New book reveals the real Shakespeare

His plays are renowned, but a new book unravels the mystery of the man, says Rita de Brun

ASK any school kid for facts about William Shakespeare and they’ll say: ‘writer of 37 plays, 154 sonnets, four poems.’ Ask any scholar and they’ll say: ‘the plagiarism question.’

The man behind the plays has long been mysterious, but that’s changing, with the publication of 30 Great Myths about Shakespeare, a new book by Laurie Maguire and Emma Smith.

Maguire is an Oxford professor and her co-author, Smith, a fellow academic, so it’s hardly surprising that this is a scholarly book.

Yet while there are paragraphs dedicated to the merits of iambic pentameters, acoustic paradigm shifts, and the difficulty of distinguishing confluence from influence, they’re greatly outnumbered by those dedicated to delightful details about the man and his time.

At 18, Shakespeare married Anne Hathaway, who was seven or eight years his senior, and he sometimes left her short of money, and, in his will, he left her his ‘second-best bed.’

Some see this as meanness, others defend it, saying that would have been the marital bed in Jacobean households (with the best bed reserved for guests), so the bequest was a romantic one.

We will never know: the notion that Shakespeare hated his wife is examined in the book, but the evidence for his affection, or otherwise, for her, remains ambiguous.

Despite the title, 30 Great Myths About Shakespeare, Maguire says that myth-busting was never the motivation.

“The intention was to evaluate the evidence that exists, illustrate how that has been interpreted or misinterpreted, and show what our conclusions as to the truth about Shakespeare reveal about our own personal investment in the stories we tell,” she says.

While the book does that extremely well, it’s also a good source of information about Elizabethan times.

Who knew that, back then, dramatists were not respected, and play-goers were described as “evil-disposed, ungodly people” and the “spawn of vipers?”

Who knew that 25% of late 16th century Stratford wives were pregnant when they married, or that Anne Hathaway was one of them?

Who would have guessed that pregnancy was by design rather than mistake?

For everyone who hisses ‘shotgun wedding’ and says that Shakespeare was trapped into marriage by a scheming, older woman, another will say that many shrewd couples, at that time, won parental approval for their choice of spouse by blithely announcing the pregnancy at the same time as the wedding plans.

Praising Germaine Greer’s book about Anne Hathaway, and confirming that Hathaway was often portrayed as an ignorant, devious woman who couldn’t give her husband what he needed, didn’t understand him and tried to hold him back, Maguire says: “The truth is that many may be envious of her, as she had something we don’t have — knowledge of who Shakespeare really was.”

As to whether she got much insight into Shakespeare’s elusive personality while researching the book, Maguire shakes her head. “The personal papers, which might well have revealed so much of his personality, could not be scrutinised, as, after his death, they probably went to his favourite son-in-law. However, we do know that he wasn’t particularly philanthropic — legal documents show him lining the insides of his own pockets rather than giving to the poor,” she says.

“As to his nature, we really don’t know much, but he’s unlikely to have been flamboyantly ostentatious, and he’s likely to have been the type who would sit in a corner, watch people, take notes and take stock.”

While Shakespeare may well have been happiest blending with the wall tapestries at parties, the authors of this book are no shrinking violets.

The Oxford dons firmly but politely dismiss Sigmund Freud’s assertion, in The Interpretation of Dreams, that Hamlet and Hamnet (Shakespeare’s son, who died at 11) were one and the same.

The authors of the endlessly engaging and highly informative 30 Great Myths about Shakespeare don’t claim to dispel all of the myths in the title. Nor do they.

But the unresolved mysteries are just part of its charm.

The myth that Shakespeare was a plagiarist highlights a clash between the Renaissance culture of imitation and the modern culture of originality. The myth that Macbeth is jinxed in the theatre, is, says Maguire, a “self-fulfilling prophecy based on a hoax.” And so it is, and delightfully so, but you’ll have to read the book to find out why.

*30 Great Myths About Shakespeare, by Laurie Maguire and Emma Smith (Wiley-Blackwell).