Contested Will (51 page)

For dance in the Blackfriars plays, see, for example, the elaborate satyrs' dance sequence followed by the dance of the shepherds and shepherdesses of
The Winter's Tale
, the Morris dance of
Two Noble Kinsmen
, the dance of the celestial spirits in
Henry the Eighth
, and especially, again,
The Tempest
, with its dance of the ‘Strange Shapes' in Act 3 and dance of reapers and nymphs in Act 4. My discussion of music and dancing in the Blackfriars plays draws
on the invaluable work of Irwin Smith. See too Alan Brissenden's excellent overview in his
Shakespeare and the Dance
(London, 1981).

It seems that the entertainment of
The Two Noble Kinsmen
in Act 3 is lifted from the second anti-masque of Beaumont's
Masque of the Inner Temple
and Gray's Inn
, which had been performed at Whitehall on 20 February 1613 in celebration of the marriage of Princess Elizabeth to the Elector Palatine (see Brissenden,
Shakespeare and the Dance
). James liked it enough to ask to see it again. For the anti-masquers of the King's Men, see Richard Proudfoot, ‘Shakespeare and the New Dramatists of the King's Men 1606–1613', in
Later Shakespeare
, ed. John Russell Brown and Bernard Harris (London, 1966), pp. 235–61. For anti-masque in
The Tempest
, see Stephen Orgel,
The Illusion of Power: Political Theater in the English Renaissance
(Berkeley, 1975). For Frank Kermode on the knotty language of the late plays, see his
Shakespeare's Language
(London, 2000). See too Russ McDonald,
Shakespeare's Late Style
(Cambridge, 2006), and Gordon McMullan,
Shakespeare and the Idea of Late Writing
.

Strachey's full sentence reads: ‘He is no longer interested, one often feels, in what happens, or who says what, so long as he can find a place for a faultless lyric, or a new unimagined rhythmical effect, or a grand and mystic speech'; see Strachey, ‘Shakespeare's Final Period',
The Independent Review
3 (August 1904). For contemporary accounts of the burning down of the Globe, see for example, the reports quoted in Gordon McMullan's Arden edition of
Henry VIII
(London, 2000).

For Chambers, see his chapter on ‘The Problem of Authenticity' in
William Shakespeare: Facts and Problems
, as well as his famous British Academy lecture on
The Disintegration of Shakespeare
(Oxford, 1924). And see Ben Jonson,
Volpone
, ed. R. B. Parker (Manchester, 1983). I quote Field's letter from Brian Vickers,
Shakespeare, Co-Author: An Historical Study of Five
Collaborative Plays
(Oxford, 2002). The story of Fletcher's tavern affair is told in vol. 2 of Thomas Fuller,
The History of the Worthies of England
(London, 1662). For a full discussion of the division of labour between Shakespeare and his collaborators, see Vickers,
Shakespeare, Co-Author
. See too, Stanley Wells,
Shakespeare and Co
., and C. J. Sisson,
Lost Plays of
Shakespeare's Age
(Cambridge, 1936). And for a fascinating account of Shakespeare and George Wilkins, see Charles Nicholl,
The Lodger:
Shakespeare on Silver Street
(London, 2008).

For the underlying autobiographical assumptions shared by those who deny Shakespeare's authorship, see, for example, Diana Price,
Shakespeare's
Unorthodox Biography
, Hank Whittemore,
The Monument
(Marshfield Hills, Mass., 2005), and William Boyle, ‘Can Literature Be Evidence?' in
Shakespeare Matters
3 (Summer 2004).

See Michael Wood,
In Search of Shakespeare
(London, 2003); Stephen Greenblatt,
Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare
(New York, 2004); see too, Greenblatt ‘A Great Dane Goes to the Dogs',
New York
Review of Books
, 26 March 2009; and René Weis,
Shakespeare Revealed: A
Biography
(London, 2007). See, too,
Shakespeare's Personality
, ed. Norman N. Holland, Sidney Homan and Bernard J. Paris (Berkeley, 1989). For Bate's remarks and Niederkorn's response, see Jonathan Bate, ‘Is This the Story of the Bard's Heart?',
The Times
, 20 April 2009; and William S. Niederkorn, ‘The Sonnets at 400', in ‘Paper Cuts', the blog of the editors of the
New York
Times Book Review
, papercuts.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/05/20/the-sonnetsat-400/. And see Hank Whittemore,
The Monument
. T. S. Eliot adds, ‘I am inclined to believe that people are mistaken about Shakespeare just in proportion to the relative superiority of Shakespeare to myself ' in his ‘Shakespeare and the Stoicism of Seneca', in
Selected Essays
, second edition (London, 1934).

