Shakespere now advert 234x156_2.0:Layout 1 25/2/11 16:52 Page 1 Shakespeare Series Editors: Ewan Fernie, The Shakespeare Institute, University of Birmingham, UK and Simon Palfrey, University of Oxford, UK An innovative new series . . . Series editors Simon Palfrey and Ewan Fernie have rejected the notion of business as usual in order to pursue a distinctive strategy that aims to put "cutting-edge scholarship" in front of a broad audience. With its insistent appeal to the contemporary, this is fresh Shakespeare for readers turned off by the prospect of dry-as-dust scholarship’ - Shakespeare Quarterly Shakespeare Now! is a series of short books that engage imaginatively and often provocatively with the possibilities of Shakespeare's plays. It goes back to the source - the most living language imaginable - and recaptures the excitement, audacity and surprise of Shakespeare. It will return you to the plays with opened eyes. For further details visit www.continuumbooks.com Nine Lives of William Shakespeare Shakespeare Now! Series edited by Ewan Fernie and Simon Palfrey First Wave: At the Bottom of Shakespeare’s Ocean Steve Mentz Godless Shakespeare Eric S. Mallin Shakespeare’s Double Helix Henry S. Turner Shakespeare Inside Amy Scott-Douglass Shakespearean Metaphysics Michael Witmore Shakespeare’s Modern Collaborators Lukas Erne Shakespeare Thinking Philip Davis To Be Or Not To Be Douglas Bruster Second Wave: The King and I Philippa Kelly The Life in the Sonnets David Fuller Hamlet’s Dreams David Schalkwyk Nine Lives of William Shakespeare Graham Holderness Shakespeare and I edited by Theodora Papadopoulou and William McKenzie Nine Lives of William Shakespeare Graham Holderness Continuum International Publishing Group The Tower Building 80 Maiden Lane, Suite 704 11 York Road New York London SE1 7NX NY 10038 www.continuumbooks.com © Graham Holderness 2011 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any infor- mation storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Graham Holderness has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identifed as Author of this work. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN: 978–1–4411–97450 Library of Congress Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress Typeset by Fakenham Prepress Solutions, Fakenham, Norfolk NR21 8NN Contents General Editors Preface to the Second-Wave of the Series viii General Editors’ Preface ix Introduction 1 LIFE ONE Shakespeare the Writer 24 Story: ‘The Shakespeare Code’ 34 LIFE TWO Shakespeare the Player 45 Memoir: ‘Master Shakespeare’s Instructions to the Actors’ 56 LIFE THREE Shakespeare the Butcher Boy 62 Memoir: ‘Some further account of the life &c. of Mr William Shakespear’ 70 LIFE FOUR Shakespeare the Businessman 76 Story: ‘Best for Winter’ 90 LIFE FIVE Shakespeare in Love: ‘Husband, I come’ 96 Memoir: ‘Shakespeare’s Ring: First Circle’ 106 LIFE SIX Shakespeare in Love: ‘Fair Friend’ 111 Story: ‘The Adventure of Shakespeare’s Ring’ 122 vi Nine Lives of William Shakespeare LIFE SEVEN Shakespeare in Love: ‘A female evil’ 141 Story: ‘‘Shakespeare’s Ring: Full Circle’ 152 LIFE EIGHT Shakespeare the Catholic 164 Story: ‘He dyed a papist’ 172 LIFE NINE Shakespeare’s Face: ‘The mind’s construction’ 179 Fable: ‘An Account of a Voyage to Bardolo’ 192 Notes 207 Index 213 For Marilyn ‘Witty above her sex’ General Editors’ Preface to the Second-Wave of the Series We begin with the passions of the critic as they are forged and explored in Shakespeare. These books speak directly from that fundamental experience of losing and remaking yourself in art. This does not imply, necessarily, a lonely existentialism; the story of a self is always bound up in other stories, shared tales of nations or faiths or of families large and small. But such stories are also always singular, irreducible to the generalities by which they are typically explained. Here, then, is where literary experience stops pretending to institu- tionalized objectivity, and starts to tell its own story. Shakespeare Now! is a rallying cry, above all for aesthetic immediacy. It favours a model of aesthetic knowledge as encounter, where the encounter brings its own, often surprising contextualizing imperatives. Implicit in this is the premise that art is as much a subject as an object, less like aggregated facts and more like a fascinating person or persons. And encountering the plays as such is unavoidably personal. Much recent scholarship has been devoted to Shakespeare then – to producing more information about the presumed moment of their inception. But this moment of inception is in truth happening over and over, again and again, anywhere that Shakespeare is being experienced anew or freshly. For the fact is that he remains, by a country mile, the most important contemporary writer – the most performed and read, the most written about, but also the most remembered. But it is not a question merely of Shakespeare in the present, as though his vitality is best measured by his passing relevance to great events. It is about his works’ abiding presence. In some ways criticism needs to get younger – to recover the freshness of aesthetic experience, and so in part better to remember why any of us should care. We need a new directness, written responses to the plays which attest to the life we fnd in them and the life they fnd in us. Ewan Fernie and Simon Palfrey General Editors’ Preface Shakespeare Now! represents a new form for new approaches. Whereas academic writing is far too often ascendant and detached, attesting all too clearly to years of specialist training, Shakespeare Now! offers a series of intellectual adventure stories: animate with fresh and often exposed thinking, with ideas still heating in the mind. This series of ‘minigraphs’ will thus help to bridge two yawning gaps in current public discourse. First, the gap between scholarly thinking and a public audience: the assumption of academics that they cannot speak to anyone but their peers unless they hopelessly dumb down their work. Second, the gap between public audience and scholarly thinking: the assumption of regular playgoers, readers or indeed actors that academics write about the plays at a level of abstraction or specialization that they cannot hope to understand. But accessibility should not be mistaken for comfort or predictability. Impatience with scholarly obfuscation is usually accompanied by a basic impatience with anything but (supposed) common sense. What this effectively means is a distrust of really thinking, and a disdain for anything that might unsettle conventional assumptions, particularly through crossing or re-drafting formal, political or theoretical boundaries. We encourage such adventure, and base our claim to a broad audience upon it. Here, then, is where our series is innovative: no compromising of the sorts of things that can be thought; a commitment to publishing powerful cutting-edge scholarship; but a conviction that these things are essentially communicable, that we can fnd a language that is enterprising, individual and shareable. To achieve this we need a form that can capture the genuine challenge and vigour of thinking. Shakespeare is intellectually exciting, and so too are the ideas and debates that thinking about his work can provoke. But published scholarship often fails to communicate much of this. It is diffcult to sustain excitement over the 80–120,000 words customary for a monograph: diffcult enough for the writer, and perhaps even more so for the reader. Scholarly articles have likewise become a highly formalized mode not only of publi- cation, but also of intellectual production. The brief length of articles means that a concept can be outlined, but its implications or application can rarely be tested in detail. The decline of sustained, exploratory attention to the singu- larity of a play’s language, occasion or movement is one of the unfortunate