What do you think?
Rate this book
Shakespeare's Lives
First published twenty years ago, this witty and learned book--now completely revised and updated--follows the quest throughout history for Shakespeare the man. Taking us on a tour of the countless myths and legends which have arisen to explain the great dramatist's life and work, S.
Schoenbaum presents a wealth of material from collections scattered all over the world which yield fresh and often dramatic information about a host of controversial characters and incidents. Beginning with the Shakespeare of documentary record--poet of the London stage and burgher of
Stratford--Schoenbaum proceeds to the legends of Shakespeare as deer-poacher, ale-toper, and valiant lover. Other Shakespeares the playwright as protagonist in a host of popular and scholarly biographies, which often reveal more about the biographer than the subject. The Shakespeare for whom
imaginary history was invented through forged documents--first by Ireland in the eighteenth century, and later by the clever and more seasoned J. Payne Collier. And lastly the Shakespeare who never anti-hero of a vast and frequently eccentric literature crediting his works to luminaries such as
Francis Bacon, the Earl of Oxford, and Christopher Marlowe. Enlivened with such notable personages as Johnson, Keats, Hawthorn, Wilde, Joyce, and Freud, Shakespeare's Lives is a book of many lives--both described and lived--during the course of four centuries.
From the mists of ignorance and misconception Schoenbaum allows the figure of Shakespeare to emerge, seen through a succession of different eyes and from constantly shifting vantage-points. This new edition makes the latest lives of Shakespeare available to whole new generation of the Bard's
devotees.
Schoenbaum presents a wealth of material from collections scattered all over the world which yield fresh and often dramatic information about a host of controversial characters and incidents. Beginning with the Shakespeare of documentary record--poet of the London stage and burgher of
Stratford--Schoenbaum proceeds to the legends of Shakespeare as deer-poacher, ale-toper, and valiant lover. Other Shakespeares the playwright as protagonist in a host of popular and scholarly biographies, which often reveal more about the biographer than the subject. The Shakespeare for whom
imaginary history was invented through forged documents--first by Ireland in the eighteenth century, and later by the clever and more seasoned J. Payne Collier. And lastly the Shakespeare who never anti-hero of a vast and frequently eccentric literature crediting his works to luminaries such as
Francis Bacon, the Earl of Oxford, and Christopher Marlowe. Enlivened with such notable personages as Johnson, Keats, Hawthorn, Wilde, Joyce, and Freud, Shakespeare's Lives is a book of many lives--both described and lived--during the course of four centuries.
From the mists of ignorance and misconception Schoenbaum allows the figure of Shakespeare to emerge, seen through a succession of different eyes and from constantly shifting vantage-points. This new edition makes the latest lives of Shakespeare available to whole new generation of the Bard's
devotees.
632 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1970
5 people are currently reading
273 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 19 of 19 reviews
May 23, 2014
Indispensible still. An accurate record of what we knew in 1970 about Shakespeare's life--quite a bit, like: the ten fireplaces in his house in Stratford. His schoolmaster, an Oxford M.A., and education: Latin grammar school. Land holdings and marriage. Also, I think in 1643, Queen Henrietta Maria was given a volume from Shakespeare's library, a life of Catherine de Medici. (Not sure if this is in Schoenbaum, though.) Some further knowledge has emerged, such as in a Michael Wood lecture (1 ix 05) that Shakespeare's great uncle Edward Arden of Castle Bromwich was a Catholic martyr executed at Smithfield, implicated by his nephew Somerville in a plot to kill the Queen.
The first fifty pages tell most of what is known, the next 750 pp., what people have made of his life from his contemporaries like Henry Chettle to Dover Wilson in the 1950s. As you may imagine, lawyers have seen the dramatist as legally trained (probably as a scrivener in Coventry Canon court), businessmen have seen him as a savvy investor in the going business of Elizabethan theater, professors have seen him as more learned than he appears (having gleaned many plots from the French, and also Latin), and travelers believe he mast have gone to Italy to depict it so well in TGV, MV, MAAN, AYLI, RJ, JC,Cor, and others--though there is no evidence for his travels.
