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The Shakespeare Circle: An Alternative Biography, edited by Paul Edmondson and Stanley Wells
by Willy Maley

The Shakespeare Circle: An Alternative Biography, ed. Paul Edmondson and Stanley Wells. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2015. xii + 358 pp. ISBN: 978-11076990901. $22.00 paper.

 

In their “General Introduction” to The Shakespeare Circle: An Alternative Biography, a landmark publication bound to have a lasting impact, Paul Edmondson and Stanley Wells begin by inviting readers, like the Chorus to Henry V, to use their imagination:

Imagination is needed if we are to bring the information we have about another human being to life. When the subject is Shakespeare, although we may continually lament that the facts we most desire do not exist, we may decide to broaden the scope of how to use what is available the better to imagine what his life was like.

(4)

The editors go on to ask:

Did he attend Edmund Spenser’s funeral or see Essex’s troops ride out on their way to the Irish wars (as Simon Forman did)? He certainly would have known other playwrights, poets and writers including Thomas Dekker, Thomas Heywood, John Marston, Thomas Nashe, Edmund Spenser and John Webster. Some of these would no doubt have been among his regular companions and associates. Together they form a litany of names that it becomes all too easy to imagine surrounding him as drinking companions in the Mermaid Tavern.

(4)

Reading the introduction, I was minded of Hamlet’s putdown of Osric: 

Thus has he—and many more of the same bevy that I know the drossy age dotes on—only got the tune of the time and, out of an habit of encounter, a kind of yeasty collection, which carries them through and  through the most fanned and winnowed opinions; and do but blow them to their trial, the bubbles are out.

(5.2.189-195)

The fore-title and subtitle suggest something new and different, but the kind of “circle” on offer here is not what many readers would understand from other Early Modern explorations of literary circles, and is “alternative” in ways one would not expect. Yet the collection as a whole is far from yeasty. On the contrary, it is a gossips’ feast, and the contributors do an excellent job of situating Shakespeare among a crisscross of connections, from the familial to the relatively unfamiliar. Indeed, such is the significance of this work that I want to pause for a moment and circle round it by thinking through the idea of the circle, since it is not a notion that has shaped Shakespeare criticism to date. 

For Shakespeare, circles could take various forms, and ripple out of sight, as Joan of Arc observes in 1 Henry VI:

Glory is like a circle in the water,
Which never ceaseth to enlarge itself
Till by broad spreading it disperse to nought.
With Henry’s death the English circle ends:
Dispersed are the glories it included.
(1.2.133-7)[1]

Here, according to the OED, Shakespeare uses the word in the sense of “A perfectly round plane figure,” but one feels there’s more at stake than merely describing a circle in the air—or water.[2] In Henry V, Burgundy’s sexual pun plays on the act of intercourse “As a figure of magic or necromancy”: “If you would conjure in her, you must make a circle; if conjure up love in her in his true likeness, he must appear naked and blind” (5.2.288-90).

The same double meaning rears its head in Romeo and Juliet, where Mercutio jests:

                    ‘Twould anger him
To raise a spirit in his mistress’ circle
Of some strange nature, letting it there stand
Till she had laid it and conjur’d it down.

(2.1.23-6)

In As You Like It, when Amiens asks “What that ‘ducdame’”? Jaques answers: “‘Tis a Greek invocation, to call fools into a circle” (2.5.56-7). Later, Jaques tells Duke Senior

                 this boy is forest-born,
And hath been tutored in the rudiments
Of many desperate studies, by his uncle,
Whom he reports to be a great magician,
Obscured in the circle of this forest.

(5.4.30-34)

In King John we get two senses of circle, both revolving around sovereignty. “A band encircling the head; a crown, coronet, diadem,” is invoked when John tells Pandulph: “Thus have I yielded up into your hand / The circle of my glory. [giving the crown]” (5.1.1-2). A more expansive circle, “The circuit or compass of a place,” is conjured up when the Bastard informs Pandulph that the king intends: “To whip this dwarfish war, this pigmy arms, / From out the circle of his territories” (5.2.135-6).

The first sense returns in Antony and Cleopatra, when Cleopatra craves from Caesar “The circle of the Ptolemies for her heirs” (3.12.18), which Johnson glossed as “The diadem; the ensign of royalty.” The idea of “a completed revolution or course of time, or of action, or events in time; a cycle, period” is offered in King Lear when Edmund admits, “The wheel is come full circle, I am here” (5.3.172).

With Shakespeare, separating the different senses of circle can be tricky. In Titus Andronicus, there seems something more than mere magic to Titus’s ritual:

You heavy people, circle me about,
That I may turn me to each one of you
And swear unto my soul to right your wrongs. […]
The vow is made.

