course of his researches' Oldys had ‘learned this particular' about Shakespeare's marriage – intimating that there was some archival underpinning here, though it's obvious to even a casual reader of his notes that Oldys couldn't be less interested in Shakespeare's marriage or inner life. Malone then offers a few scraps of supporting evidence, including that contested will in which Shakespeare had chosen his daughter Susanna as his executor and had further slighted his wife by bequeathing her ‘only an old piece of furniture'. Early biographers were so disturbed by what they interpreted as Shakespeare's graceless decision to leave his widow a ‘second best bed' that when reprinting the document some silently emended the phrase to ‘brown best bed'.

Malone found further evidence of Shakespeare's jealous resentment of his wife – expressed in the will and confirmed in ‘Sonnet 93' – in several of the dramatic works, for ‘jealousy is the principal hinge of
four
of his plays', especially
Othello
, where ‘some of the passages are written with such exquisite feeling, as might lead us to suspect that the author had himself been
perplexed
with doubts, though not perhaps in the
extreme
'. A mistaken identification of the Sonnets' author with their speakers, a strained reading of a poem's opening lines and a fundamental misunderstanding of the conventions of early modern wills, confirmed, if further confirmation were needed, by what occurred in play after play, added up for Malone to a convincing case.

Knowing that his account crossed a boundary, one that had been strictly observed by every previous editor and critic of Shakespeare's plays, Malone retreated a half-step, admitting that the case was built on ‘an uncertain foundation' and explaining that all he meant ‘to say is, that he appears to me to have written more immediately from the heart on the subject of jealousy, than on any other; and it is therefore not improbable that he might have felt it'. Recognising that this semi-retraction didn't go quite far enough, he added: ‘The whole is mere conjecture.' But he refused to reword or remove what he had written.

As noted earlier, Malone's annotations appeared in an edition of Shakespeare's
Works
edited by George Steevens. Steevens, an established scholar, had warmly welcomed the younger Malone into the world of Shakespeare editing three years earlier, even as Dr Johnson had welcomed him; but when he read Malone's note to ‘Sonnet 93', he insisted on adding a rejoinder. Steevens knew and feared where this kind of speculation could lead. It was a very slippery slope, with conjecture piled upon conjecture. He too had consulted Oldys's notes and saw through Malone's ploy, insisting that whether ‘the wife of our author was beautiful or otherwise was a circumstance beyond the investigation of Oldys'. Steevens added that whether ‘our poet was jealous of this lady is likewise an unwarrantable conjecture'. Steevens was especially offended by
Malone's reductive view that just because one of Shakespeare's characters experienced something, the poet must have felt it too: ‘That Shakespeare has written with his utmost power on the subject of jealousy is no proof that he ever felt it.' For if this were so, given the nearly limitless range of Shakespeare's characters, it would be possible to claim virtually anything and everything about Shakespeare's own feelings. Because Timon of Athens hates the world, Steevens asked, does it follow that Shakespeare himself ‘was a cynic or a wretch deserted by his friends'? And because Shakespeare so vividly conveys the ‘vindictive cruelty of Shylock', he added, driving the point home, ‘are we to suppose he copied from a fiend-like original in his own bosom?'

Steevens was unforgiving. He recognised that Shakespeare scholarship stood at a crossroads, foresaw that once Malone pried open this Pandora's box it could never be shut again. He would not have been surprised to learn that two centuries later a leading scholar would write (and a major university press publish) a book called
Shylock Is Shakespeare
that answered his rhetorical question in the affirmative. Steevens's response to the kind of biographical flights of fancy Malone was both engaged in and inviting could not have been clearer:

Malone, more comfortable criticising others than being taken to task himself, was stung by Steevens's response. Steevens was clearly threatened by his upstart collaborator and now rival, and the wounds opened in this latest exchange would never heal. When Steevens died in 1800, Malone didn't even attend his funeral and continued to harp on the ‘incessant malignity and animosity' that Steevens had directed at his annotations years earlier.