The first fifty pages tell most of what is known, the next 750 pp., what people have made of his life from his contemporaries like Henry Chettle to Dover Wilson in the 1950s. As you may imagine, lawyers have seen the dramatist as legally trained (probably as a scrivener in Coventry Canon court), businessmen have seen him as a savvy investor in the going business of Elizabethan theater, professors have seen him as more learned than he appears (having gleaned many plots from the French, and also Latin), and travelers believe he mast have gone to Italy to depict it so well in TGV, MV, MAAN, AYLI, RJ, JC,Cor, and others--though there is no evidence for his travels.
May 17, 2017
Very learned, erudite, witty and subversively funny detailed look at the attempts to create a biography of Shakespeare from the very few facts actually known about him. Wonderful book, can pick it up at any point and read 50 or 100 pages.
January 30, 2010
The amount of research Schoenbaum must have done for this book is ridiculous.
September 20, 2023
In this book i learned how much liberty is granted to “orthodox” Stratfordians to deflect attention away from serious investigations into Edward De Vere (Oxford) as the real Shakespeare.
‘Tis a shame.
With 560+ pages of historical detail—much of which is complex and amusing—Oxford is glossed over with shamefully few details alongside the author’s hubristic tone. His furtive evaluation of Oxford himself as a historical figure is pathetic; it’s almost as if Schoenbaum is ignorant of the man himself; but surely that’s not correct, because of how much historical documentation permeates this book.
His survey of Oxfordian theories are more extensive than the man himself, but it’s ultimately just as useless, covering less than ten pages. Shoenbaum instantly dismisses all Oxfordian theories without manifesting any evidence of cogency within them. His deflection of attention away from Oxford in the research of Oxfordians looks intentional when compared to the many thousands of Shakespeare scholars who are now converted Oxfordians (being former Stratfordians).
For an example of what I mean (i.e., deflecting attention away from Oxford within Oxfordian research), Schoenbaum spends a couple pages critiquing J. Thomas Looney’s groundbreaking Oxfordian thesis, but his critiques are almost entirely anecdotal (e.g., mocking Looney’s name, some of Looney’s typographical errors, and the length of Oxfordian theses published in Looney’s stead by reputable scholars, a few studies of which are over 900 pages long each) and presume that the reader is ignorant of Looney’s thesis and how much clarity Oxfordian research has brought to light as a result of his groundbreaking work.
Although Schoenbaum wrote this book in 1991, he would benefit greatly with a little intellectual humility and a thorough study of a book published in 2021 called “Shakespeare Revolutionized: The First Hundred Years of J. Thomas Looney’s ‘Shakespeare’ Identified” (by James Warren). Many thousands of historians and scholars shifted in favor of Oxfordian readings and research between Looney’s publication (1920) and Schoenbaum’s (1991). Warren’s book is all that’s needed to see what Shoenbaum selectively neglects and omits from public discussion.
Schoenbaum’s book does not deserve many stars simply because it misleads the reader by design. And the only way to know how misleading it is, is to study the Oxfordian alternative that thousands of historians and scholars have become convinced by.
I recommend people begin with Mark Anderson’s “Shakespeare by Another Name: A Biography of Edward De Vere, Earl of Oxford, the Man Who Was Shakespeare”, and then review Looney’s book (the Centenary Edition), followed by Hank Whittemore’s “The Living Record: Shakespeare, Succession, and the Sonnets”.
‘Tis a shame.
With 560+ pages of historical detail—much of which is complex and amusing—Oxford is glossed over with shamefully few details alongside the author’s hubristic tone. His furtive evaluation of Oxford himself as a historical figure is pathetic; it’s almost as if Schoenbaum is ignorant of the man himself; but surely that’s not correct, because of how much historical documentation permeates this book.