(3.1.277-80)

Yet the OED gives later dates—1646 and 1714 respectively—for the definitions most relevant to the book under review: “A number of persons united by acquaintance, common sentiments, interests, etc.; a ‘set’ or coterie; a class or division of society, consisting of persons who associate together,” and “A number of persons standing or seated round a person or object of interest; ‘an assembly surrounding the principal person’ (Johnson), as at Court, at a Drawing-room or Levée, etc.”[3] As someone who has worked on the Spenser Circle, and its predecessor the Sidney Circle, I often wondered why there was little talk of a Shakespeare Circle. Considering that Shakespeare was a lifelong collaborator whereas Spenser collaborated only with Harvey early on this seems odd.[4] John Freehafer speaks of “the Shakespeare circle in both Stratford and London” but there has been little written on this.[5] Until now, that is.

The Shakespeare Circle does not merely promise a new way of conceiving Shakespearean biography, it delivers a series of entry-points into Shakespeare through the lives and works of others that helped shape his own. The book’s three parts flag up the approach taken: “Family” (chapters 1-11); “Friends and Neighbours” (12-17); and “Colleagues and Patrons” (8-25). Each part is prefaced by a short editorial statement explaining its rationale; thus part 1 is introduced in a brusque fashion that makes the family a natural starting-point for half a volume on Shakespeare’s circle: “The closest members of the Shakespeare circle are his family. This section covers four generations” (9). The preface to the first part ends with one of the book’s relentless speculations about possible exchanges and experiences that cannot be verified, in this case an encounter between Susanna Hall, Shakespeare’s daughter, and Henrietta Maria: “It is interesting to imagine the conversations that might have taken place between the poet’s daughter and the wife of the theatre company’s majestic patron” (11). 

The opening chapter by Michael Wood, “His mother Mary Shakespeare,” has the bardolatry bells ringing out an alarm. Most studies of circles in the period do not begin with the author’s mother. Wood is aware of breaking new ground—“Even now the poet’s mother is perhaps the least known of his circle” (13)—and he works hard to bring Mary Arden to life and by extension to suggest ways in which her life impinged on her son’s: “It is reasonable to think that Mary carried down into James I’s reign the thought world of the pre-Reformation countryside in Warwickshire, which seems constantly present in her son’s language and imagination. Studies on Shakespeare’s upbringing tend to focus on the influence of grammar school and Latin learning, but it is surely likely that at least as important in shaping his ways of seeing was his mother” (24). The reader’s skepticism is challenged here, because of course a writer’s mother must play a part in her son’s life that should be recorded and recognized. From here on in, the emphasis on family, shorn of the suspicion of mere padding, takes on the sense of genuine scholarly engagement with a family portrait of the artist as a young man.

David Fallow follows with “His father John Shakespeare,” and begins by separating out the strands of thought on Shakespeare senior: “The first biography of William Shakespeare in 1709 describes the playwright’s father as ‘a considerable dealer in wool’ […] Winnow out the subsequent speculative or anecdotal descriptions of John Shakespeare and what emerges is a successful self-made man, active in the business that then dominated the nation’s economy” (26). Which is not to deny that a considerable deal of wool is woven into this volume. The persistent absence of material evidence presses contributors into increasingly imaginative ways of seeing, so that a lack of documentation on John Shakespeare’s early life leads to a leathering and weathering of what there is: “No record survives of his schooling, numeracy or literacy. The harsh reality for an apprentice glover would have been laboring outdoors, beating cold stinking hides, and scraping filth from pieces of leather” (27). More spinning of yarn comes when we are told: “The autocratic Elizabethan father had total sway over his family, who relied on him for their survival. Nothing suggests John Shakespeare deviated from this stereotype” (38). What does this actually tell us, other than that stereotypes go hand-in-glove with speculation? And yet Fallow’s final point is entirely reasonable: “the probability is that William first went to London as a businessman rather than as an impoverished poet” (38). Who can deny a father’s influence, or doubt the suggestion that the son turned his hand to another profession than the one his father trained him to pursue?

Catherine Richardson’s chapter, “His siblings,” is equally pertinent, looking at Shakespeare’s relationships with his brothers Gilbert, Richard and Edmund. (Shakespeare’s sister Joan is treated separately in this volume from the band of brothers.) As Richardson observes, “thinking about the siblings as a circle, as this book encourages us to do, means focusing on how they may or may not have operated as a family, with a sense of their identity as the next generation of Shakespeares” (41). Richardson’s conclusion links “Shakespeare’s brotherhood” in familial terms with his entry into a social and professional fraternity, so that “success meant thinking as a sibling”: “Shakespeare’s rapid rise on the public stage may have been unusual, but a more regular investment in brotherhood extended his theatrical achievements in social ways, underpinning that transition from playwright to gentleman” (47). Richardson’s brief essay is insightful and suggestive, but I was surprised here and elsewhere by the tendency for contributors to stop short of connecting biography with criticism. Here, some mention of the ways in which brothers feature in the playwright’s work would have strengthened the case being made.[6]