Much of this social history can be found in E. A. Wrigley et al.,
English
Population History from Family Reconstitution, 1580–1837
(Cambridge, 1997) and E. A. Wrigley and R. S. Schofield,
The Population History of England,
1541–1871: A Reconstruction
(London, 1981). For more recent overviews, see Will Coster,
Family and Kinship in England 1450–1800
(London, 2001);
The
Family in Early Modern England
, ed. Helen Berry and Elizabeth Foyster (Cambridge, 2007); and Naomi Tadmore, ‘The Concept of the Household-Family in Eighteenth-Century England',
Past and Present
151 (1996), pp. 111–40. On early modern autobiography, see Paul Delany,
British
Autobiography in the Seventeenth Century
(London, 1969); Meredith Skura,
Tudor Autobiography
(Chicago, 2008); Henry Cuffe,
The Differences of the
Ages of Man's Life
(London, 1607); and Germaine Greer,
Shakespeare's Wife
. See too, Gail Kern Paster,
Humoring the Body: Emotions and the
Shakespearean Stage
(Chicago, 2004), and
Reading the Early Modern Passions:
Essays in the Cultural History of Emotion
, ed. Gail Kern Paster, Katherine Rowe and Mary Floyd-Wilson (Philadelphia, 2004).

For the story of the Mark Lawson interview, see Susan Elderkin, ‘Gullible's Travels',
Financial Times
, 23 June 2007; my thanks to Rosie Blau,
who commissioned the review and shared it with me. For Giles Fletcher's work, see his
Licia, or Poems of Love
(n.p., 1593);
The English Works of Giles
Fletcher, the Elder
, ed. Lloyd E. Berry (Madison, 1964); and Gordon McMullan's excellent
Dictionary of National Biography
entry. And for the story of the young scholar who bragged of sleeping with Licia, see
Records of
Early English Drama: Cambridge
, ed. Alan H. Nelson, 2 vols (Toronto, 1989), as well as Nelson's ‘Shakespeare and the Bibliophiles,' where the story is told of young William Covell (a future clergyman and early admirer of ‘sweet Shakespeare') who reportedly boasted to a Cambridge friend (who in turn told this to a married woman with whom Covell was having an affair) that Covell ‘lay with Licia, and by what means he got to her bed'. For what Shakespeare would have learned in grammar school, see T. W. Baldwin,
William Shakspere's Small Latine & Lesse Greeke
, 2 vols. (Urbana, Illinois, 1944). For Shakespeare's vocabulary, see David Crystal, ‘
Think on My Words':
Exploring Shakespeare's Language
(Cambridge, 2008).

Researching and drafting a book is a solitary business, revising and seeing it into print a deeply collaborative one. I have been blessed in my friends and colleagues – James Bednarz, Mary Cregan, Robert Griffin, David Kastan, Richard McCoy, Gail Kern Paster, William Sherman, Alvin Snider and Stanley Wells – who have been patiently reading and improving my work, some of them for decades. Collectively, they have made this a much better book than the one I first shared with them and have spared me from many errors of fact and judgement.

I have benefited greatly from the guidance of a pair of brilliant editors, Bob Bender and Julian Loose, as well as from the suggestions and support of my literary agents, Anne Edelstein and Rachel Calder. I'm also grateful for the help I've had along the way, in matters large and small, from Rosie Blau, Warren Boutcher, Jerry Brotton, Tim Brearley, Maurice Charney, Ashley Combest, Barry and Mary Cregan, Becky Fincham, Clive Fisher, Andrew Hadfield, Adam Hooks, David Kurnick, William Leahy, Hermione Lee, Zachary Lesser, Laurie Maguire, Russ McDonald, John McGavin, Gordon McMullan, James Miller, William Monroe, Alan Nelson, David Norbrook, Anne Owen, Tom Paulin, Douglas Pfeiffer, Trevor Poots, Ross Posnock, Martin Puchner, Eleanor Rees, Jacqueline Rose, Richard Sacks, Herbert and Lorraine Shapiro, Jill Shapiro, Michael Shapiro, Kevin Sharp, Laurie Sheck, Patrick Spottiswoode, Alan Stewart, Jean Strouse, Daniel Swift, Sam Swope, Jeff Talarigo, Jeremy Treglown, Pierre Walker, René Weis, Linda Woodbridge, Terence Wright and Georgiana Ziegler.

One of the unspoken arguments of this book is that electronic resources can only take scholarship so far; libraries, and their largely untapped archival riches, remain as crucial as ever. Libraries have been a second home for me while researching this book, and I'm grateful for the help provided by the following archivists and institutions: the New York Public Library; the Folger Shakespeare Library; the British Library; the National Library, Dublin; Karen Attar at Senate House Library of the University of London; Columbia University Libraries; the Huntington Library; Dartmouth
College Library; Brunel University Library; Neda Salem at the Mark Twain Project at the Bancroft Library, University of California at Berkeley; University of Tennessee Library; Harry Miller at the Wisconsin Historical Society; Helen Burton at Keele University Library; Helen Selsdon at the Helen Keller archives, American Foundation for the Blind; and the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust.

I could not have written this book without the generous support provided by a Guggenheim Fellowship; a Distinguished Visiting Fellowship at Queen Mary, University of London; and a fellowship at the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library, an unrivalled literary community, thanks in large part to the guidance of Jean Strouse. I'm grateful, too, for the helpful feedback from audiences that have heard my work-in-progress at King's College, University of London; Penn State University; the Sun Valley Writers Conference; the Early Modern seminar at Oxford University; and Queen Mary, University of London. I'm also keenly aware of how much I have learned over the past quarter-century from my students at Columbia University.

Once again, my greatest debt is to my wife and best critic, Mary Cregan, and to our son Luke, to whom this book is dedicated.