His survey of Oxfordian theories are more extensive than the man himself, but it’s ultimately just as useless, covering less than ten pages. Shoenbaum instantly dismisses all Oxfordian theories without manifesting any evidence of cogency within them. His deflection of attention away from Oxford in the research of Oxfordians looks intentional when compared to the many thousands of Shakespeare scholars who are now converted Oxfordians (being former Stratfordians).
For an example of what I mean (i.e., deflecting attention away from Oxford within Oxfordian research), Schoenbaum spends a couple pages critiquing J. Thomas Looney’s groundbreaking Oxfordian thesis, but his critiques are almost entirely anecdotal (e.g., mocking Looney’s name, some of Looney’s typographical errors, and the length of Oxfordian theses published in Looney’s stead by reputable scholars, a few studies of which are over 900 pages long each) and presume that the reader is ignorant of Looney’s thesis and how much clarity Oxfordian research has brought to light as a result of his groundbreaking work.
Although Schoenbaum wrote this book in 1991, he would benefit greatly with a little intellectual humility and a thorough study of a book published in 2021 called “Shakespeare Revolutionized: The First Hundred Years of J. Thomas Looney’s ‘Shakespeare’ Identified” (by James Warren). Many thousands of historians and scholars shifted in favor of Oxfordian readings and research between Looney’s publication (1920) and Schoenbaum’s (1991). Warren’s book is all that’s needed to see what Shoenbaum selectively neglects and omits from public discussion.
Schoenbaum’s book does not deserve many stars simply because it misleads the reader by design. And the only way to know how misleading it is, is to study the Oxfordian alternative that thousands of historians and scholars have become convinced by.
I recommend people begin with Mark Anderson’s “Shakespeare by Another Name: A Biography of Edward De Vere, Earl of Oxford, the Man Who Was Shakespeare”, and then review Looney’s book (the Centenary Edition), followed by Hank Whittemore’s “The Living Record: Shakespeare, Succession, and the Sonnets”.
October 23, 2022
Maybe I've read just too much about his life, but this offered nothing really new and on top of that, he mentioned over and over "theories" that turned out false, or scholarship that was faulty. I never need to read all the false stuff. It just confuses the actual and hinders proper understanding
Read
April 6, 2022Gift for my husband.
June 1, 2023
Wonderful, one can feel Schoenbaum's impatience with the follies and lunacies
March 25, 2016
The other night a local newscast had a story about Shakespeare's grave, namely that his skull may or may not be inside there. I didn't bother paying a ton of attention to the story because just a day or two before, I'd finished this book, which says (among many other things) that the grave has either Shakespeare's bones, a horde of manuscripts or nothing but dust. It depends on who's story you believe.
That's kind of what this thick, endlessly facinating book is about. It's less a biography of Shakespeare than a survey of his biographers, idolaters and haters. It looks at dozens and dozens of books, pamphlets, monographs and memoirs about the Bard and charts how a poet and playwright from Stratford became the national poet and heir to controversies that will never quite go away completely.
In a brief biographical sketch at the beginning, Schoenbaum lays out the facts of Shakespeare's life: family history, as proven by biographical records, his career and a general order of plays, his retirement death and, eventually, the extinction of his direct biological line. It takes him maybe 100 pages, give or take. That's when the fun starts. With Shakespeare dead and buried, the legends begin to fly all fast and furious: he was a deer poacher! He died after a drinking bout with Ben Jonson! He was cuckolded and in a final fit of pique, denied his wife the honor of being in the same grave! Soon, the legends didn't fill in the gaps, they replaced the known facts. Oh, and we're just getting started here, folks.
Over the centuries, more and more stuff sprung up about Shakespeare, all of which Schoenbaum has a knowledge of. There was eccentric scholars like George Steevens and James Halliwell-Phillips, rigorous biographers like Edmund Malone and EK Chambers and forgers and fraudsters like William Henry Ireland. And to his credit, Schoenbaum makes these controversies and battles of letters come alive in his pages; the Ireland-Malone battles are downright facinating and would make a good book on their own, although I could say the same for the battles over portraits 0r a wild and drunken Shakespeare Jubilee in 1769 where people danced and drank during a flood that wrecked havoc in Stratford.
