2 - Shakespeare’s Life, Times and Stage

Summary

In what is probably his most entertaining and useful book to date on Shakespeare, F. E. Halliday traces the growth of various attitudes to the dramatist from his eclipse in the Commonwealth period to the adulation of the nineteenth century. There are lively chapters on the squabbles of eighteenth-century editors, on Garrick’s Stratford festival and the cult of “Avonian Willy, bard divine”, on the Shakespeare Gallery, Bowdler, Collier and the Shakespeare Society, the tercentenary celebrations, and on Fleay and the disintegrators. The whole is cleverly linked together, and makes an amusing guide to bardolatry, as well as providing an introduction to what every student should know about fashions in taste, as these have affected the editing and acting of Shakespeare’s plays. Halliday neatly demolishes the claims of Baconians and Oxfordians in his last chapters; two American cryptographers go further, and make a detailed analysis of the supposed ciphers which have been used to ‘reveal’ Bacon or others as the author of Shakespeare’s plays. This is often fascinating, and would be thoroughly entertaining, did not the authors seem to take themselves and the whole business a little too seriously; but it is a notable record of human eccentricity, of talent and energy wasted on dredging rivers, opening tombs, and pursuing a variety of illusory clues. One might think that such onslaughts would bring the Anti-Stratfordians to repent; but they do not cease to put forward with huge solemnity their claims. Perhaps the Friedmans were justified in composing a serious criticism, but one cannot help feeling that Halliday has the best word in describing all this as “matter for a psychologist and a May morning”.