WHO WAS SHAKESPEARE?

Otago Daily Times, Issue 21940, 29 April 1933, Page 4

WHO WAS SHAKESPEARE?

AN AUTHORITATIVE REPLY "A Short Life of Shakespeare. With the Sources." Abridged by Charles Williams from Sir Edmund Chambers’s " William Shakespeare. Illustrated. Oxford: at the Clarendon Press (Mr Humphrey Milford). (5s net.) «Shakespeare." By John Drlnkwater. Great Lives, No. 1, London: Duckworth. (2s net.)

Who was Shakespeare? He has been represented as a dissolute, licentious actor; as a charlatan and pervert; as a great lover or a saintly man. Frank Harris, in bis valuable study, drew him in lineaments that tend to become those of Harris himself; -.Clemence Dane made him the murderer of 1 Marlowe; Shaw promoted him to be the Queen's, lover. It is doubtful whether the Shakespearian scholars, creating their Shakespeare (alias Bacon, Oxford, Southampton et al) from “ internal evidence,”- or the makers of fiction conceiving Shakespeare in imagination through the prism of their own minds, have done most to confuse the ordinary unscholarly person who asks this unextraordinary question.v . The answer is contained in “ A Short Life of Shakespeare” b’ased by-Mir'Ghhrles Williams on Sir Edmund -Chambers’s large and scholarly compilation. This book tells no more, and no less than what is known definitely, beyond reasonable question, of the man whose name is attached to the greatest plays in the language. It is, when all is said, not very illuminating, but it should be known by everyone who essays, even by his own fireside, to study Shakespeare. gtrafcford the representatives of thirty nations have done honour to Shakespeare’s memory. They selected his 369th birthday as the occasion, but even there they were making an assumption. “AH that dan be inferred Sir Edmund Chambers 1 reminds us, “is that the birth was on a day not earlier than 24 Apr., 1563, or later than 23 Apr., 1564.” And so the story goes. Did Shakespeare hold horses for a living when first he went to London? The answer is that he may have. Did Shakespeare meet the Queen? It is permissible to suppose that he did so. At least he attended the Court of James in a red livery when the' Cpristable: of : Castile was ip'vLondon. Did Shakesp'eaire;" S - reside ously’iih London,' save for short lours, from the time he left Stratford; as a young man till the time he returned to spend his later years “as all men of good sense will wish theirs may be, in ease, retirement, and the conversation of his friends”? •He probably did. . Did Anne Hathaway never live with him in London? She probably did not. Did a drinking bout in hia native town hasten his death? It is more than possible, or we may be content to accept the report of. William Beeston that “he was not a company keeper ” and “ wouldn't be debauched, and if invited to, writ, he was- in . paine.” Even Mr Drinkwater, : whose pleasant little addition to Shakespearian literature (from Whitcombe and Tombs) is not intended to be controversial, has his private fancy to add to Shakespeare legend. Mr Drinkwater is quite convinced that in his retirement Shakespeare wrote poetry which has been lost. “If so," he exults, “what verse it must have been!” The hypotheses are quite unsound. Shakespeare was not, in his latter years, an unknown man., He was the most honoured dramatist and poet of his day. Had he written wonderful poetry during those last five years it is incredible?, that it should all have been lost', including contemporary reference to it. Sappho’s work was ordered by the ecclesiastical authorities to be utterly and ignominiously burned, yet parts of it survive after 26 centuries. How.- less likely that Shakespeare’s would have been destroyed, who is not banned even in Boston! Yet Mr Drinkwater, strangely, goes out of his way to assert that the Mountjoy depositions, discovered in 1910, do not suggest that Shakespeare lived in Cheapside in 1604, a possibility that is clearly established. But Mr,Drinkwater—and this is the one fault that may be found in his book—is inclined to be careless of facts which his preconceptions, rather than his intellect, .reject as ; unsuitable: and his reference to dhe authentic sources must have been cursory. Witness a bad misquotation on page 61. On the whole, however, Mr Drinkwatere “ Shakespeare ” serves to suggest adequately and fairly the personality of the man who was-Shakespeare. Head in conjunction with Mr Williams's abridgment of Chambers (which contains, as well as the actual narrative, all the important sources and contemporary allusions), it gives any ordinary reader all the information he should require as a background to the plays. Mr Drinkwater is particularly interesting when he writes of the theatrical aspect of Shakespeare’s work, establishing convincingly that it is best presented without the elaborate trappings and settings of n recent tradition. The Elizabethan stage, he contends, achieved in presentation “ a purity besides which most stage productions would seem to be incurably messy and unkempt.” A play was given at once with the greatest possible economy and the greatest possible effect, fettered by no “fourth wall ” convention. “The excellence lay in a fixed determination to concentrate on two things, great drama and great acting, to the relative exclusion of everything else.” Fortunately the modern stage, different though its technique is, seems to be getting around again to that ideal. Dame Sybil Thorndike s “Macbeth,” handsomely dressed, it. is true, was played mainly without settings aside from a few inconspicuous hangings end some “props ” that had done service in “ Saint Joan,” yet it must have been a revelation to many who have seen the tragedy on a dozen stages. Margaret Rawlings’s settings for " Happy . and Glorious” indicated that an expenditure of sense instead of pence may put vigour into any production. In remembering Shakespeare’s birthday people should remember, too, that the man they celebrate is “ the energetic, bright-eyed poet of the London playhouses,” not the uninspiring bald-pate ot the Stratford monument: that it is the living genius in his works which must be perpetuated. Bardolatry and elaborate stage devices are all right in their, place, but they should be kept there, in Stratford and the expensive theatre, not per-

mitted to taint the common man’s perception of the common wisdom and humanity, of Will Shakespeare. ■ ’ : ■ J. M.

Jane Austen Juvenilia Jane Austen is known to have left three MS. notebooks containing juvenilia. One of these was published in 1922 as “ Love and Friendship.” A second was known to be preserved in the family, but has not been published. A third had riot been traced. This last volume has now turned up and has been acquired by the Friends of the Bodleian. It will be published by the Oxford University Press under the title “ Volume the First.” The Fiction Market Mr Cecil Roberts, the novelist and critic, in an address on “ Literary Taste,” reported by the Aberdeen Press, said that a publisher had told him that bis readers last year bad read 37,000 manuscripts of novels, of which 1400 were selected for publication, 605 were published, 310 paid for the cost of printing, 92 brought the author a sum not exceeding £lO, 35 brought a sum equivalent to a decent living, and three brought the authors comparative opulence, these three being the worst on the list. Scholar-Gipsy With the newspapers keeping us continually aware of the political turmoil and unrest of Central Europe, it is easy to forget that the large population of wandering gipsies of Hungary and Rumania still offers to the enterprising traveller a romantic world of quaint habits and enchanting customs. Professor Walter Starkie, who is professor of Spanish at Dublin University, set off with his fiddle on his back to live with these gipsies, and, earning his meals with his fiddle, he found them not only a romantic panacea for the realism of the modern world, but a race with a. delicious and uncurbed zest for life and . an unrivalled heritage of folk lore and captivating folk music. Ho has turned the diary_ he kept while with them into a book which John Murray will shortly issue, with a frontispiece by Arthur Racklram, under the title of “ Ragglc-Taggle.”