Abstract
Shakespeare the Biography1 reveals Peter Ackroyd’s attraction to a narrative which is artistically satisfying, rather than simply ‘true’, in its very first chapter:
William Shakespeare is popularly supposed to have been born on 23 April 1564, or on St George’s Day. The date may in fact have been 21 April or 22 April, but the coincidence of the national festival is at least appropriate.
(p. 3)
Ackroyd’s biography reflects the research of ‘a Shakespeare enthusiast’ woven into a fictitious narrative, an imaginative story about the man behind the plays and sonnets, rather than a straightforward historical record. Relying on other scholars’ research rather than on primary sources, Ackroyd presents us with a Shakespeare who was shaped by his rural background, and who was characterized by a sprightly wit and a pragmatic attitude to life. Ackroyd’s Shakespeare is a confident, enterprising man of his day.2
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Notes
All quotations are from P. Ackroyd, Shakespeare the Biography (London: Vintage Books, 2005).
All quotations are from S. Greenblatt, Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare (London: Jonathan Cape, 2004).
Paul Franssen makes a further classification of the genre of biography into literary biography and fictional biography/biographical fiction. He claims that the literary biography combines two different disciplines: historiography (facts about an author’s/Shakespeare’s life are presented and analysed) and literary criticism (an author’s own works are recalled and interpreted by a biographer). Biographical fiction includes familiar data about an author’s life, which, however, cannot be scientifically proven. See P. J. C. Franssen, ‘The Life and Opinions of William Shakespeare, Gentleman: Biography between Fact and Fiction’, in Literature as History/History as Literature: Fact and Fiction in Medieval to Eighteenth-Century British Literature, ed. S. Fielitz (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2007), 63–5.
A. Fowler, ‘Enter Speed. A Feverish Life of Shakespeare, like History on Amphetamines’, TLS, 4 February 2005, 3.
H. White, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Baltimore, MD, and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1975), xii.
H. White, The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation (Baltimore, MD, and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990), 5.
C. N. Parke, Biography: Writing Lives (New York: Routledge, 2002), 17.
S. Schoenbaum, William Shakespeare: A Compact Documentary Life (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1975).
D. Bevington, ‘Reviewed Works: William Shakespeare: A Compact Documentary Life by Samuel Schoenbaum’, Modern Philology lxxvii (1979): 217–18.
I. Schabert, ‘Fictional Biography, Factual Biography, and their Contaminations’, Biography v (1882): 1.
Ibid., 7.
L. Edel, Literary Biography: The Alexander Lectures 1955–1956 (Soho Square London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1957), 5.
J. Gibson, Peter Ackroyd: The Ludic and the Labyrinthine Text (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2000), 223.
Ibid., 224.
B. Finney, ‘Peter Ackroyd, Postmodernist Play and Chatterton’, Twentieth Century Literature xxxviii (1992): 246.
Ibid.
Ackroyd (p. 55) believes the painful process of Shakespeare’s learning from Lilly to be shown in The Merry Wives of Windsor, in the scene where a strict pedagogue teaches Latin to a young boy William: ‘I pray you, have your remembrance, child; accusativo hung, hang, hog’ (4.1.29). All Shakespeare citations are taken from The Norton Shakespeare: The Complete Works, ed. S. Greenblatt (New York and London: W. W. Norton, 1997). Jonathan Bate in his biography Soul of the Age: A Biography of the Mind of William Shakespeare points at the same play to emphasize that the young Shakespeare studied Latin ‘from dawn to dusk, six days a week, all the year round’. In Bate’s view, Shakespeare took mainly Latin grammar, the process being no less painful — ‘rote learning in the style of catechism’. See J. Bate, Soul of the Age: A Biography of the Mind of William Shakespeare (New York: Random House, 2010), 71, 73.
Bill Bryson also deals with the question of Shakespeare’s (il)literacy in Shakespeare: The World as a Stage. He addresses the argument put forward in 2002 by a writer for the New York Times who claims that Shakespeare ‘never owned a book’. Bryson refutes this argument saying that the lack of evidence in this matter does not rule out the possibility that Shakespeare actually did possess books: ‘But the writer might just as well have suggested that Shakespeare never owned a pair of shoes or pants. For all the evidence tells us, he spent his life naked from the waist down, as well as bookless, but it is probable that what is lacking is the evidence, not the apparel or the books’. See B. Bryson, Shakespeare: The World as a Stage (London: Harper Press, 2007), 180. However, Franssen expresses his concern that it is becoming popular among Shakespeare biographers to present the lack of evidence as actual evidence. See Franssen, ‘Life and Opinions’.
A. D. Nuttall, Shakespeare the Thinker (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2007), 26.
K. Duncan-Jones, Shakespeare: An Ungentle Life (London: The Arden Shakespeare, 2010), 11.
Ibid., 14.
R. Weis, Shakespeare Unbound: Decoding a Hidden Life (London: Murray, 2007), 29.
P. Honan, Shakespeare: A Life (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 34.
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© 2013 Urszula Kizelbach
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Kizelbach, U. (2013). Peter Ackroyd’s Shakespeare the Biography and Stephen Greenblatt’s Will in the World, or Facts and Fiction about William Shakespeare. In: Brown, S.A., Lublin, R.I., McCulloch, L. (eds) Reinventing the Renaissance. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137319401_7
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