Contested Will (9 page)

Shakespeare and Anne Hathaway, unknown artist,
c
.1860.

German critics were among the first to seize on the potential of Malone's approach. August Wilhelm von Schlegel took the English to task in his Viennese lectures of 1808 for never having ‘thought of availing themselves of [Shakespeare's] Sonnets for tracing the circumstances and sentiments of the poet' and for failing to recognise that they contained the ‘confessions of his youthful errors'. His equally famous brother Friedrich von Schlegel seconded and extended this view: ‘It is strange but delightful to scrutinise, in his short effusions, the character of Shakespeare.' Heinrich Heine would confirm that the Sonnets are ‘authentic records of the circumstances of Shakespeare's life'.

William Wordsworth soon spread the word that in the Sonnets, ‘Shakespeare expresses his own feelings in his own person.' He made this point more memorably in his poem ‘Scorn not the Sonnet' where he writes, ‘with this key, Shakespeare unlocked his heart'. Wordsworth saw no contradiction between his belief that these Elizabethan poems were thoroughly autobiographical and his admission that he had held off publishing his own auto biographical poem,
The Prelude
, because it was ‘a thing unprecedented in literary history that a man should talk so much about himself'. He had found a Romantic precursor in this newly minted Shakespeare.

Others scrambled aboard. A contributor to
Blackwood's Magazine
confidently claimed in 1818 that the Sonnets are ‘invaluable, beyond any thing else of Shakespeare's poetry, because they give us little notices, and occasional glimpses of our own kindred feelings, and of some of the most interesting events and situations
of his life'. A long piece on the Sonnets in
New Monthly Magazine
in 1835 – ‘The Confessions of William Shakespeare' – took things a step further, calling the Sonnets ‘personal confessions' and breathlessly describing their triangular love-plots. Who could resist such voyeuristic pleasures? With the Sonnets, ‘we seem to stand by the door of the confessional, and listen to the most secret secrets of the heart of Shakespeare'.

Word spread to America, where Emerson, in his influential
Representative Men
(1850), wondered: ‘Who ever read the volume of the Sonnets without finding that the poet had there revealed, under masks that are no masks to the intelligent, the lore of friendship and of love?' By the mid-nineteenth century, the critical heavyweights on both sides of the Atlantic – the Schlegels, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Heine and Emerson – had all embraced the position first suggested by Malone. According to John Keats's close friend Charles Armitage Brown, author of
Shakespeare's Autobiographical Poems
(1838), the Sonnets were ‘pure uninterrupted biography'. The Bard's life was now an open book.

A handful of dissenters struggled, with little success, to challenge this new consensus. Thomas Campbell complained in 1829 that the Sonnets were ‘insignificant as an index' to Shakespeare's biography, and rejected the argument that ‘they unequivocally paint his passions, and the true character of his sentiments'. He tried again a few years later, this time more bluntly: ‘Shakespeare's sonnets give us no access to his personal history.' His words fell on deaf ears, as did Robert Browning's rebuttal of Wordsworth's ‘Scorn Not the Sonnet':

By 1856, the battle was all but over. As David Masson put it in that year, ‘Criticism seems now pretty conclusively to have determined … that the Sonnets of Shakespeare are, and can possibly be, nothing else than a poetical record of his own feelings and
experience.' There was no longer any doubt that the poems ‘are autobiographic – distinctly intensely, painfully autobiographic'.

Once critics began reading the Sonnets as confessional, they began to turn their attention to the unnamed shadowy figures alluded to in the poems on the assumption that Shakespeare had actual people in mind when the various speakers of the Sonnets complained about dark ladies, young men and rival poets. George Chalmers, an enemy of Malone and a believer in the Ireland forgeries, got this biographical competition off to a strong start by arguing in 1797 that
all
the Sonnets had been addressed to Queen Elizabeth herself. Countless others soon went about uncovering the identity of the ‘only begetter' of the Sonnets, the mysterious ‘W. H.'; at least they had initials to go by, and the dedication apparently had a real, if elusive, individual in mind.

Malone himself was among the earliest to hazard a guess as to the identity of that ‘better spirit' of ‘Sonnet 80', the talented literary rival ‘to whom even Shakespeare acknowledges himself inferior'. Malone concluded that it had to be Edmund Spenser, and to support this claim devoted over a third of his unfinished biography of Shakespeare to the relationship of the two poets. George Chalmers, who could never bring himself to agree with Malone, did so this time. Others weren't so sure, and placed bets on Samuel Daniel, Michael Drayton, George Chapman, Christopher Marlowe, Ben Jonson and a host of others. Another insisted that they were all wrong: surely Chaucer was the great rival Shakespeare had in mind.

The lists of Elizabethan Dark Ladies, Young Men, and those with the initials W.H., H.W., W.S., or some similar combination were even longer. The parlour game that began with Malone is still avidly played, with hardly a year going by without another fresh name trotted out. It would take pages to list them all, the equivalent of an Elizabethan census. The most innocent and metaphorical utterances of the fictive speakers of Shakespeare's poems were interpreted as biographical fact. Was Shakespeare syphilitic, as hinted at in ‘Sonnet 144'? Did the author of ‘Sonnet
37' (which speaks of being ‘made lame by Fortune's dearest spite') walk with a limp? Did Shakespeare hate prostituting his talents onstage, as Malone claimed he confessed in ‘Sonnet 111'? Who needed to wrestle with the Sonnets' dense language, when it was possible to make one's literary reputation unlocking the biographical secrets they contained?

