Shakespeare Entombed

By G. Emily Ghods-Esfahani | Monday, January 9, 2006

BOOK REVIEW

Shakespeare: The Biography
Peter Ackroyd
Nan A. Talese, 2005

After 518 pages full of everything your father's accountant ever wanted to know about Shakespeare—no civil fine or timber's future is left untouched—Peter Ackroyd reserves the last—and clearest—words on his colossal project to the 18th century transcendentalist, Ralph Emerson: "Shakespeare is the only biographer of Shakespeare."

Yes, indeed. Now, provided Ackroyd concurs, he has left this reader a bit more than ruffled over having spent her precious winter break parsing the minutiae and import of the life and times of Will Shakespeare, son of John Shakespeare, as retold in Shakespeare: The Biography.

Ackroyd's a good writer. He's absorbing and loquacious: a stout tour-guide of Renaissance Isles and parts there-about. Fine-spun from the black lines of the page, the author slowly twists the kaleidoscope of Elizabethan England while iridescent images of the young Shakespeare spill across the droll backdrop of Stratford-upon-Avon, over the enchanted wood of Arden Forest, over sepia replicas of an anxious Elizabethan England gone to war with Spain, France, and Ireland, and most importantly, over the tender verdure of what it was, and will be, to be English, the language of her literary realm.

Ackroyd, the biographer, leads the Shakespearean pilgrim into the spirituous loam of 16th century English soil wherewithal rose the enchanted garden of English theatre, comedy, tragedy and drama: Marlowe, Kyd, Greene, Nashe, and then, bold and above such scholastic and accomplished contemporaries as these, rose Will Shakespeare, a man who was, in the words of the Oxford educated Greene, but a "countrey-Author." Nonetheless, Shakespeare knew the lay of the land, from the machinations of the Realm of the state and beyond, to the state of the Renaissance soul as only a seraph, or demon, really should.

Ackroyd breaks his first biographical ground in Stratford-upon-Avon, a "back-water" town. He then slowly leads us along with the expatriate Shakespeare into London, a city perpetually and paradoxically ancient and young, a city in search of identity. Sprinkle the seeds of exquisite genius, and the menagerie of London's rising theatrical culture springs to bud and bloom before the audience and eyes of the world.

That's the "biography" part. Then we encounter, Peter Ackroyd: literary critic.

While Ackroyd fittingly succeeds in connecting the plexus that intertwines theatre, reality and identity into Shakespeare's dramas and comedies, he fumbles his attempt to make the three into one. That is to say, to an amateur moralist, Ackroyd doesn't always seem to get the moral gravity of the plays either right or well.

Within The Biography, Ackroyd's analysis dutifully and predictably avers that sympathy, loss, exile, dispersion and dispossession are at the spinning core of Shakespeare's dramas. As it is in The Comedy of Errors, where Adriana summarizes this seeming paradox of Shakespeare's heroes: "oh how comes it / That thou art then estranged from thy self."

Shakespeare's plays are awash in such commanding men and women who fail where it counts, and yet it is their brewing failure that pulls the anxious strings of the audience accustomed to such failure. When Shakespeare exposes the demurral of human consciousness, the incredulity of right and wrong that slices through the soliloquies, he is not eminently preoccupied with the role of his great men in high places or even with the assorted barmaids, drunkards, adulterers, wanderers-all who frequent the dark corridors of a consciousness common to one and all: rather, in any one of the Bard's characters, we imbibe what is common to us, universally. The Elizabethan audience had no appetite for literal parochialism, but rather imbibed a deep humanism enamored and curiously confused in equal measure by a desire for human compassion, bloody revenge and absolute transcendence.

The plays were the public means by which the Elizabethan gentry and masses alike understood their delicate and robust reality. In the words of Twelfth Night's Olivia, "we will draw the curtain and show you the picture." The biographer succinctly depicts the nexus between the real and surreal in Shakespeare's characters and people's lives. But in such things as dreams are made of, rationality tenders no common currency and the office of the exchequer is staffed by the surreal, whereby no more than the rebus of life fuels the soul of the dreamer.

Cleaving through the Gordian Knot of rationalism, Shakespeare exposes the other-worldly truth embedded in the yoke that binds humanity to language; he unravels the braid in subtle and dramatic moves, common to him, such that he, within the same play, allows the working actor that plays Lear's royal and saintly daughter, Cordelia, to act the play's "Fool" as well.

Though Shakespeare's plays were, and still are, used to understand and (God forbid) deconstruct the human condition, the plays themselves are submerged deep within a preternatural world that trembles beneath the blue humdrum of the audience. When the Bard, through the guise of Macbeth, declares, "life's but a walking shadow [the technical name for actors], a poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage" he implies, as Ackroyd interprets, that drama is without substance, though, he allows, it lends depth and darkness to any particular worldly vision.