Cathy Shrank’s contribution, “His sister’s family: the Harts,” addresses itself to Joan, “Shakespeare’s sole surviving sibling,” who lost her brother immediately after she was widowed, two Williams in a week (51). Shrank’s essay shows how in-laws make inroads into Shakespeare’s world, and offers a fascinating glimpse of seventeenth-century family politics, down to the adoption of home and name in the form of a fiftieth anniversary gift: “Their connection with Shakespeare was commemorated through George Hart (Shakespeare’s great-nephew) christening his son ‘Shakespeare Hart’ in 1666” (55). Shakespeare Hart became a glazier.[7] One wonders whether he ever recited: “That hath his windows glazed with thine eyes” (Sonnet 24.8).

In “His wife Anne Shakespeare and the Hathaways,” Katherine Scheil homes in on another set of in-laws, focusing on “arguably the closest member of the Shakespeare circle,” but one with an elusive history (57). Scheil “revisits the various factual details associated with Anne Hathaway and her family, in order to give a clearer picture of realistic possibilities for her life story and for her role in the innermost ring of the Shakespeare circle” (57). She urges us to share in the common wish to know more about Shakespeare’s marriage circle, envisaged as a wedding ring:

Many have lamented the absence of details that might offer a window into the relationship between William Shakespeare and Anne Hathaway. The surviving historical documents about Anne Hathaway have been stitched together to create a narrative and construct a wife for Shakespeare, but often without acknowledging what is missing, or what other narratives may be possible. The material objects that remain, both legitimate and forged—love letters, a bed, remains of a house, an epitaph, a carved casket—have been made to stand in for the haunting sense of absence in the archives about this enigmatic woman who occupied the first ring of the Shakespeare circle.

(68-9)

At this point I found myself asking why so much time was being spent on family relations. What of the haunting presences in the archives?

Lachlan Mackinnon’s chapter, “His daughter Susanna Hall,” appears to continue the theme of imagining reactions to thinly evidenced material: “William Shakespeare’s monument in Holy Trinity Church will have caused quite a stir in Stratford when installed, sometime between 1616 and 1623” (71). Yet here too there is a patient and elaborate sifting of what we do know, or should know. According to Mackinnon: “She has always seemed the duller of Shakespeare’s daughters, the virtuous older sister who married well, inherited the bulk of her father’s estate and was principally responsible for her mother’s care in old age. I shall sketch a rather different picture” (74). He does, one in which Susanna emerges as a daughter far from dull who may have authored more than her own epitaph: “Through Susanna’s verses (not his) she and her father survive together” (83). This essay, with its mix of speculation and scrupulous scholarship, is characteristic of the collection as a whole. 

Greg Wells follows on from Susanna Hall by tracing the life of her husband. In “His son-in-law John Hall” there’s a nice skeptical passage on the extent to which Hall’s knowledge of medicine has some bearing on Shakespeare’s stage doctors (89-90), and a neat conclusion that simply states: “I suggest that their relationship started as one of mutual respect, and developed through shared business and family interests into a close friendship” (98). Yet despite this low-key conclusion there is some vivid comment here on Hall’s medical casebook, and while we may miss out in terms of our sense of a circle of a more conventional creative and cultural kind, we gain an enhanced understanding of the health and wellbeing of the society Shakespeare inhabited.

“His son Hamnet Shakespeare” sees Graham Holderness negotiate the ground between imagination and evidence with consummate ease through a disarming opening gambit: “Everything we know about Hamnet Shakespeare is that he was baptised 2 February 1585, Stratford-upon-Avon, one of a pair of twins; and buried, 11 August 1596. He was eleven years old. He was born; he lived; he died. And one more thing: he happened to be the only son of the most famous writer in history” (101). In the next sentence Holderness begins the work of teasing out the implications of who Hamnet “happened to be,” “a body of circumstantial evidence” that leads us to look to the father’s works for signs of his son’s life and the exit wound of an early and dramatic loss. Holderness takes us through the fragments upon which substantial surmises have been built: “We could conclude that there is no Hamnet Shakespeare story beyond those scraps of historical record, details that could be crammed onto a very small gravestone (though he doesn’t seem to have had one). However, a glance at a few mainstream Shakespeare biographies will show that the Hamnet Shakespeare biography has been fully and comprehensively written, over and over again, and in at least two principal versions” (102). In the first version, Hamnet is “a normal and healthy boy” who dies from a common infection (102). In the second, he is “the weaker of […] two twins,” who “died young as a consequence of his crippling birth defects” (103). As Holderness maintains, “Neither of these narratives is implausible […] But there is clearly a problem, when two diametrically opposed interpretations of the same data can co-exist without any recourse to definitive proof or conclusive argument” (104).

Holderness then proceeds to unpack biographical assumptions, finally enlisting the aid of James Joyce (106-8). According to Holderness, Joyce’s “creative explorations of the evidence provided to us by the documented life-history, and [by] performed and published works […] take us to a place where literary criticism and historical biography can’t really go” (107). Many of the contributions to this collection are “creative” in a more constrained sense, but Holderness wears his irony and invention on his sleeve.

Germaine Greer combines creative exploration with critical engagement in her chapter, “His daughter Judith and the Quineys,” as gender becomes the key to scantiness of information, so that Judith “joined the ranks of the vanishing women” (110). Greer provides both documentary detail and convincing historical arguments of contemporary relevance, the latter sometimes missing from the chapters of her co-contributors. Her concluding remarks are as speculative as others’ in this volume, but there’s also an edge in the shape of age as another vanishing point that we would do well to visualize: “The curious folk who had for years been coming to Stratford in search of Shakespeare never guessed that an old lady who sat every Sunday in the Quiney pew at Holy Trinity could have answered many of their questions—if she chose” (121).

Writing of “His granddaughter Lady Elizabeth Barnard,” René Weis is less probing or perceptive than Holderness or Greer: “To posterity there is something disarming about the fact that someone once called Shakespeare ‘grandfather,’ even if we have known all along that the Shakespeares were domestically no different from any other family in the Midlands of the time” (122). Referring to the pathologist’s report after the opening of the vault in 1981 Weis remarks: “If DNA sampling had been available at the time [her] remains would have provided us with an important route to Shakespeare’s” (133). My own feeling is that we may well find out more about Shakespeare from the DNB than from his DNA, and that the study of the literary milieu in which Shakespeare worked promises to yield more fruit for posterity than the pursuit of family connections.

Tara Hamling’s take on “His ‘cousin’: Thomas Greene” is subtler and more searching, opening with a question: “What might it have meant to Shakespeare to have a self-styled ‘cousin’ at the margins of kinship occupy the physical and metaphorical body of the household, the fundamental unit of early modern society and an environment through which wider circles of influence operated?” (135). The answer is as loaded as the question, because it raises the issue of extended family as players in the life, and of a “circle” as something where outliers can unexpectedly intrude on the inner ring, since “the term ‘cousin’ could be used to refer to a wide circle of distantly related kin” (136). This “cousin” who claims kinship with Shakespeare “cannot claim an entry in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography” (135). Here, at the limits of family, we are still a long way from the conventional understanding of a literary circle of likeminded poets, patrons, and printers. Instead, physical proximity rather than artistic affinity marks the point of contact. Greene is left out of Shakespeare’s will: “And yet, for a time at least, Thomas and William returned home by crossing the same threshold, they occupied the same space, shared the same facilities, and retired to bed in chambers close by” (142). If “Thomas Greene’s place in the Shakespeare circle remains elusive,” it raises the question of where we should look to establish a circle (142). The closing chapter of the first part of this “Alternative Biography,” Hamling’s contribution stops at the border between personal and professional worlds. It left me yearning for grounds more relative than this. I was minded of another Thomas Greene, one who does have a DNB entry, an enterprising actor who played a baboon and Bubble the clown at the Boar’s Head and the Red Bull, and whom one would like to think moved in the same circles as Shakespeare.[8] 

Leaving family behind—well, almost—part 2, “Friends and neighbours,” opens with the volume’s first editorial contribution, Stanley Wells’s erudite and perceptive treatment of “A close family connection: the Combes.” In 1616 Shakespeare left Thomas Combe his sword, which Wells notes “would have had sentimental and commemorative as well as financial value,” adding that the word sword “occurs hundreds of times in his plays” and in his poetry, including Sonnet 55 (159). What has become of the gifted sword remains a mystery: “Whether he prized his legacy, history does not record. Like the silver-gilt bowl that Shakespeare left to his granddaughter, it may have been inscribed with his initials and could survive still, unrecognised and undervalued” (160). As with the other Thomas Greene, here I wanted to hear more about another Thomas Combe, Sir John Harington’s servant and an emblematist, who in 1614 published one of the earliest English emblem books, The Theater of Fine Devices, with Shakespeare’s printer, Richard Field.[9]

Richard Field published Sir John Harington’s translation of Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso in 1591, and in 1593 reprinted Geoffrey Fenton’s Guicciardini. A reprint of Thomas North’s Plutarch followed in 1595, and in 1596 Field published The Faerie Queene, Petrucchio Ubaldini’s Rime, and Sir John Harington’s New Discourse of a Stale Subject, called the Metamorphosis of Ajax (1596). All of these authors had Irish connections. No mention is made of these links in Carol Chillington Rutter’s intriguing chapter, “Schoolfriend, publisher and printer Richard Field,” but she does have some valuable observations on the publishing industry, the profession of printing, and the potential impact on Shakespeare of the other works published by Field, including a bestselling medical book first published in 1583 by Thomas Vautrollier, the printer who taught Field (172).  

In “Living with the Mountjoys” David Kathman explores Shakespeare’s relationship with French Huguenot immigrants from whom he rented a room in London during what would be a highly productive period in the early 1600s. Christopher and Marie Mountjoy were makers of “head-tires” for wealthy women (174). Kathman’s nimble exploration flits from the appearance of such tires in Shakespeare’s drama to the ways in which the Mountjoys’ family affairs may have made their way into plays like Measure for Measure and All’s Well That Ends Well, and finally to the degree to which Shakespeare became embroiled in litigation involving his former landlord (181-4). There’s no mention of the character of the French herald called Mountjoy in Henry V, or of Charles Blount, eighth Baron Mountjoy and earl of Devonshire (1563–1606).[10] The editors of the Folger edition of Henry V suggest that the general coming from Ireland with rebellion broached on his sword may refer not to Essex but to his more successful successor, Lord Mountjoy, thus complicating further the Franco-Hibernian undertones of the play.[11]

David Riggs’s contribution might have been called “His fellow playwright Ben Jonson,” but instead it’s simply entitled “Ben Jonson,” giving the latter his place as a formidable figure in his own right. It is a much more straightforward essay than the others in this section, because Jonson’s relations with Shakespeare are well documented, and because Riggs approaches the relationship as one between two theatre practitioners who were learning from one another, as well as great rivals who parted company in terms of dramatic vision. Riggs may be less “alternative” in his approach to questions of biography than some other contributors had to be, given the slender sources they had to work with, but his treatment of the ways in which these two writers circled one another with a mixture of suspicion and grudging admiration is deftly done, and his comment that Jonson’s embracing of a writer who had gone before, alongside and ahead of him, ahead of his time and for all time, “was a remarkable act of critical recognition” indicates the extent to which if there was a circle with Shakespeare at its center then Jonson was its leading spokesperson (197).

In “Richard Barnfield, John Weever, William Basse and other encomiasts,” Andrew Hadfield distances himself from some of his over-encomiastic fellow contributors. Indeed, from his opening line, Hadfield sets out his stall as a critical celebrant: “Shakespeare was certainly well known to his contemporaries as an author, even if he was not uncritically celebrated” (199). As one would expect from Spenser’s biographer, Hadfield is adept at connecting writers. After a detailed discussion of influence and interaction, he can convincingly conclude of these key contemporaries of Shakespeare’s: “They knew who he was, what he had written, and the characteristic style he adopted. He was one of them, part of a larger group of writers in London and the surrounding provinces, who they would read and discuss and who, in turn, would read and discuss their writing with some of them” (211). Here, the reader gets a stronger sense than in other chapters of a circle that is creative, critical, and collaborative.

Susan Brock’s long and learned contribution, “Last things: Shakespeare’s neighbours and beneficiaries,” is a painstaking portrait of the Stratford legacy, piecing together and picking apart the poet’s will in order to investigate elusive figures like Thomas Russell, who oversaw the will, and about whom we wish we knew more. Brock says, “Perhaps Shakespeare just liked him,” but this is one of those points where lack of evidence makes judgment difficult (217). “How did this group of Stratford citizens come to be the poet’s special friends? Perhaps like Jonson, they responded to Shakespeare’s ‘open and free nature’ […] and he to theirs, for almost all were mavericks in some way” (226). It is these characters that we would need to investigate further if we want to get a richer picture of their benefactor bard. 

With part 3, “Colleagues and patrons,” we are on more familiar ground, particularly as this final section opens with Andy Kesson’s engaging essay, “His fellow dramatists and early collaborators.” Kesson uses Robert Greene’s (or Henry Chettle’s) Groatsworth vision of Shakespeare as a kind of crow’s nest from which to survey the rise of early Shakespeare on the one hand and the reaction of Shakespeare critics, especially biographers, to the crow comparison on the other. This bird’s-eye view feels like the most lightly referenced contribution, but only because the course of the argument runs smoothly without being cluttered with quotations or coordinates. It is in fact quite weighty work, and manages to raise key questions about authorship, collegiality and the idea of a “career,” “misleading as a noun, much more accurate as a verb,” as Kesson tells his students: “Early Shakespeare careered through multiple professional possibilities—actor, business man, playwright—and, as Groatsworth shows, such careering prompted clashes and collaborations in the very definition of authorship itself” (246).

