Literary Criticism/Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare By Stephen Greenblatt: In Henry VI, part 2, describing the rebel peasant Jack Cade in battle, Shakespeare writes that he ". . . fought so long till that his thighs with darts/Were almost like a sharp-quilled porcupine", writes Fintan O'Toole
In the American edition of his biography of Shakespeare, the brilliant Harvard scholar, Stephen Greenblatt, tells his readers that this image arises directly from the playwright's childhood experiences: "Shakespeare himself had in all likelihood not served in the wars and had never seen a soldier's thighs pierced with arrows, but, as a country boy, he had almost certainly seen his share of sharp-quilled porcupines". Or, in fact, almost certainly not. There are no porcupines in these islands.
Someone evidently pointed out this out to Greenblatt. In the British edition of the book, the gloss on the description of Jack Cade reads: "as a country boy, he had almost certainly seen his share of spiny hedgehogs and, as an adult, he may have seen the porcupine that Queen Elizabeth kept in her small menagerie near the Tower".
There is a comic desperation here and any professional writer will smile ruefully at the thought of Greenblatt's frantic search for the contents of the queen's menagerie. Clutching at porcupines, though, is a sad fate for one of the great historical critics of our times. That he ends up ignoring the obvious - Shakespeare wrote "porcupine" because "hedgehog" doesn't suit the rhythm of his verse and is too unheroic a word for his image of Cade's ferocity - should stand as a warning to all biographers. Never, ever, attempt to write a life of Shakespeare.
The one thing we can say for certain about Shakespeare's life is that he didn't want to reveal much about it. There are good, straightforward reasons for this reluctance. He lived and wrote in one of the world's first efficient police states. Two of his most important contemporaries in the creation of Elizabethan drama, Christopher Marlowe and Thomas Kyd, met ghastly deaths at the hands of the state: Marlowe murdered by denizens of the murky underworld of spies, Kyd's body broken by torture.
Greenblatt points out that right at the start of her reign, Elizabeth I instructed her officers to prevent the staging of any play "wherein either matters of religion or of the governance of the estate of the commonweal shall be handled or treated". Since all of Shakespeare's plays do in fact reflect on a world in which religion and governance are violently disputed, he had every reason to keep his own opinions to himself.
At one level Greenblatt is far too smart not to understand that Shakespeare's genius is driven precisely by his need to avoid the revelation of his own thoughts: "he had a complex attitude toward authority, at once sly, genially submissive, and subtly challenging". The phrase he uses to describe the method of the great late tragedies - "strategic opacity" - is a perfect summary of the way Shakespeare works. Greenblatt's previous book, Hamlet in Purgatory, is itself an exemplary discussion of the sly and subtle ways in which Shakespeare relates to the big issues of his time - especially the split between Protestantism and Catholicism - and to events in his own life - the death of his father and of his son, Hamnet. There, he manages to locate Shakespeare's writing within a historical and biographical context without indulging in a crudely mechanical reading of the life from the art.
The great reading public is not terribly interested in books like Hamlet in Purgatory, however. The only form of literary inquiry that sells to a wide market is literary biography. The reasons for not writing a biography of Shakespeare - that there is simply not enough evidence and that the work is driven by a need to avoid self-revelation - were outweighed by Greenblatt's understandable desire for a large audience. Thus we get the fascinating but painful spectacle of a great mind being employed to construct an impossible narrative.
Narrative abhors a vacuum. Every biographer knows the great temptation to turn speculations into assertions and assumptions into facts. You suggest an intriguing and tantalising possibility. To get to the next stage of the story, you gradually transform it into solid statement of what happened. This slow slippage from possibility to reality is the characteristic mode of Will in the World.
Sometimes it happens within a few sentences. Greenblatt starts, for example, by wondering whether Shakespeare's father took the five year-old Will to see a play that visited Stratford. He finds a man called Willis who saw a play as a child in Gloucester - 40 miles away. Willis's later memories are used to make the experience concrete. Then, in two leaps over two sentences, it becomes a fact that John Shakespeare took little Will to see the travelling players in Stratford: Will "intelligent, quick, and sensitive, would have stood between his father's legs. For the first time in his life William Shakespeare saw a play". This is a travesty of historical method. We don't know that five-year-old Will was a quick and sensitive boy. (Maybe he was a slow developer who liked torturing frogs.) We don't know that his father took him to see the players, never mind what position he stood in as he watched. But out of these unknowns, Greenblatt pulls a rabbit of certainty: "William Shakespeare saw a play". He adds a new category to Donald Rumsfeld's infamous epistemology: the unknown known.
This method is applied to the plays as well. Greenblatt, for example, unearths a marvellously suggestive description of the festivities held to honour Elizabeth's visit to the Earl of Leicester's mansion at Kenilworth, 12 miles from Stratford, when Shakespeare was 11. He suggests, reasonably enough, that Shakespeare "would at the very least have heard" of the elaborate spectacle in which a huge mechanical dolphin was made to leap from a lake. Most readers will agree that it is possible that this influenced a line in A Midsummer Night's Dream where Oberon talks of having seen "a mermaid on a dolphin's back". Within 10 pages, though, it is a fact that Shakespeare was at Kenilworth, saw the spectacle, and drew "deeply upon his own experiences" when he wrote the Dream.
Greenblatt is far too erudite a scholar not to know the warning that Hamlet sounds for Rosecrantz and Guildenstern: "You would play upon me; you would seem to know my stops; you would pluck out the heart of my mystery . . . 'Sblood, do you think I am easier to be played on than a pipe?" The tune that Greenblatt wants to play is one in which the undertones of a mysterious life emerge as clear trumpet-blasts. Shakespeare doesn't play along.
Fintan O'Toole is Chief Drama Critic of The Irish Times and the author of Shakespeare is Hard But so Is Life
Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare By Stephen Greenblatt Jonathan Cape, 430pp. £20