In a nutshell, for Ackroyd, as for others (famously, Harold Bloom), the kernel of the plays resides in the conundrum of what it is to be human, a twist on the Delphic Oracle's "know thyself"—such a shell, he believes, cannot be cracked by appealing to reason alone. Think of Hamlet's remark, "There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, / Than are dreamt of in your philosophy." Such a question, to Ackroyd, appeals to the play of our dreams and intuitions: "It shall be called 'Bottom's Dream', because it hath no bottom." Dreams without end, without reason, without
meaning.

The problem with Ackroyd's dismissal of reason as a force within Shakespeare's plays is that it leads him to dismiss the meaning and morality cached within the pith of the plays. Ackroyd's assumptions lead to no other conclusion. Throughout The Biography, Ackroyd maintains correctly that Shakespeare dissected an argument from every angle, presumably with reason, and that all forms of experience are dialectically weighed by Shakespeare; he is thus capable of distilling romance and heroism through comedy and farce.

Still, Ackroyd triumphantly and curiously declares, "Shakespeare had a sympathy so fine that no belief could injure it." Well, does this mean, as Ackroyd seems to suggest throughout The Biography, that Shakespeare held no firm beliefs? Of course not. Simply stated, Shakespeare understood the delicacy of belief so thoroughly that he could recreate and recombine such ephemera into fantastical symphonic arrangements: eroticism with melodrama, farce with love, authority with disorder. These plays are a testament to, not a nullification of, a boundless morality.

We need not wonder over the ink Ackroyd spills in his attempt to conclude that Shakespeare was a practicing Catholic in an England in which such demonstrations of faith resulted in a trip to the Tower of London. It should be added, he accomplishes this last point in a rather convincing fashion.

Ackroyd believes that because there are no plainly Good and Bad characters within the plays, that there must necessarily be no conflict between Good and Bad, but only between "variously mixed natures." Though what else could those natures be mixed with, if not with the Good and the Bad of it all? The reader goes off the tracks if they misunderstand the internal conflict for an external effect. It is the internal, not external, struggle of these two forces that Shakespeare is concerned with. It is the difference between transcendent man (Hamlet/Cordelia) and materialist/determinist man (Marx, Freud). It is the spirit lost in the abandonment of the Individual—denizen of the Spiritus Mundi—for the mechanical determinism of an agnostic Society.

Invoking Shylock, Ackroyd observes that Shakespeare was too complex to create a stereotype. Universally, Shakespeare's heroes are in their spirit and humanity bottomless. They cannot be reduced to the black and white of diabolic or angelic. To the unaccustomed eye, it would appear that Shakespeare deals only in shades of enigmatic grey.

More apropos of the ethos of a cable talk show's "we're all different and special," than an Elizabethan drama, Ackroyd claims that it is impossible to derive a moral significance from Macbeth, Lear, Hamlet etc… and therefore, there is no morality from which an analysis of the plays can be made. And yet, curiously, Shakespeare does not shy away from emoting on the consequences of moral corruption in having Macbeth lament, "Will all Neptune's ocean wash this blood / Clean from my hand? No."

Along with Ackroyd's suspension of reason in his reading of the Bard's plays, he at times refuses to wield such a traditional instrument in his own script. Perhaps the reason Shakespeare flies above the common desire to offer heavy-handed judgments is because, as Ackroyd himself had earlier pointed out, to condemn Macbeth or Lear would be to condemn humanity, and Ackroyd poignantly affirms that the pessimists are Shakespeare's true villains, denying "human energy and the capacity for human greatness."

Ackroyd's own exquisite, though occasionally hollow, lyricism may be partly responsible for his sometime hazy rendition of purpose and meaning within Shakespeare's dramaturgy. This reader of The Biography sees Ackroyd's crypto-nihilist-rhapsody running away with him at times. For instance, Ackroyd suggests that Shakespeare refused to pay his London income tax one year. From this, he speculates that Shakespeare refused to pay because he felt he owed the world nothing—except, of course, by conservative estimate, a meager 35 otherworldly plays.

Ackroyd explains and invents. For instance, he advises that for Shakespeare one word would simply suggest another—one word would impel him to write the next, and meaning came about secondarily, or as somehow compelled by the newly evolved string of words. As above, Ackroyd too often blindly empties his quiver when he attempts to do the same. Sentences like "Shakespeare was both everything and nothing" may have poetic currency, but lack expressive genius; though, perhaps, we have finally come to expect both only from the likes of the Bard himself.

So, we end where we began at the top, pulling a page out of Ackroyd's book to say, "Shakspeare is the only biographer of Shakspeare." For a greater glimpse into the bottomless soul of the great bard, you need not look further than his first folio. I'd spend some time with Hamlet…a lot of time.

Shakespeare Entombed

Article Tools

Related Articles