An overlong note to ‘Sonnet 93' got longer still when Malone again insisted that the works described what Shakespeare himself had gone through: ‘Every author who writes on a variety of topics will have sometimes occasion to describe what he has himself felt.' He then turned on Steevens for imagining that Shakespeare could have shared Timon's cynicism, let alone ‘the depravity of a murderer'. To argue this ‘would be to form an idea of him contradicted by the whole tenor of his character'. Since Malone knew what Shakespeare's character was like, he had no difficulty identifying which of his dramatic creations embodied it.

The unprofitable game of profiling what could or couldn't be true of Shakespeare's character, based on what his characters said or did, had begun. So too had the baseless tradition that Shakespeare was unhappily married. Trying to extricate himself from charges that this was idle speculation, Malone further entangled himself in the intricacies of Shakespeare's love-life. While willing to concede that ‘it does not necessarily follow that because he was inattentive to her in his Will, he was therefore jealous of her', Malone didn't believe that Anne Hathaway was good enough for Shakespeare: ‘He might not have loved her; and perhaps she might not have deserved his affection.' Malone was a bachelor when he wrote these words – in fact, he would never marry, though he wanted to (he seems to have wooed far too aggressively, and two years after this edition appeared would write to a woman he had wanted to marry but who had rejected him, words that echo his sentiments here: ‘How, my dear,' he complained, ‘have I deserved that you should treat me with such marked unkindness?'). Malone's biographical note to ‘Sonnet 93' thus introduced yet another centrepiece of modern Shakespearean biography: the tendency to confuse the biographical with the autobiographical, as writers projected onto a largely blank Shakespearean slate their own personalities and preoccupations.

Malone, who had trained as a lawyer, was, unsurprisingly, convinced that Shakespeare too had legal training, and ‘not merely such as might be acquired by the casual observation of even his
all-comprehending mind'. Malone even suspected that Shakespeare ‘was employed, while he yet remained at Stratford, in the office of some country attorney'. The evidence? Not anecdotal reports, which claimed that he had been a butcher or a schoolteacher, but rather internal evidence from the plays, most notably
Hamlet
. Malone was uncomfortable enough with this line of argument to add that Shakespeare ‘may be proved to have been equally conversant with the terms of divinity or physic'. If others could come along and show that Shakespeare knew as much about religion or medicine as he did about the law, Malone concluded, then ‘what has been stated will certainly not be entitled to any weight'.

Underlying his reasoning here was the presumption that Shakespeare could only write about what he had felt or done rather than heard about, read about, borrowed from other writers or imagined. The floodgates were now open and others would soon urge, based on their own slanted reading of the plays, that Shakespeare must have been a mariner, a soldier, a courtier, a countess and so on. By assuming that Shakespeare had to have experienced something to write about it with such accuracy and force, Malone also, unwittingly, allowed for the opposite to be true: expertise in the self-revealing works that the scant biographical record couldn't support – his knowledge of falconry for example, or of seamanship, foreign lands or the ways that the ruling class behaved – should disqualify Shakespeare as the author of the plays.

Yet another precondition for challenging Shakespeare's authorship had now been established, one that would be trotted out more often than all the others combined. From now on, consensus would be impossible, and writing the life of the author of Shakespeare's works a game that anyone with enough ingenuity and conviction could play. When desire outpaced what scholars could turn up, there remained only a few ways forward: forgery, reliance on anecdote, or turning to the works for fresh evidence about the author's life. The impulse to interpret the plays and poems as autobiographical was a direct result of the failure to
recover enough facts to allow anyone to write a satisfying cradle-to-grave life of Shakespeare.

Malone's commentary on ‘Sonnet 93' was a defining moment in the history not only of Shakespeare studies but also of literary biography in general. What has emerged in our own time as a dominant form of life writing can trace its lineage back to this extended footnote. While the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries had seen a handful of literary biographies, the genre didn't come into its own until the eighteenth century, spurred by an intense interest in life writing, swept along not only by a torrent of biographies and memoirs, but also by great collaborative efforts such as the multi-volume
Biographia Britannica
of 1747–66. The
Biographia Britannica
marked a conceptual leap forward, recognising that accurate biographies could act as a check on self-interested memoirs: