THE MOTIVATION OF SHAKESPEARE – ON HIS BIRTHDAY/DEATH DAY

We don’t know a lot about the life of William Shakespeare, which is surprising. When you consider how well documented some of his contemporaries were, when you consider that he was living well into the age of print, and when you consider how prolific and great a writer he was, then it most certainly is surprising. Even more when you consider how many books have been written about that life that we know so little about. (My favourite is possibly Ian Wilson’s: Shakespeare: the Evidence).

In fact to is because we know so little that has led to the cottage industry of ‘Shakespeare did not write his plays … Bacon, Marlowe, Oxford [fill in the name] did’. These theories are fascinating but certainly false; there is plenty of evidence that Shakespeare did write the plays he is credited with, and nobody at the time suggested otherwise. I cannot claim to have read all the authors of the absurd ‘Shakespeare didn’t write brigade’, but I have read several. One underlying argument of such works invariably seems to be: Shakespeare could not have written the plays because his social background and his education, or more precisely his lack of education(he didn’t go to Oxbridge). It sounds plausible until you realise it is just the pretentious snobbery of the English class system asserting itself – trying to re-claim this darling for its own.

And that’s the trouble – as Professor Schoenbaum observed in “Shakespeare’s Lives” – everyone wants to claim Shakespeare for their own, and re-make him in their own image. My favourite Shakespeare biography even, by Ian Wilson, argues Shakespeare actually was a Catholic, and – guess what? – Wilson is a Catholic!

Perhaps this is why Shakespeare is so motivating – quite apart from his sublime works – because what little we do know of his actual life can be interpreted in so many ways, and can almost exactly fit the gods of our own mind.

In the Tao Te Ching it says that ‘the way that can spoken of is not the way’. The way of Shakespeare’s life seems almost equally unspeakable, and unwrite-able (though many try). That is his mystery – and our motivation – as we keep trying.

Shakespeare says in Hamlet: There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so

James