Can there possibly be more to say about William Shakespeare? A third of the way into the 400th anniversary of his death and the media seems to be saturated with articles about his links to anywhere and everywhere. Everyone who has ever read one of his plays is speaking or blogging somewhere, and the presses are churning out books and editions at a record rate.
Still, the answer is that there is much more to say about Shakespeare than one could ever have thought: there were more unknown unknowns than most experts imagined. We know so little about his life that attempts to reconstruct the significance of what we do have by a serious expert is always valuable.
Shakespeare's Money, in which Robert Bearman explores how financially successful the playwright was, is a good example of what can be gleaned when the records are scrutinised by someone who has spent his life working in the archives and reflected on what the research actually means.
It is generally assumed that a man who bought one of the best houses in Stratford was a financially astute businessman who did rather well for himself. To some extent this is indeed true: Shakespeare became a shareholder in his company, the King’s Men, and produced plays at a relatively modest rate compared with such writers for hire as Henry Chettle and Robert Greene, who make the Bard’s significant output look like that of a gentleman amateur.
Shakespeare was not above sly and hard-nosed dealing, and was prepared to speculate in order to accumulate, trading in essentials such as malt and grain. We should probably not be surprised. His father, who had not been an especially successful businessman, had been a “brogger”, trading illegally in wool when the government was clamping down on such activities.
Bearman argues that Shakespeare is a particularly interesting case study of the uncertainties of middle-class and gentry life in early modern England. He was successful, although he never quite joined the elite of society and was always insecure, probably spending his last years worried about his family’s future and whether he had done quite enough for them.
The marriages of his daughters – to the second son of a doctor and the third son of a mercer – suggest that, “despite his considerable success”, Shakespeare “had not convincingly broken into the ranks of the gentry of a local market town”.
Gargantuan success
If he was only moderately successful in life, Shakespeare certainly made up for it after his death. Emma Smith's The Making of Shakespeare's First Folio is an absorbing tale of gargantuan success. We have nearly a third of the copies printed in 1623, an exceptionally high survival rate for a book from that period, and news of the discovery of a hitherto unknown copy is widely broadcast. (The latest find is one in the library of Mount Stuart House, on the Isle of Bute, which Prof Smith has confirmed as genuine.)
The book has become a totemistic object, valued as a thing in its own right rather than for what it contains. As Smith points out in her chapter on annotation, most readers who left marks in their books start off with a flourish of enthusiasm that wanes about half way through as the 900-odd pages take their toll.
There is an especially entertaining section in the chapter on owners and collectors, detailing the exodus of copies over the Atlantic as death duties imposed by early-20th-century governments forced landowners to sell their trophies to American industrialists. The largest collection of folios now exists in the Folger Shakespeare Library, in Washington, DC, and many readers and scholars have had good reason to thank Henry Clay and Emily Folger for their generosity, myself included.
The money to establish the library came from Standard Oil, a Falstaffian behemoth of a company that was broken up in 1911 because of its rapacious business activities and infringement of anti-trust laws.
Folger accumulated folios as his company acquired tiddler oil companies, his antiquarian labours serving “to establish the American buyer as the energetic champion of English cultural heritage rather than its monied despoiler”.
First Folio concludes on a sad note: the suicide in prison of Raymond Scott. Scott had stolen a first folio from Durham University library, then tried to sell it to the Folger Shakespeare Library in order to continue his exotic lifestyle, pay off his mounting debts and bring his exotic-dancer girlfriend to Britain. Waiting for an appeal that was surely doomed to fail, Scott justified his actions as those of a man following his dreams using the world's greatest book to fulfil them, but lapsed into despair.
As ever, Prof Smith is on the money with her concluding sentence: “This final First Folio shows that it is quite possible to over-value this most valuable of books.”
Oaths and promises
John Kerrigan's mighty and magisterial Shakespeare's Binding Language is the most serious of the books reviewed here. Oaths and promises were ubiquitous in Shakespeare's England, uniting society through formal ceremonies, legal hearings and church services. Of particular significance was the oath of allegiance made law in the wake of the Gunpowder Plot, of 1605, and was designed to force Catholics to declare that they would be loyal to the monarch, not the pope.
One could, of course, swear oaths and then break them, but at a time when religion had the force to dictate actions, few were willing to risk God’s wrath as well as that of the civil authorities. Much energy was spent thinking about how one could swear or evade oaths without sullying one’s conscience.
The plots of Shakespeare’s plays are therefore often based on binding language, as Prof Kerrigan demonstrates in a timely and erudite book that will surely transform our understanding of the context in which Shakespeare worked and his achievement in producing works that reflect so intelligently on the complicated loyalties demanded by society.
Measure for Measure, for example, is centred on a series of evasions and libels, examples of loose language that demonstrate a serious loss of authority as society threatens to spiral out of control. Promises are not kept and a bed trick (secretly substituting one partner for another) is necessary in order to make an unborn child legitimate. The disguised duke is slandered by Lucio, whose name might be recast as "Loose-io", a man who has no respect for the serious declaration of social bonds.
The reverse situation drives the plot of The Merchant of Venice. Shylock demands an oath that cannot be fulfilled, justifying the tricksy chop logic of Portia but at the cost of making all binding language contingent on a common sense that not everyone shares.
The anxious comedy of Love's Labour's Lost depends on our understanding that a ridiculous oath – that the young men in the play will abjure women for a year in order to concentrate on their studies – was made in jest and so cannot be kept.
Few works on Shakespeare written in the past 20 years contain so many insights.
Andrew Hadfield is professor of English at the University of Sussex. His most recent book is The Oxford Handbook of English Prose, 1500-1640