Throughout the book, Schoenbaum tries to keep an even tone, never going too far to bash one critic or writer unfairly; he's even rather kind to forgers like Ireland. But when he gets to the people trying to discredit Shakespeare completely, he just unleashes on them and it's amazing; he calls books unreadable, writers cranks or lunatics and dryly leaves in large chunks of their nearly-unreadable prose. It's fun, but it's also interesting and colourful history: Delia Bacon waits overnight in Shakespeare's vault, working up courage to break into it and get the proof she needs William didn't write his plays; Ignatius Donnelly builds elaborate machines to prove Francis Bacon left a hidden message inside the plays. All sorts of names pop up here: Mark Twain says he doesn't believe Shakespeare could have written all these works, while Malcolm X says he didn't even think Shakespeare was even a real person.
Although this book sounds like the kind of thing only a scholar would have any interest in, I think really anybody with an interest in Shakespeare can get a lot out of this. Although his writing is rather British in tone (lots of passive voice, too), Schoenbaum's book never stops being interesting. And he's read so, so many things it's impressive; he's even read multiple versions of books he despises for this project.
By the end of it, I was left with one sort-of regret about this book: it was written too soon! A little over a decade after the second edition was published (1990), a new spate of controversies arose: a portrait of Shakespeare found in Canada (see: Shakespeare's Face), duelling biographies by Germaine Greer (Shakespeare's Wife) and Stephen Greenblatt (Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare) and more arguments over if he wrote Edward III. It would've been nice to see his opinion on books by James Shapiro, Bill Bryson and Harold Bloom. But really, that's such a minor quibble.
Don't make this the first book you read about Shakespeare, but I'd definitely recommend reading it after Greenblatt, if only so you can see how much supposition went into that book and give you some perspective into it.
That's kind of what this thick, endlessly facinating book is about. It's less a biography of Shakespeare than a survey of his biographers, idolaters and haters. It looks at dozens and dozens of books, pamphlets, monographs and memoirs about the Bard and charts how a poet and playwright from Stratford became the national poet and heir to controversies that will never quite go away completely.
In a brief biographical sketch at the beginning, Schoenbaum lays out the facts of Shakespeare's life: family history, as proven by biographical records, his career and a general order of plays, his retirement death and, eventually, the extinction of his direct biological line. It takes him maybe 100 pages, give or take. That's when the fun starts. With Shakespeare dead and buried, the legends begin to fly all fast and furious: he was a deer poacher! He died after a drinking bout with Ben Jonson! He was cuckolded and in a final fit of pique, denied his wife the honor of being in the same grave! Soon, the legends didn't fill in the gaps, they replaced the known facts. Oh, and we're just getting started here, folks.
Over the centuries, more and more stuff sprung up about Shakespeare, all of which Schoenbaum has a knowledge of. There was eccentric scholars like George Steevens and James Halliwell-Phillips, rigorous biographers like Edmund Malone and EK Chambers and forgers and fraudsters like William Henry Ireland. And to his credit, Schoenbaum makes these controversies and battles of letters come alive in his pages; the Ireland-Malone battles are downright facinating and would make a good book on their own, although I could say the same for the battles over portraits 0r a wild and drunken Shakespeare Jubilee in 1769 where people danced and drank during a flood that wrecked havoc in Stratford.
Throughout the book, Schoenbaum tries to keep an even tone, never going too far to bash one critic or writer unfairly; he's even rather kind to forgers like Ireland. But when he gets to the people trying to discredit Shakespeare completely, he just unleashes on them and it's amazing; he calls books unreadable, writers cranks or lunatics and dryly leaves in large chunks of their nearly-unreadable prose. It's fun, but it's also interesting and colourful history: Delia Bacon waits overnight in Shakespeare's vault, working up courage to break into it and get the proof she needs William didn't write his plays; Ignatius Donnelly builds elaborate machines to prove Francis Bacon left a hidden message inside the plays. All sorts of names pop up here: Mark Twain says he doesn't believe Shakespeare could have written all these works, while Malcolm X says he didn't even think Shakespeare was even a real person.
