A lush book about Shakespeare

Press, Volume CX, Issue 32460, 21 November 1970, Page 10

A lush book about Shakespeare

Shakespeare. By Anthony Burgess. Jonathan Cape. 272 pp. Illustrated. Notes. Bibliography. Index. Anthony Burgess’s much-publicised book on Shakespeare has arrived. The blurb on the dust-jacket gives his purpose as “to make mortal the immortal.” The author in his foreword is more discreet He hopes to set out "the main facts about the life and society from which the poems and plays arose.” Mr Burgess has already made mortal the immortal, in his novel “Nothing Like the Sun,” a bawdily-imaginative reconstruction of Shakespeare’s life. Now, in twenty chapters, with fortythree colour plates and ninety-seven black-and-white illustrations, he attempts the same task in a non-fictional medium. Who is this new book intended for? From the superb quality of its production, its glossy pages and beautiful colour, it seems a book for showing off on the coffee-table, more a book for presentation, perhaps, than for buying oneself. All the ground it covers and facts it contains can be found in other books, which the historian of Shakespeare’s England or the Shakespeare critic would already have. So this book is for the non-specialist, and in bringing a competent sifting of available facts and presenting them palatably to the general public Mr Burgess is doing a useful service. For an audience of Shakespeare-

lovers, of play-goers, not merely academics, Mr Burgess has re-constructed the circumstances of the first performances of “Hamlet;” here, and elsewhere, he adds a substantial amount of guesswork to the known facts to present a plausible interpretation. His ingenuity in this may serve to whet the appetite of the young student of Shakespeare, who might enjoy Mr Burgess’s novelistic taste for gossip, scandalous conjecture and bawdry. It is the portraits around which the book is built to which it owes its success. Beautifully reproduced on finequality paper, they range from the 1585 Ermine portrait of Elizabeth I attributed to Nicholas Hilliard, through portraits of Robert Dudley, William Somerset, William Cecil, Edward Alleyn, Francis Drake, Christopher Marlowe. Ben Jonson and other distinguished contemporaries, to the Chandos portrait of Shakespeare and other, less well authenticated likenesses. There are also photographs of the tourist’s Stratford, and plates from the cultural historian’s department of costume, jewellery and furniture. Numerous sketches, engravings, etchings and manuscripts complete the picture. The scope of the illustrations shows the scope of the book. Drawings of the Globe theatre, of 'William Kemp and other actors, succeed illustrations of medieval drama. Some may be irritated by the facile wit of many of the captions under the pictures, as for example

“The Third Earl of Ddrset, a patron of Ben Jonson, showed the true Elizabethan splash, pouring out so much for finery that he floated on his debts.” This sort of thing is funnier heard than read. Nevertheless, a lot of history is compressed in short space. From a prologue about the propitious times- of Elizabethan discovery, Mr Burgess moves to chapters on Home, School, Work, Marriage and London. Shakespeare’s parentage is given in authentic detail, enlivened by Mr Burgess’s puns: “John was goad at clothing five fingers, as his son was to be good at clothing five feet” (Shakespeare’s father was a glover). At the invitation of the sonnet “Whoever hath her wish, thou hast thy Will,” Anthony Burgess proceeds to call the dramatist by this familiar name. He follows him thus through his school Latin texts. But his ear for English, he thinks, was not fostered by school but by the talk and prattle and bustle of the townsfolk. (Nevertheless, the classical background may have given shape and pith to his utterance.) With regard to the “lost years” before there is record of Shakespeare in London, Mr Burgess places him in the role of law-clerk as well as schoolmaster. The marriage to Anne Hathaway, he considers, was made against Shakespeare’s will (he puts the case imaginatively in his novel). In London, Mr Burgess juxtaposes an artistry of brutality with the fine art of music. Slaughter, and harmony, were, he thinks, alike delighted in by the dramatist who was of his time as well as transcending it. Likewise London’s horrors and stinks were one with its spirit of enterprise. After his biographical first chapters, Mr Burgess gives a retrospective picture of drama in London before Shakespeare. This pedestrian account js balanced by the lively chapter “Shakescene,” a picture of theatre in London when Shakespeare was himself the scene. Shakespeare's major patron, Southampton, and his friend the mysterious Mr W.H., are then examined, and the Sonnets looked to for clues; Anthony Burgess thinks they were mostly written under the patronage of. and for the benefit of, the third Earl of Southampton. Who was the Dark Lady? Here the answer is that she is anony- . mous, even composite. The period of Shakespeare’s establishment as a playwright and his rise to the rank of Gentleman is described less vividly than the early life. The Globe was built, and the "Poet’s War” or “Poetomachia” is briefly chronicled. Essex’s Rebellion of 1600 is linked with Shakespeare’s “Troilus and Cressida.” The parallel is convincingly made, both in choice of plot and the dark mood of “the disillusionment of lust and the decay of the state.” The death of Elizabeth I is the end of a theatrical era. With the arrival of James I came an intensification of the fashion for performing masques rather than plays. Shakespeare’s work after 1600 does not provide Burgess with the same happy hunting-ground for biographical conjecture that the earlier plays and poems did. Shakespeare’s successors in tragi-comedy are brought in, while Shakespeare’s children marry or die. Shakespeare’s Will, and the second-best bed, end the book.