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- The Observer,
- Sunday March 31 2002
A few weeks ago the Sunday edition of the New York Times, not a publication to be put down lightly, devoted a whole page to the investigation of a major literary story. A new Mark Twain manuscript unearthed in Hannibal, Missouri, perhaps? The unpublished correspondence of Theodore Roosevelt and TS Eliot?
No, the breaking story that was rushed to the American breakfast table was yet another exhaustive (and exhausting) examination of the claim that Edward de Vere, seventeenth Earl of Oxford, wrote the plays we attribute to William Shakespeare.
This, of course, is hardly news. Henry James claimed, about 100 years ago, to be 'haunted by the conviction that the divine William is the biggest and most successful fraud ever practised on a patient world'. Sigmund Freud, among others, shared this view, observing: 'The man of Stratford seems to have nothing at all to justify his claim, whereas Oxford has almost everything.'
Never mind. Nearly 400 years since his death in 1616, the 'divine William' is still the literary world's top story. He remains 'the world's greatest author', according to John Gross, who has just edited an anthology of writing inspired by the poet, After Shakespeare (Oxford, £17.99 pp360). This, he says, 'is the Shakespeare literature which extends far beyond formal Shakespeare criticism or Shakespeare scholarship'.
In a world that publishes quite enough books, thank you very much, I am, generally speaking, allergic to anthologies. I am not charmed by the sweet narcotic scent of glue and the soothing snip-snip of literary critical scissors that accompany such volumes. But if there's one man who should be allowed to perpetrate anthologies it's Mr Gross, possibly one of the best-read book men in the western hemisphere.
After Shakespeare is not only a good idea (a richly varied illustration of the colossal impact Shakespeare has had on our cultural life), it is also extremely well-executed. It ranges from famous attacks on the playwright by Tolstoy and George Bernard Shaw to unlikely conjunctions such as Nelson Mandela and Alfred Dreyfus consoling themselves with Shakespeare in prison.
It includes, inevitably, some dithyrambic celebrations of his genius by creative figures as diverse as Cole Porter ('Brush up your Shakespeare'), Berlioz, Max Beerbohm, Van Gogh and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who called him 'the great, ever-living dead man'.
It will no doubt enrage Oxfordians to learn that, as Gross says in his scholarly introduction, 'the most striking feature of the imaginative writing which derives from Shakespeare is the amount of it devoted to Shakespeare himself.'
In recent years the most enthralling fictional explorations of Shakespeare the man have come from Anthony Burgess (in Nothing Like The Sun) and Robert Nye (in Mrs Shakespeare). Gross shows that this tradition has antecedents in Walter Savage Landor's ironic account of Shakespeare the deer poacher, Oscar Wilde's The Portrait of Mr WH, and Kipling's neglected late short story, 'Proofs of Holy Writ'. Gross notes: 'The most Shakespeare saturated of great novels, Ulysses, is preoccupied with the man rather than the work.' Elsewhere, playwrights like Peter Whelan (in The Herbal Bed) have constructed theatrical lives for the playwright.
As well as finding inspiration in his tantalisingly elusive character, novelists have also adapted his material repeatedly. A play like Hamlet is never far from Sterne's mind in the writing of Tristram Shandy and provides an important theme in Goethe's Wilhelm Meister. It also inspired John Updike's Gertude and Claudius. Dickens, a master of theatrical effect, loves to dazzle his reader with Shakespearean allusion. And so on.
If you believe, as some do, that Shakespeare's work was written by the Earl of Oxford, or Francis Bacon, or Christopher Marlowe - or even, Elizabeth I (to name the most usual suspects), then this book will be an exasperating exercise in bardolatry. If, like Alexander Dumas, you think that 'After God, Shakespeare has created most', then you are in for hours of entertainment.
Who, for instance, could resist Edwardian thespian Gordon Browne's apocryphal: 'My Rosencrantz was not up to much, but my Guildenstern was tremendous'?
After Shakespeare has the cardinal virtue of bringing us back to the work. It's good to be reminded afresh of his mythic genius and his extraordinary capacity for the delineation of character in a few simple strokes. The work is what matters. Next to that, it seems to me neither here nor there exactly who wrote it. As a correspondent for the New York Times put it, debating the Shakespeare question is like wrestling with a pig. You get very dirty - and the pig loves it.
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