THOUGHTS ON SHAKESPEARE: Shakespeare: The Later Years
Columbia University Press
the globe and mail

THIS is a fine, unfashionable book, the second half of a two-part life and works of Shakespeare. Actually, it takes in most of the Works. Russell Fraser's Young Shakespeare got his man to London, and tracked his beginnings as actor, playwright and poet. Plague had closed the theatres, and driven our hero to narrative verse. ("London", says Fraser, "was a pesthouse.") Then, in 1594, the playhouse had re-opened and Shakespeare, 30 years old, supplies them with Romeo and Juliet and A Midsummer Night's Dream: a tragedy and a comedy on identical themes.

What kind of man wrings laughter and tears from the trials of young love, on alternate afternoons? A wise man, and a cold one. Fraser's Shakespeare is both, though for cold we should read guarded rather than heartless. "You don't imagine Shakespeare going to the stake or the block" and we might add that martyrdom wasn't his job. There are other ways of bearing witness to the truth. As Fraser puts it, "the prudent man was disinterested: a virtue rarer than heroism."

Shakespeare was probably a Catholic like his father, but he kept it under wraps. Religion was of only superficial importance to him anyway; it colours the plays but it doesn't govern them. (Like Fraser, I am inferring the man from the work. What else is there to do?) His father's failure in life weighed heavily on him, and he himself valued success. He bought himself a coat of arms, plus the second-best house in Stratford, and generally invested wisely. He was probably the only Elizabethan dramatist to make money out of the theatre. Most of his fellows died broke. That includes Ben Jonson, whom Fraser describes, wonderfully, as "Shakespeare's self- appointed conscience." There is embodied a whole relationship, personal and professional, between the playwright who always told you what to think, and the one who never did.

Of course Fraser cannot know for certain how Jonson regarded Shakespeare; and though an academic himself (English faculty, University of Michigan), he disdains to shield his hunches with the usual apparatus of footnotes and perhapses. Anyone accustomed to the idea that we know nothing about Shakespeare is going to be shocked by Fraser's confidence. Actually we know quite a lot, but much of it is in legal documents and parish records and I wish myself that Fraser had been more forthcoming about his sources. But his boldness stems from his overwhelming virtue: he believes that somebody, at a succession of moments in time, sat down and wrote the plays.

That sounds embarrassingly obvious, but it is a notion that critics have always had trouble with. Old Bardolaters thought it disrespectful to the mystery of creation, and post-modernists view the whole matter of authorship with distaste, preferring the idea of discrete texts that derive any meaning they may have from a convergence of formal and historical pressures. (Logically, this would make Shakespeare's plays indistinguishable from those of his contemporaries but, strangely, it is Shakespeare rather than Dekker or Heywood whom they continue to write about. Perhaps there's more promotion in it.) Fraser looks for the life in the work and vice versa. He does not assume a one-to-one correspondence. Sometimes he goes by what the plays leave out. Hamnet, Shakespeare's son, died at 11; but "the greater life's impact on Shakespeare, the less the plays announce it." Fraser finds it reflected indirectly in Much Ado About Nothing, "where a bereaved father, railing out of control, intimates the playwright's involvement." The child he mourns is a girl and she isn't really dead and he knows it; though Shakespeare may, at that moment, have forgotten. Both his own girls survived and nobody, looking at King Lear or The Tempest, could doubt that daughters were much on his mind. I might add, since it's one of the few connections Fraser overlooks, that in The Winter's Tale the jealous king Leontes, after 16 years' penance, gets his lost daughter back but never his son. Maybe that was Hamnet's epitaph. Or maybe it was the tragedy that Shakespeare steeled himself to write about a hero with almost the same name. (He could hardly have failed to notice.) Fraser sees Hamlet as Shakespeare's self-portrait: a man whose mind never stops working.

He also never stops criticizing himself. Shakespeare, stockholder and landlord, was very hard on money- grubbers in the plays. In Coriolanus, inspired by Jacobean riots against property-owners like himself, he is almost infuriatingly even-handed. Edward Bond's play Bingo has Shakespeare committing suicide, disgusted by his own connivance at oppression. This is to underrate the human talent for compromise and self-deception.

Besides his plays had already given him all the escape-valves he needed. Fraser is inclined to credit the old story that he died after a drinking-bout with Jonson. He could have done worse.

Tracing a story through the plays Fraser brings them alive as no other critic has done in years. What he offers us, with cool and elliptical stylishness, is the old, familiar, skeptical, all-encompassing humanist Shakespeare. I believe every word of it.