2 - Shakespeare’s Life, Times and Stage

Summary

Leslie Hotson’s Mr. W.H. is an ambitious attempt to solve most of the problems of Shakespeare’s biography. The conclusions are drawn from ‘Shakespeare’s allusive and symbolical method in his personal or lyrical poetry’. The evidence that Shakespeare used such a method derives from the results that Dr Hotson achieves by assuming that he did. And these results are, as the author is happy to admit, astonishing. The use of regal imagery for the youth of the sonnets implies that he was, factually or fictionally, of regal status. He was, Dr Hotson believes, the Prince of Purpoole, leader of the Gray’s Inn revels. This office was held in 1588 by a Mr W.H.—William Hatcliffe. Dr Hotson finds his very name buried in many of the sonnets. More often than not, one part of the formation derives from those not uncommon words ‘what’ and ‘that’; the occurrence of one of them within a line or two of ‘live’, ‘leave’, ‘left’, etc. is held to be significant. (Apparently Shakespeare’s ingenuity did not extend to indicating the ‘-cliffe’ form of the name.) There are also remarkable ramifications involving true-love knots, coats of arms, one of Hilliard’s best-known miniatures (a portrait, we are told, of Hatcliffe), and Pompey the Great.