John H. Astington, in “His theatre friends: the Burbages,” charts the emergence and ascendance of a dramatic dynasty that played a vital role in Shakespeare’s career, and offers an actor’s-eye view, the memorial ring bequeathed him by his beloved bard a measure of Richard Burbage’s place in the inner circle: “Shakespeare’s true legacy, we might think now, as Burbage may also have thought then, was the succession of outstanding stage parts that the leading Jacobean actor had brought to life, from Richard III onwards” (256). Astington alludes at the end of his essay to Charles I’s experience of seeing Burbage act Shakespeare, and how the Folio comforted the king in his last days (259). One wonders what the condemned king thought of Richard III.

Bart Van Es carries forward the idea of Shakespeare as an actor’s playwright in “His fellow actors Will Kemp, Robert Armin and other members of the Lord Chamberlain’s Men and the King’s Men.” Van Es tells a good story and evokes a rich creative milieu, using the individual tales of his assorted performers as a way of circling, silhouetting and finally foregrounding Shakespeare, so that an actor’s life can stand in for the actor-playwright who placed him centre stage: “Armin’s journey to the Globe in 1599 both literally and figuratively crossed the paths of printers, playwrights and patrons before it ever came to the world of the actors—this was a journey that Shakespeare himself had also made” (273). This essay is a fine instance of the scholarly circling and shadowing that gives rise to fresh insights.

Alan Nelson, in “His literary patrons,” focuses most lucidly on Henry Wriothesley, third earl of Southampton. Nelson mixes careful scholarship with cavalier speculation as he traces the crossing-points between poet and patron. Having established that “Shakespeare was a rock-star modern poet capable of setting young male hearts aflutter” (287), he goes on to suggest that influence and inspiration combined to make this relationship especially fruitful: “Did the connection between Southampton and Shakespeare last beyond the poetically productive years 1593 and 1594? Did a personal tie lead the Earl to invite Shakespeare’s company to Southampton House, London, for a performance of Love’s Labour’s Lost following the Earl’s release from prison in 1604? Whether the friendship lasted but a year, or more than a decade, it was sufficiently powerful to inspire great admiration, and, particularly in Venus and Adonis, Lucrece and the Sonnets, great poetry” (287).

The addition of inspiration to influence and cultivation further enriches the idea of a circle, but what of collaboration? In “His collaborator George Wilkins,” Duncan Salkeld’s opening gambit sets the tone for a bruising encounter with a key contemporary. Salkeld doesn’t pull his punches in tackling Wilkins warts-and-all:

George Wilkins is remembered today largely for two reasons—for co-writing Pericles with Shakespeare and for running a tavern or bawdy house. Neither activity has enhanced his reputation. By all accounts, he was an unlikeable figure, a man evidently given to violent outbursts and physical attacks against women. Critics have kept their distance from him and wished that Shakespeare might have done so too. (289)

What Van Es and Nelson did for Armin and Southampton, Salkeld does for Wilkins, using the evidence of his life and work as a way of highlighting Shakespeare’s parallel world, and it works well. Wilkins was written out of the story at an early stage, and modern critics persist in underplaying his contribution, but Salkeld does enough to suggest that the offstage antics of this problematic interlocutor may have informed the drama in profitable ways, more about the making of money than a meeting of minds: “Since history has left no trace of a personal friendship between the two dramatists, it is likely that this particular collaboration was a purely commercial venture” (295).

Emma Smith, in “His collaborator Thomas Middleton,” addresses a collaborator of a different order, one whom critics can more readily credit as a crucial contributor to Shakespeare’s corpus, and whose input is likely to become ever more visible: “Two contemporary critical strands converge to make it highly likely that further Middletonian collaboration or adaptation will be discovered in the Shakespeare canon: the new embrace of the collaborative energies of early modern theatre; and a quantifiable and increasingly robust understanding of the textual markers of Middleton’s authorship” (297). Middleton may have given Shakespeare a jumpstart for the life to come. He certainly learned from Shakespeare, leaned on him, and lent him a helping hand. Smith demonstrates how far new approaches to authorship, adaptation and attribution are reshaping our understanding of collaboration, and suggests that Middleton may yet be placed nearer to the middle of the Shakespeare canon rather than remaining at the margins, much to the chagrin of those still wedded to the notion of a solitary genius working in splendid isolation: “The vehemence of some of the defences of sole authorship betrays the radical potential of this line of enquiry” (303).