Although this book sounds like the kind of thing only a scholar would have any interest in, I think really anybody with an interest in Shakespeare can get a lot out of this. Although his writing is rather British in tone (lots of passive voice, too), Schoenbaum's book never stops being interesting. And he's read so, so many things it's impressive; he's even read multiple versions of books he despises for this project.
By the end of it, I was left with one sort-of regret about this book: it was written too soon! A little over a decade after the second edition was published (1990), a new spate of controversies arose: a portrait of Shakespeare found in Canada (see: Shakespeare's Face), duelling biographies by Germaine Greer (Shakespeare's Wife) and Stephen Greenblatt (Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare) and more arguments over if he wrote Edward III. It would've been nice to see his opinion on books by James Shapiro, Bill Bryson and Harold Bloom. But really, that's such a minor quibble.
Don't make this the first book you read about Shakespeare, but I'd definitely recommend reading it after Greenblatt, if only so you can see how much supposition went into that book and give you some perspective into it.
May 17, 2012
Originally published on my blog here in September 1999.
One of the big problems with Shakespearean scholarship is that so little is known about the man who wrote the plays and poetry. His life is almost a complete blank, the major documentary evidence provided by occasional legal documents in which he is mentioned for one reason or another. Many of these documents were unknown before the second half of the nineteenth century or even later, and the background (knowledge of, say, the financial arrangements through which early seventeenth century theatre existed) less well understood than they are today.
The lack of knowledge combined with an extreme reverence for the works themselves proved a fertile incentive for the invention and elaboration of traditions and theories, culminating in the attribution of the plays to other hands entirely. It is the history of these traditions which forms the subject of Schoenbaum's famous book.
Schoenbaum has a rather enjoyably caustic style, dismissive of the more baseless fantasies. Some of these are pretty laughable, such as those which "prove" that Shakespeare spent part of his life following the same profession as the fantasist - a sailor, for example, wrote a book describing how Shakespeare ran away from home at 13 to sign on as the cabin boy on Drake's famous trip around the world, and carried on a sailing career until wrecked on the shores of Illyria years later. The only evidence for this sort of suggestion is the unimaginative idea that everything Shakespeare wrote about must relate to his own experience; the whole thing springs from a desire to remake Shakespeare in the image of his admirer.
Schoenbaum has more sympathy for those whose 'bardolatry' took them beyond the bounds of sanity, including the rather pitiful forger William Henry Ireland. Ludicrous though his work may seem, it would not be right to deride someone clearly not at all normal mentally.
His most acid dismissals are reserved for those who suggested that other people wrote the plays of Shakespeare. This is inspired by a species of bardolatry, the feeling that the person who wrote the plays must have been more eminent than Shakespeare. Many candidates have been put forward, including Christopher Marlowe, Queen Elizabeth I (both dead when most of the plays were first performed), and a committee of eminent Elizabethans, but the most widely espoused causes are those of Francis Bacon and Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford. Schoenbaum describes these theories as madness, taking passing delight in the fact that the Oxfordian theory was first put forward by a man named Looney. Certainly, there doesn't seem much to recommend either idea, particularly when connected, as they often are, with some of the more outlandish speculation in another field that has generated much Shakespearean rubbish, the identities of Mr W.H., the Dark Lady and the Rival Poet from the Sonnets. The cryptoanalytical side of the theories (Bacon hiding sentences proving his authorship, or even explaining that he is the illegitimate son of Queen Elizabeth and the Earl of Essex in the works) is the sort of meaningless speculation common to the sort of esotericism caricatured by Eco in Foucault's Pendulum. Arguments identical to the Baconian cryptology have been advanced in attempts to ridicule the idea, to show, for example, that the works were written by prominent nineteenth century figures.
