Much virtue in "if".(book on William Shakespeare)

Katherine Duncan-Jones Ungentle Shakespeare: Scenes from his Life. Thomas Learning, 332 pages, 20 [pounds sterling]

Katherine Duncan-Jones must be granted a certain originality. There cannot be many Shakespeare scholars who combine a refusal to accept that Hand D in the manuscript of Sir Thomas More has been demonstrated beyond reasonable doubt to be Shakespeare's, with a willingness to believe that he might have been part-author of a run-of-the-mill domestic drama of c. 1605 called A Yorkshire Tragedy. When, moreover, we find Duncan-Jones misquoting the editors of the latter play--attributing to them the statement that "there is very strong evidence" for Shakespeare's authorship when they actually say "there is apparently very strong external evidence" (italics added)--and failing to acknowledge that they are not persuaded by this evidence, we are less than impressed. This curious combination of wariness and rashness occurs elsewhere in Ungentle Shakespeare. She refrains, for example, from deciding whether Shakespeare was a Protestant or a Catholic, but is willing to believe that he may have had a sexual relationship with the Earl of Southampton.

Her title strikes the keynote. Shakespeare was "ungentle": a social upstart, a sexual opportunist, and mean with his money. He was eager to escape the cares of marriage and fatherhood for bachelor lodgings and distinctly cool towards his native town. Duncan-Jones's account of his last illness and death is every bit as unpleasant as Edward Bond's in his terrifying play Bingo. Syphilitic, troubled with heart and circulation problems, Shakespeare takes to the bottle, falls out with old friends, insults the beneficiaries in his will, and causes a curse to be carved on his tomb in order to keep his widow out. Sweet swan of Avon? Well, swans have nasty tempers.

Duncan-Jones warns us, "I quite often risk conjecture" and that her approach is "more thematic than narrative," each chapter comprising "a collection of short related essays" on key topics. The result is a lively read, whose strengths and weaknesses can be best appreciated by those already well versed in Shakespeare's biography. The speculations work well in contexts in which she can build on accepted evidence, as with her treatment of the uneasy professional relationship between Shakespeare and Ben Jonson. Jonson described Shakespeare, in Discoveries, as "honest, and of an open and free nature," a disconcerting quotation of Iago's contemptuous verdict on Othello. Duncan-Jones persuasively suggests that Shakespeare repaid Jonson's acerbities through the character of Jacques in As You Like It, who, like Jonson, is "a satirist with a murky past, who believes himself nevertheless perfectly entitled to anatomize the follies and vices of others," an oppositional figure whose sudden conversion at the end of the play recalls Jonson's rapidly acquired Catholic faith a year or so earlier. We can accept this as plausible without insisting that Jacques is a full-fledged portrait of Jonson or turning the play into a clumsy allegory of the contemporary literary scene.

Jonson was not Shakespeare's only rival, of course, and one aspect of Shakespeare's career that this book well brings out is his place in a complicated nexus of playwrights, all jockeying for position, influence, and audience ...