Volume 28, Number 16 · October 22, 1981
Just Plain Will
By Robert M. Adams
What Shakespeare Read-and Thought
by A.L. Rowse
Coward, McCann and Geoghegan, 210 pp., $12.95
Shakespeare and Tragedy
by John Bayley
Routledge and Kegan Paul, 228 pp., $10.95 (paper)
Of making many Shakespeares there is no end; and in every image of Shakespeare as it takes form there is the potential for blotting out or blurring some part of every other Shakespeare. The more opaque and substantial we make the man from Stratford (b. 1564, d. 1616), the less we are likely to understand some of the other Shakespeares who speak to us from the texts of the plays. Like the material surviving from ancient Rome, the biographical material surviving from 400 years ago is mostly hardware, limited in quantity but even more in quality. It consists of contracts, leases, formal documents; of occasional allusions in the plays to things read in books and public events. At its outer fringes, the material relies on conjecture, more or less probable, about personal relationships.
Review, 2772 words
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