There is little to criticise about this book. Schoenbaum gives credit where it is due, and its opposite where that is due; no writer is perfect or all bad. His writing is clear, and his critical appraisal of each writer he describes easy to understand. In reading the second edition, I rather miss what has now been left out to make room for an expansion of other material, a discussion of Shakespeare's role in fiction. In the year of Shakespeare in Love, this would have been most interesting to read.
One of the big problems with Shakespearean scholarship is that so little is known about the man who wrote the plays and poetry. His life is almost a complete blank, the major documentary evidence provided by occasional legal documents in which he is mentioned for one reason or another. Many of these documents were unknown before the second half of the nineteenth century or even later, and the background (knowledge of, say, the financial arrangements through which early seventeenth century theatre existed) less well understood than they are today.
The lack of knowledge combined with an extreme reverence for the works themselves proved a fertile incentive for the invention and elaboration of traditions and theories, culminating in the attribution of the plays to other hands entirely. It is the history of these traditions which forms the subject of Schoenbaum's famous book.
Schoenbaum has a rather enjoyably caustic style, dismissive of the more baseless fantasies. Some of these are pretty laughable, such as those which "prove" that Shakespeare spent part of his life following the same profession as the fantasist - a sailor, for example, wrote a book describing how Shakespeare ran away from home at 13 to sign on as the cabin boy on Drake's famous trip around the world, and carried on a sailing career until wrecked on the shores of Illyria years later. The only evidence for this sort of suggestion is the unimaginative idea that everything Shakespeare wrote about must relate to his own experience; the whole thing springs from a desire to remake Shakespeare in the image of his admirer.
Schoenbaum has more sympathy for those whose 'bardolatry' took them beyond the bounds of sanity, including the rather pitiful forger William Henry Ireland. Ludicrous though his work may seem, it would not be right to deride someone clearly not at all normal mentally.
His most acid dismissals are reserved for those who suggested that other people wrote the plays of Shakespeare. This is inspired by a species of bardolatry, the feeling that the person who wrote the plays must have been more eminent than Shakespeare. Many candidates have been put forward, including Christopher Marlowe, Queen Elizabeth I (both dead when most of the plays were first performed), and a committee of eminent Elizabethans, but the most widely espoused causes are those of Francis Bacon and Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford. Schoenbaum describes these theories as madness, taking passing delight in the fact that the Oxfordian theory was first put forward by a man named Looney. Certainly, there doesn't seem much to recommend either idea, particularly when connected, as they often are, with some of the more outlandish speculation in another field that has generated much Shakespearean rubbish, the identities of Mr W.H., the Dark Lady and the Rival Poet from the Sonnets. The cryptoanalytical side of the theories (Bacon hiding sentences proving his authorship, or even explaining that he is the illegitimate son of Queen Elizabeth and the Earl of Essex in the works) is the sort of meaningless speculation common to the sort of esotericism caricatured by Eco in Foucault's Pendulum. Arguments identical to the Baconian cryptology have been advanced in attempts to ridicule the idea, to show, for example, that the works were written by prominent nineteenth century figures.
There is little to criticise about this book. Schoenbaum gives credit where it is due, and its opposite where that is due; no writer is perfect or all bad. His writing is clear, and his critical appraisal of each writer he describes easy to understand. In reading the second edition, I rather miss what has now been left out to make room for an expansion of other material, a discussion of Shakespeare's role in fiction. In the year of Shakespeare in Love, this would have been most interesting to read.
May 31, 2017
Samuel Schoenbaum's Shakespeare's Lives was meta-history before anybody used that term. The central problem for Shakespeare's many biographers through the years has been the very limited extent of our knowledge of the facts of his life. His birth and birthplace, his parents, some facts about his marriage, and some records of his life in Stratford-upon-Avon are known. But the records that survive are generally legal and/or ecclesiastical in nature, and shed little light on the man, his inner life, and his works. Alongside the established facts, there are a limited number of anecdotal tales about his life, referred to as traditionary tales, none of which have been or can ever be verified. Despite the thinness of the historical record,from the 18th century to the current date, a veritable legion of Shakespearean academics, antiquaries and amateurs have essayed to flesh out his biography.
