5 - The Writer at Work

Summary

So far, in our discussion of ‘the work', the writer, William Shakespeare, has been glimpsed only intermittently. His name has been invoked from time to time as the source of particular literary and poetic effects; he has been credited with making choices from Holinshed's chronicle that will inform the construction of his narrative and it has been suggested that the witches’ speeches found in the Folio text, though possibly the work of another writer, might have been the result of a particularly creative reaction to the image in the frontispiece of Newes from Scotland.

The evidence for these connections is, of course, purely circumstantial. The sources that Shakespeare used, the process of composition and, above all, his views about his work have all to be inferred after the fact, working outwards from the text to historical circumstances in order to propose an invented personality that will offer a plausible author for the work as we know it.

The mixture of admiration, invention and speculation that attends all efforts to understand the connection between the writer and his work, are given enormous scope because of the gap that exists between the records of Shakespeare's life and the works that he produced. The records consist of raw information: his baptism on 26 April 1564, the license for his marriage to Anne Hathaway issued on November 27 1582 when Shakespeare was nineteen and his bride eight years his senior; the birth of his children: Susanna, baptized on 26 May 1583 (six months after her parents’ wedding) and the twins, Hamnet and Judith, baptized on 2 February 1585. In 1597, Shakespeare bought New Place, the second largest dwelling in Stratford and he continued to deal in property and land with his Stratford fellows until he made his will in March 1616 and was buried on April 25 of the same year.

Records of his life in London are similarly concerned with the details of his professional life. He was payee for performances at court before Queen Elizabeth by the Chamberlain's Men and, later, before James VI and I by the King's Men. He and his fellows in the Kings Men were awarded livery cloth to march in the King's coronation procession.