A Life After Life For Shakespeare
Jack Lynch's argument in "Becoming Shakespeare: The Unlikely Afterlife That Turned a Provincial Playwright Into the Bard" (Walker, 320 pages, $24.95) is reminiscent of Walter Pater's idea that the greatness of "Mona Lisa" depends on the masses of people who have projected greatness onto the painting. This is not to say that Leonardo's work is not a masterpiece, any more than it is to suggest that Shakespeare is not the immortal bard. On the contrary, the Leonardos and the Shakespeares both create and benefit from our collective impulse to impose an aesthetic order on existence.
If Shakespeare is the superlative object of our search for artistic perfection, this is because he is so elusive, so Mona Lisa-like. Or as Matthew Arnold put it in "Shakespeare":
Others abide our question. Thou art free.
We ask and ask: Thou smilest and art still,
Out-topping knowledge.
Mr. Lynch quotes Paul Fussell's remark that what is known about Shakespeare would probably fit on a 3-inch-by-five-inch index card.
While Mr. Fussell may exaggerate, most of what we know about Shakespeare derives from legal documents and the stray observations by the bard's contemporaries. No manuscript written in his hand exists, and he never published his plays. Nothing found in his will even acknowledges he was a writer — a fact that had led to much speculation that Shakespeare was not Shakespeare but rather Francis Bacon, the Earl of Oxford, or even Christopher Marlowe, who faked his death so that he would go on writing as Shakespeare.
Mr. Lynch has no patience for such speculations, though he might concede that they, too, are part of the biography of Shakespeare's afterlife. But Mr. Lynch is more concerned with how Shakespeare became more alive after his death than during his lifetime. A keen literary historian, writing in pellucid prose, Mr. Lynch re-creates the truly extraordinary trajectory of a B+ writer (this is the grade his contemporaries would have given him) who suffered obscurity immediately after his demise and then virtual extinction after the Puritans successfully shut down the English theater.
Not until the restoration of the monarchy and the play-loving Charles II did Shakespeare's fortunes revive. Even then, though, he took second place to Ben Jonson, a classical author who, unlike Shakespeare, observed the unities of place and time and seemed less vulgar (the raunchy Porter scene in "Macbeth," for example, was routinely excised in performance).
But 17th-century and 18th-century objections to Shakespeare's faults, including his obsession with punning and mixing comic and tragic scenes in a most ungodly way, gave way to fascination with his characters and the desire to improve upon them. Surely King Lear, for instance, did not have to come to such a miserable end. The happy ending version of the play was popular right up to the end of the 19th century. As the critic Michael Dobson explains, "Shakespeare's plays belonged to the theatre more significantly than they belonged to Shakespeare." And, adds Mr. Lynch, "All were fair game for rewriting."
Mr. Lynch might have made more of Shakespeare's stagecraft and verbal vivacity. As any actor knows, he is marvelously playable and much fun to parody — as Mark Twain demonstrated in "Huckleberry Finn." Shakespeare's wonderfully quotable words positively cavort and are easily susceptible to memorization.
"Becoming Shakespeare" focuses, instead, on the scholars who set about restoring the playwright's corrupted texts and the forgers who fed the public appetite for documents authenticating the bard's existence. Mr. Lynch spends much of a chapter on the story of a young scamp who tried to impress his Shakespeare-besotted father with a tale about a lost play he had uncovered among some old papers. This play even got produced in London, and though it was howled off the stage, the father refused to believe it was a fake because he believed his son was not clever enough to imitate Shakespeare.
Mr. Lynch does not deplore any of the Shakespeare travesties — not even one by an eminent scholar who made major discoveries but also inserted fake findings right alongside his legitimate aperçus. To this day, scholars can be fooled by seemingly reliable emendations.
Missing from this entertaining survey is a chapter on Shakespeare biography, though Mr. Lynch does include a few comments on it in his "further reading section." He notes, for example, that Stephen Greenblatt's "Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare" (2004) is too speculative. Quite so. But surely Mr. Greenblatt's flights of imagination are just the kind of stuff that has contributed to Shakespeare's robust afterlife.
Quibbles aside, this is a very impressive, accessible book that synthesizes and clarifies hundreds of years of scholarship, and as such belongs on every Shakespeare shelf.