Lucy Munro’s chapter, “His collaborator John Fletcher,” is equally insightful in its analysis of another important contributor to Shakespeare’s work, often acknowledged, but not yet fully appreciated. One of the strengths of Munro’s argument is the emphasis on Fletcher’s own qualities as a writer, and in particular the ways in which his own drama developed Shakespearean themes: “Fletcher’s Bonduca adopts and adapts the Romano-British setting of Cymbeline, presenting the story of Boudicca as a sustained exploration of the danger and allure of Roman political and cultural domination” (312). Such literary cover versions are common, so that what comes after collaboration is posthumous prestige, legacy and leverage: “Shakespeare’s multiple collaborations with Fletcher thus help us to reconsider his working practices, his final years of creativity, and his afterlife on the Jacobean stage and beyond” (313).

Paul Edmondson’s authoritative intervention, “His editors John Heminges and Henry Condell,” is an exemplary account of how scripts went from page to stage and back again, and the ways in which editorial decisions could rewrite dramatic history, parcelling out the plays and parts thereof in a manner that makes the work anew: “The 1623 Folio shapes and constructs Shakespeare differently from the theatrical world in which he had lived and worked” (324). Yet this editorial work is representative of the collaborative nature of playwriting and publishing. Moreover, since his editors, fellow actors and writers, inhabited the same small world, they are also our best witnesses to the work: “Heminges’s and Condell’s literary sensibilities and their loyalty to Shakespeare helped to shape his works and reputation. They knew how and why he wrote, how he revised his work, and how he divided his time up between Stratford-upon-Avon and London. They could a tale or two unfold” (326). And they do—we just have to listen carefully to the lines they left behind.

In their eloquent “Closing remarks,” Edmondson and Wells distil the collection’s concerns with clarity and precision. Despite the riches they have gathered, the editors recognize that there are ripples to come: “there are always new circles to explore, different stories to tell ” (334). Taking up the invitation, I found myself reflecting with Imogen that “I’th’ world’s volume / Our Britain seems as of it, but not in’t” (3.4.136-7).

The Shakespeare Circle omits to address the Irish experiences of key source figures. Their subtitle, An Alternative Biography, conceals the fact that there is one alternative not on offer to the contextual confines in which Shakespeare’s circle is examined, and that is a non-English alternative. There has been much work in recent years on Celtic Shakespeare, and the ways in which Ireland, Scotland, and Wales informed and impinged upon his world, but here the Stratford-London axis is largely undisturbed. I would like to have seen a more archipelagic, less Anglocentric collective biography. Given that a number of translators providing key sources for Shakespeare—Lodowick Bryskett, Geoffrey Fenton, Thomas North, Barnaby Rich, and Petrucchio Ubaldini—all served in Ireland, perhaps in future we will speak of Shakespeare’s Irish circle. The sole allusion to Fenton makes no mention of his status as a source for Othello, merely noting that Richard Field reprinted his work along with that of North (168). One would have thought that “Master Fenton” in The Merry Wives of Windsor might have seemed pertinent. North is another Shakespearean source, and another of Spenser’s contemporaries in Ireland whose service there goes unremarked. North went from Chester to Dublin in October 1580 as a captain, returning in March 1582, and later served again as a captain in Dublin from September-December 1596.[12] Barnabe Googe is a further absentee, yet he too has been recognized as a possible influence on Shakespeare.[13]

“Dendrochronology,” says Margaret Drabble in her “Afterword,” “now a comparatively venerable method of investigation, has demonstrated that Shakespeare’s granddaughter Elizabeth Hall cannot have been born at the house known as Hall’s Croft, and the more recent tools provided by DNA, hopes René Weis, may yet tell us more about her long and interesting afterlife” (335). At this point the reader may feel we have come a long way from a circle conventionally conceived, but then that is exactly what Edmondson and Wells offer—an alternative biography: civic, collective, collegial, communal. Drabble continues: “Searchable online databases have helped scholars to trace documents and references in [Hall’s] father’s medical textbooks, and computer-aided stylistic analysis has shed compelling new light on Shakespeare’s collaborations with Thomas Middleton—as Emma Smith challenges, in concluding her chapter on this subject, ‘Watch this space’” (335). 

Watch this space indeed, for online searchable databases may tell us more about Shakespeare and his contemporaries than dendrochronology or DNA, and “computer-aided stylistic analysis” may shed new light on more than Middleton. As Macbeth remarks, “Stones have been known to move, and trees to speak” (3.4.122). Tree-rings are no doubt vital for establishing roots, and like Birnam Wood can unsettle our expectations, but other circles matter too.[14] Edmondson and Wells have given us a monumental work which will generate debate and discussion for years to come. This is an essay collection of immense significance, a touchstone text bristling with engaging observations and telling asides, a critical companion to Shakespeare that places him in excellent company, and an open invitation for critics to continue to observe the ripples of a writer whose circle “never ceaseth to enlarge itself.”

