Michael Dobson

In a glass case in the garret of a house just off Fleet Street, a historic publishing contract has just gone on display. It only takes up one piece of paper, rather smaller than a sheet of A4, and compared to most such agreements today seems remarkably straightforward. It is the document by which, in 1756, the firm of J.&R. Tonson undertook to publish The plays of William Shakespeare, in eight volumes, with the corrections and illustrations of Various Commentators; To which are added notes by Sam. Johnson.

The eroticised discourse of favouritism was so well established by the 1580s that it could evidently perpetuate itself regardless of the facts of particular careers. Leicester, for instance, is depicted in the much transcribed Catholic libel Leicester’s Commonwealth (1583-84) as a monster of gluttony, even though his correspondence reveals him to have been a self-disciplined and abstemious diner with an enthusiasm, years ahead of his time, for light white wines and salad. (His headquarters in Utrecht now house a passable restaurant.)

One of Shakespeare’s defining knacks, so it’s said, is his ability to render his own time and place more or less irrelevant to the appreciation of his art. So although it seemed uncontroversial when Paul Salzman recently related a rich and miscellaneous clutch of Jacobean publications (Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy, Donne’s elegies, Wroth’s Urania and...

They were both eight-year-old grammar-school boys when news began to reach England of the bloody events of St Bartholomew’s Day, 1572 (news which bolstered moves towards Protestant reform in each of their provincial towns), and they remained sufficiently interested in French politics to write in a surprisingly well-informed fashion about the subject twenty years later. The dispute...

Above the entrance to the saloon bar there is a picture of Shakespeare on the swinging sign. It is the same picture of Shakespeare that I remember from my schooldays, when I frowned over Timon of Athens and The Merchant of Venice. Haven’t they got a better one? Did he really look like that all the time? You’d have thought that by now his publicity people would have come up with...