Schoenbaum's book, which was originally issued around 1970 and updated in a second edition in 1991, surveys the colorful story of the many efforts to illuminate the poet's life. As Schoenbaum relates, the very bareness of the record has given license to many authors to project their own lives and professions on Shakespeare. Thus, we are variously told, Shakespeare was a sailor, a soldier, worked in a lawyer's office, consorted with nobles, taught school, etc. As Schoenbaum demonstrates, the changing conceptions of Shakespeare tell us much about the development of history as a modern discipline, and about the changes in English society (the book's emphasis is on English studies) through the years.
Schoenbaum is thorough and fair in evaluating this enormous body of work, although from time to time his peevishness with books he regards as foolishness peep through. His sharpest scorn is reserved for the out-and-out frauds, the numbers of which are suprising, and the anti-Stratfordians, whom he regards as largely deranged. Schoenbaum's strength is his depth and his regard for genuine scholarship; his weakness is his own fascination with minor characters who may have at one time been important, but who are justly forgotten today. This is a valuable book on many levels: it contains all the important facts known about Shakespeare's life as of the time that it was written, and it's also a fascinating historiography, if as noted, it takes a few unnecessary detours into the trivial.
Schoenbaum's book, which was originally issued around 1970 and updated in a second edition in 1991, surveys the colorful story of the many efforts to illuminate the poet's life. As Schoenbaum relates, the very bareness of the record has given license to many authors to project their own lives and professions on Shakespeare. Thus, we are variously told, Shakespeare was a sailor, a soldier, worked in a lawyer's office, consorted with nobles, taught school, etc. As Schoenbaum demonstrates, the changing conceptions of Shakespeare tell us much about the development of history as a modern discipline, and about the changes in English society (the book's emphasis is on English studies) through the years.
Schoenbaum is thorough and fair in evaluating this enormous body of work, although from time to time his peevishness with books he regards as foolishness peep through. His sharpest scorn is reserved for the out-and-out frauds, the numbers of which are suprising, and the anti-Stratfordians, whom he regards as largely deranged. Schoenbaum's strength is his depth and his regard for genuine scholarship; his weakness is his own fascination with minor characters who may have at one time been important, but who are justly forgotten today. This is a valuable book on many levels: it contains all the important facts known about Shakespeare's life as of the time that it was written, and it's also a fascinating historiography, if as noted, it takes a few unnecessary detours into the trivial.
November 18, 2015
Probably the most definitive and scholarly book I've ever read on Shakespeare. Schoenbaum painstakingly separates the myths from the facts giving a biography of what is known first, then going era by era and proving or disproving what the writers of era said about Shakespeare. A little ponderous, it's still a great tool for any Shakespeare scholar. I particularly liked all the comments by the Romantics like Coleridge who were very very wrong.
September 19, 2007
A good overview of the arc of Shakespearean biography from Shakespeare's death to the present day. Schoenbaum is a bit of a smartass as well, which helps compensate for the sheer density of the research. Plus, he brooks no sass from the "Shakespeare wasn't Shakespeare" types.
June 9, 2008
This is a fantastic book for anyone contemplating the multi-faceted jewel that is Shakespeare. Schoenbaum approaches the man from Stratford armed with documentary evidence of varying provenance, date, and reliability. His scholarly hand is guiding, but the results are never dull or dry.
February 4, 2016
Interesting study of the history of Shakespeare scholarship.
August 28, 2008
Great! Unbelievable detail behind many different aspects of Shakespearean scholarship. I loved getting all the facts on the few biographical documents that survive.
abandoned
April 25, 2012Quite good, what I read of it. Abandoning...for now....
August 16, 2010
Yes, believe it or not, I actually finished this book. Very interesting, but very dense. Rewards slow reading if you have the patience for it.
October 13, 2011
EVERYTHING you ever wanted to know about Shakespeare.
September 4, 2015
Purchased for a dollar at the library's book sale. Wow!
Displaying 1 - 19 of 19 reviews