Willy Maley
University of Glasgow



[1] All references to Shakespeare are to the revised Arden Edition of the Complete Works. See The Arden Shakespeare: Complete Works, ed. Richard Proudfoot, Ann Thompson, and David Scott Kastan, Bloomsbury, 2001.

[2] All definitions and etymologies are from the OED.

[3] As John Kerrigan observes elsewhere, “This is a collective corporeal oath even if Titus makes most of the moves.” See Shakespeare’s Binding language, Oxford UP, 2016, 131.

[4] For an earlier effort to see Shakespeare as part of a circle, see C. Martin Mitchell, The Shakespeare Circle, A Life of Dr. John Hall, Shakespeare’s Son-in-law, with Glimpses of their Intimate Friends and Relations, Cornish Bros., 1947.

[5] John Freehafer, “Leonard Digges, Ben Johnson, and the Beginning of Shakespeare Idolatry,” Shakespeare Quarterly, vol. 21, no. 1, 1970, pp. 63-75, at 63. David Lee Miller reminds me “there is at least some case to be made that the collection of lyrics published with ‘Astrophel’ is collaborative, and of course there is also E. K.”

[6] For one example among many, Louis Adrian Montrose, “‘The Place of a Brother’ in As You Like It: Social Process and Comic Form,” Shakespeare Quarterly, vol. 32, no. 1, 1981, pp. 28–54.

[7] See Robert Bell Wheler, An Historical Account of the Birth-place of Shakespeare, The Birth-Place Fund, 1863; first published 1824, 14.

[8] Herbert Berry, “Greene, Thomas (bap. 1573, d. 1612),” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford UP, 2004; online edition, May 2008, accessed 3 May 2016, http://www.oxforddnb.com.ezproxy.lib.gla.ac.uk/view/article/67760. 

[9] On the identification of Harington’s servant with Shakespeare’s Stratford neighbor see William Sebastian Heckscher, Peter Maurice Daly, and Daniel S. Russell, eds., Emblematic Perceptions: Essays in Honor of William S. Heckscher on the Occasion of his Ninetieth Birthday, V. Koerner, 1997, where the idea is entertained “that both the emblematist and his publisher belonged to the small circle of Stratford entrepreneurs that included Shakespeare” (8). See Michael Bath’s essay in the same collection: “‘Dirtie Devises’: Thomas Combe and the Metamorphosis of Ajax,” 9-23. See also Jason Scott-Warren, “Harington, Sir John (ba1560, d. 1612),” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford UP, 2004; online edition, May 2015, accessed 3 May 2016, http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/12326. 

[10] Christopher Maginn, “Blount, Charles, eighth Baron Mountjoy and earl of Devonshire (1563–1606),” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford UP, 2004; online edition, Jan. 2008, accessed 3 May 2016, http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/2683.

[11] Barbara A. Mowat and Paul Werstine, eds., Henry V (Washington Square P, 1995), The New Folger Library Shakespeare, 242.

[12] See Tom Lockwood, “North, Sir Thomas (1535–1603?),” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford UP, 2004; online edition, Jan. 2008, accessed 24 June 2015, http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/20315.

[13] Geoffrey Bullough, Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare: Early comedies. Poems. Romeo and Juliet, Routledge and Paul, 1957, 206.

[14] For an exemplary approach to archipelagic circles see Sarah Prescott, “Archipelagic Coterie Space: Katherine Philips and Welsh Women’s Writing,” Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature, vol. 33, no. 2, 2014, pp. 51-76. For a non-archipelagic view that looks at the importance of place see Katherine Scheil, “Shakespearian Biography and the Geography of Collaboration,” Journal of Early Modern Studies, vol. 5, 2016, pp. 69-90. 

Comments

  • letter boxed 11 months, 4 weeks ago

    Anyone who wants to learn something new about the playwright and the times he lived in will find it interesting. Imaginary first-person audio accounts from the featured individuals are available on a companion website.

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  • lego 2k drive 8 months, 4 weeks ago

    Friends of The Shakespeare Birthplace Trust take on new voices and read unique recollections of Shakespeare's group of relatives, friends, fellow-actors, colleagues, and patrons.

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  • https://www.gilbertphotobooth.com/ 5 months, 1 week ago

    They were aware of his identity, writings, and distinctive writing style.

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  • tunnel rush 1 month, 1 week ago

    The remarkable new book written by John Kerrigan, which investigates how Shakespeare's plays are involved in a continuous chain of reflections on the "binding" power of language, is an incredibly ambitious work of literature.

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46.1.3

Cite as:

Willy Maley, "The Shakespeare Circle: An Alternative Biography, edited by Paul Edmondson and Stanley Wells," Spenser Review 46.1.3 (Spring-Summer 2016). Accessed March 28th, 2024.
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