About Shakespeare

I see that Bill Bryson has a new book out about Shakespeare. There's a fairly lengthy extract here from The Times.

Bryson makes this point about Will's personal attitudes:

Even the most careful biographers sometimes take a supposition – that Shakespeare was Catholic or happily married or fond of the countryside or kindly disposed towards animals – and convert it within a page or two to something like a certainty.

In fact it cannot be emphasised too strenuously that there is nothing – not a scrap, not a mote – that gives any certain insight into Shakespeare’s feelings or beliefs as a private person. We can know only what came out of his work, never what went into it.

A recent Doctor Who episode (taking its cue from "Shakespeare in Love", no doubt) again portrayed Shakespeare as a rakish charmer, but it is entirely possible that he was the complete opposite. He may be the beneficiary of the most generously imagined personality ever. Just for a change, I would like some popular fictional work to portray him as intensely dislikeable.

Bryson does make it clear that knowing little of the playwrights of the day is just par for the course. The figures in this extract surprised me:

It cannot be overemphasised how fortunate we are to have so many of Shakespeare’s works, for the usual condition of 16th and early 17th century plays is to be lost. Few manuscripts from any playwright survive, and even printed plays are far more often missing than not. Of the approximately 3,000 plays thought to have been staged in London from about the time of Shakespeare’s birth to the closure of the theatres by the Puritans in a coup of joylessness in 1642, 80% are known only by title. Only 230 or so play texts still exist from Shakespeare’s time, including the 38 by Shakespeare himself – about 15% of the total, a gloriously staggering proportion.

There are bigger gaps in the records of history than I imagined.

UPDATE: I see that Germaine Greer has a Shakespeare book coming out too, and this extract indicates she is good at turning speculation into certainty, as Bryson complains.