By the mid-nineteenth century, the obsession with autobiographical titbits had all but displaced interest in the aesthetic pleasures of the poems themselves. Wordsworth had famously described the Sonnets as a ‘key'. Coleridge suggested that one of the poems (probably ‘Sonnet 20', the most explicitly homoerotic) was a ‘purposed blind'. Emerson spoke of these poems as ‘masks that are no masks to the intelligent'. And following the invention of the telegraph and Morse code, a new and ominous metaphor was introduced to describe the way in which Shakespeare deliberately concealed autobiographical traces: for Robert Willmott, writing in 1858, the ‘Sonnets are a chapter of autobiography, although remaining in cipher till criticism finds the key'.

The best contemporary explanation I have come across for this frenzy of biographical detection – and it is worth quoting at length – is offered by Anna Jameson, in her
Memoirs of the Loves of the Poets
, published in 1829. Jameson was at least honest about her motives, admitting that it's ‘natural to feel an intense and insatiable curiosity relative to great men, a curiosity and interest for which nothing can be too minute, too personal'. Yet the few facts of Shakespeare's life left her hungry for more:

Missing was the only thing that really mattered: that which could connect us to ‘a presence and a power … diffused through all time, and ruling the heart and the fancy with an incontrollable
and universal sway!' The desire to feel that presence, experience a sense of intimacy with Shakespeare, was not going to go away simply because not enough facts about his personal life were known. It was easier for critics who shared that desire to make stuff up rather than admit defeat.

Soon enough, what started with the Sonnets migrated to the plays, though the claim that Shakespeare was speaking for himself through his dramatic characters was more difficult to sustain. John Keats was among the first to do when he wrote that Shakespeare's ‘days were not more happy than Hamlet's, who is perhaps more like Shakespeare himself in his common everyday life than any other of his characters'. It was but a short step from here to Keats's self-identification with both Hamlet and Shakespeare: ‘Hamlet's heart was full of such misery as mine is when he said to Ophelia, “Go to a nunnery, go, go!”' Coleridge made the case more simply and directly: ‘I have a smack of Hamlet myself, if I may say so.' Over-identification on the part of Shakespeare's biographers had mutated into an over-identification on the part of his readers.

Critics began identifying moments when Shakespeare accidentally slips out of writing in character and into self-revealing autobiography. Coleridge, for example, was sure that this was the case with Capulet's lines in
Romeo and Juliet
:

‘Other passages more happy in illustrating this', he adds, ‘might be adduced where the poet forgets the character and speaks in his own person.' Coleridge was also the first to suggest that Prospero, the great image of artistic authority in the nineteenth century, ‘seems a portrait of the bard himself' – a claim that would echo, with increasing volume, through the rest of the nineteenth century.

Coleridge was also the first to take the ultimate biographical leap: reading the trajectory of the entire canon of Shakespeare's plays as a story of the poet's psychological development. For as Coleridge himself recognised, he was ‘inclined to pursue a psychological, rather than a historical, mode of reasoning' (and in doing so, was not only the first to use this new term ‘psychological' in its modern sense, but also one of the first to engage in psychobiography). In February 1819, Coleridge sketched out before an audience at the Crown and Anchor Tavern on the Strand his theory of the five eras of Shakespeare's creative life, scrambling the established chronology of the canon to suit this more psychologically compelling biographical narrative. According to Coleridge, Shakespeare began with the late romances (
Pericles, The Winter's Tale, Cymbeline
) as well as a few of the comedies (
Comedy of Errors, A Midsummer Night's Dream
and, surprisingly,
All's Well
), then worked through the history plays, before arriving at his major era in which he ‘gives all the graces and facilities of a genius in full possession and habit of power' – and this mixed group includes
The Tempest, As You Like It, The Merchant of Venice
and
Twelfth Night
. In the end, a triumphant Shakespeare climbs to the ‘summit', the great run of tragedies,
Lear, Hamlet, Macbeth
and
Othello
. Following this great climb is the inevitable descent, ‘when the energies of intellect in the cycle of genius were though in a rich and potenziated form becoming predominant over passion and creative self-modification' – and to this final stage of Shakespeare's career Coleridge consigns
Measure for Measure
, as well as most of the classical and Roman plays:
Timon of Athens, Coriolanus, Julius Caesar, Antony
and
Cleopatra and Troilus and Cressida
.

Others would modify or build upon this model, including Henry Hallam, who in 1837 turned this into a more melodramatic story: ‘There seems to have been a period of Shakespeare's life when his heart was ill at ease, and ill content with the world or his own conscience.' As ‘the memory of hours misspent, the pang of affection misplaced or unrequited … sank down into the depths
of his great mind', they ‘seem not only to have inspired into it the character of Lear and Timon, but that of one primary character, the censurer of mankind' – a version of Shakespeare's self which is projected through a series of characters, from Jaques in
As You Like It
, up through Hamlet, Lear and Timon.

It wasn't long before an autobiographical canon-within-a-canon had emerged, with a half-dozen works attracting almost all the attention of those wishing to trace the life in the works, from Shakespeare as lover in
Romeo and Juliet
and the Sonnets, to the brooding, depressed and misunderstood Jaques, Timon, Lear and especially Hamlet of Shakespeare in the depths, to the triumphant and serene artist, Prospero, whose decision to break his staff and abandon his art prefigures Shakespeare's own retirement to Stratford. It was a great story and would have a long half-life, even if it didn't leave much room for characters or plays that couldn't be shoehorned into this plot, so that
Titus Andronicus, Pericles, The Comedy of Errors
and a couple of dozen others were left largely untouched by biographical speculators. Scholarship had stumbled off course the moment that Malone used ‘Sonnet 93' to introduce conjectural readings of both life and work, and the Romantics who followed in Malone's errant footsteps rapidly and irrevocably transformed how Shakespeare's poems and plays would be read.