Ambifacts

Gary Taylor

• Shakespeare: The Later Years by Russell Fraser
  Columbia, 380 pp, $35.00, April 1992, ISBN 0 231 06766 6
• Shakespeare: His Life, Work and Era by Dennis Kay
  Sidgwick, 368 pp, £20.00, May 1992, ISBN 0 283 99878 4
• William Shakespeare: The Anatomy of an Enigma by Peter Razzell
  Caliban, 188 pp, May 1992, ISBN 1 85066 010 7
• Politics, Plague and Shakespeare’s Theatre: The Stuart Years by Leeds Barroll
  Cornell, 249 pp, £20.80, January 1992, ISBN 0 8014 2479 8
• Shakespeare Verbatim: The Reproduction of Authenticity and the 1790 Apparatus by Margreta de Grazia
  Oxford, 244 pp, £30.00, February 1991, ISBN 0 19 811778 7

Why do people read a biography of Shakespeare? Either as a substitute for or as a supplement to a reading of his work. I may read about Byron or Orton because the life itself is both well-documented and well worth watching; but Shakespeare’s life is neither. How he behaved, what he endured, who he knew, where he went – such information does not expand or deepen my grasp of human possibility, as in their different ways the history of Thomas More or John Milton does. The extant marks of Shakespeare’s mortal passage don’t tell us anything we don’t already know about the world or the human. The works – various and ambiguous as they are – tell us something about both; the life doesn’t. Instead, far more often, we must apply our pre-fabricated theories about the world and the human in order to interpret the artifacts and ambifacts before us.