An interesting and informative review of Stephen Greenblatt's recent historically and biographically rich book on Shakespeare. The celebated 'anonymity' of W.S., his elusive negative capability starts to look a little less self-evident.
Occasionally, the book seems to reprise the National Library discussion in Ulysses:
Yet Greenblatt argues persuasively (as Joyce had Stephen do in “Ulysses”) that the death of his only son, Hamnet, at the age of eleven, in 1596, was the crushing and transforming blow in his life. The heartbreaking lines about a lost child that begin “Grief fills the room up of my absent child, / Lies in his bed, walks up and down with me,” from “King John,” were written just afterward, and before long he began a new version of an old revenge play bearing a variant of his son’s name.
Elsewhere, speculative daring that many might deem inadmissable:
A chapter of Greenblatt’s book is devoted to the horrible death of Ruy Lopez, the Queen’s physician, and its consequences for Shakespeare’s imagination of the “other.” Jewish by birth though not by faith, Lopez was found guilty of an attempt on the Queen’s life. (He was almost certainly framed.) When, on the scaffold, he cried plaintively that he “loved the Queen as well as he loved Jesus Christ,” the mob merely laughed at what they took to be an equivocation, before he was ripped apart.
Greenblatt conjectures that Shakespeare was there and was haunted by the laughter, and that “The Merchant of Venice” is in part a response to his shiver.
And nuggets of (re)discovery:
Greenblatt revives the great, too little known speech from a manuscript of a many-authored play about Thomas More, which includes lines, perhaps actually in Shakespeare’s hand, where More protests the expulsion of foreigners from England:
'Imagine that you see the wretched strangers/, Their babies at their backs, with their poor luggage/Plodding to th’ ports and coasts for transportation. . . . / By this pattern /Not one of you should live an agèd man, /For other ruffians as their fancies wrought/ With selfsame hand, self reasons, and self right /Would shark on you, and men like ravenous fishes /Would feed on one another'.
The gloss on this last, however, that Shakespeare was an instinctive Liberal Humanist, i imagine is the reviewer's rather than Greenblatt's, unless 'Liberal Humanist' is diluted to mean little more than someone intuitively responsive to the suffering of others (and of the Other), which may be cordial (pun intended) to the Present but is, in the end, a-historical mystification.