The Real Shakespeare: Retrieving the Early Years, 1564-1594.

It is not much fun to review Eric Sams's The Real Shakespeare, since the very act of criticizing his overarching thesis will be, paradoxically, a confirmation of his point. As the subtitle of the volume suggests, Sams's project is to establish the importance of Shakespeare's early years as a man of the Warwickshire countryside and Roman Catholic background. This is an altogether commendable aim for literary scholarship, though the project is neither as original nor as courageous as Sams insists throughout the book. The problem is that his arguments are bound up with a specious narrative of cover-up and conspiracy in which Eric Sams stands alone against an overbearing Shakespeare establishment that, for reasons which remain opaque, doesn't want to acknowledge the importance of Shakespeare's formative years. In taking issue with many of the claims put forward in The Real Shakespeare, this reviewer is simply revealed as part of the cover-up. Notwithstanding this difficulty, my general assessment of Sams's work here is that its accomplishments are very modest. The broader claim that Shakespeare's plays ought to be placed in an ethical context defined by early modern plebeian culture is one I strongly endorse. The more specific biographical arguments are inconclusive, despite the polemical tone in which they are presented. The cover-up argument strikes me as just plain incompetent.

The Real Shakespeare argues that Shakespeare's imagination was powerfully and irrevocably shaped by the poet's early experience of small-town life in Stratford. This is probably true, though it is hardly a novel claim. Thomas Spencer Bayne's entry on Shakespeare, written for the Ninth Edition of The Encyclopaedia Britannica (1886) makes precisely this argument. Bayne's monograph essay is one of the fullest and most confident accounts of Shakespeare as the great poet of ordinary life. Although some of the biographical detail there is rather fanciful, the entry does present some very useful social history. It also has much greater literary charm than Sams's contentious and querulous prose. The importance of the rural and plebeian background for Shakespeare's writing has been very fully documented and widely accepted in the work of contemporary scholars, including Robert Weimann, Annabel Patterson, Francois Laroque, and many others (including myself). A review of biographical evidence in the context of this recent research would be most welcome, but Sams seems quite oblivious to its very existence.

Many of the chapters in the first half of The Real Shakespeare attempt to establish very specific biographical details of the poet's early life. Sams contends, for example, that Shakespeare was raised as a Roman Catholic. The possibility that Shakespeare's family was Catholic is well-known to scholarship, but Sams's review of the existing evidence does little to settle the issue. It is not clear, in any case, what larger importance this fact would have even if it were established beyond a reasonable doubt. The same can be said for the argument that Shakespeare trained and practiced as a law clerk. Part of the evidence for this claim is the appearance of Shakespeare's signature on a 1568 legal textbook. This is hardly conclusive, even if the signature is authentic, and much of the corroborating evidence is derived from a survey of legal language in the plays. Here Sams's work converges weirdly with the arguments of Anti-Stratfordians, who have used some of the same evidence to argue that the playwright knew so much law that he could not have been "the man from Stratford." In the final analysis the argument isn't new, it isn't persuasive, and it isn't particularly interesting.

The second half of Sams's book is given over to questions of authorship and attribution. Here the larger point advanced is that Shakespeare began his career as a writer much earlier than is generally supposed, and that he is in fact the unacknowledged author - or co-author - of a number of early works, including The Taming of a Shrew, The Troublesome Reigne of King John, Faire Era, and even Locrine. Sams also maintains that Shakespeare is the author of both the Ur-Hamlet, of which no known copy exists, and of the 1603 Hamlet Quarto, generally dismissed as "bad." The main drift of this discussion is that all these plays have been excluded from the canon of Shakespeare's works because of a dismissive snobbery on the part of literary scholars. I would like to stipulate here that it is altogether possible that a young Shakespeare wrote plays in the 1580s and that some of these have survived in unattributed form. It is, furthermore, quite likely that literary scholars on the whole really are snobs who might be reluctant to include such works in the Shakespearean canon. But there is really nothing in The Real Shakespeare that persuades me that this view should now be adopted as the correct one.

The larger problem with this book is its treatment of the problems of evidence and historiography. There are any number of rather self-congratulatory statements here to the effect that Sams has considered more evidence than anyone else concerned with the facts of Shakespeare's biography. This, I think, is disingenuous. Sams has looked at a very large number of texts and documents, but he has not uncovered any important new evidence to support his various claims. More significantly, for many documents he has simply failed to establish how and in what way they really can count as evidence. To give only one example, Sams relies extensively at various points on satirical writings by Thomas Nashe and Robert Greene, which allude to - or seem to allude to - William Shakespeare. Sams's logic seems to be that these texts indubitably refer to the young Shakespeare and therefore they can be extensively mined for reliable evidence about his early career. The actual connections traced, however, range from tenuous to improbable to downright fanciful, and Sams professes himself completely unfazed by the theoretical difficulties entailed by working with such equivocal material.

A more interesting argument concerns the epistemic and historiographical authority of official documents relative to oral history. Sams wants a more balanced consideration of the "anecdotal" evidence recorded by Aubrey, Davenant, Rowe, and Betterton in their early accounts of Shakespeare's life. I agree that it might well be appropriate to have a thoughtful re-consideration of this problem. Sams's contribution to this discussion, unfortunately, is not terribly helpful. The notions of cover-up, conspiracy, literary snobbery, and so forth put forward are simply too impoverished to serve as a vocabulary for exploring problems of historical knowledge.

What's really at stake for Sams in The Real Shakespeare is not Shakespeare's early life, or his background in country life, or his role in the writing of such playtexts as Faire Em or the 1603 Hamlet Quarto. In point of fact, the arguments for some of these claims scarcely go beyond the listing of undefended assertions. The real story here is a kind of animus or personal grievance against Samuel Schoenbaum and Gary Taylor, who are soundly and repeatedly thrashed as carnival effigies representing the larger Shakespeare establishment. Sams claims (xii) that the experts speak with one voice. He then identifies Schoenbaum and Taylor as "the best known and most influential," and then concludes: "If they are as mistaken and misleading as I aver, then so a fortiori are all other extant editions, series, reference books and biographies." There's probably a lot to object to in the work of Schoenbaum and Taylor, but the idea that their work accurately represents a single voice- or even a dominant voice - of Shakespeare scholarship is implausible on the face of it. It follows a fortiori that the ensuing arguments about cover-up and conspiracy really can't be taken seriously. But just in case it doesn't follow a fortiori, it's worth pointing out that Sams hasn't really taken a careful look at the now considerable body of Shakespearean biographies. If he had, he might well have been struck by the range and diversity of outlooks expressed in this literature. A full investigation of these biographies would define a very worthwhile research agenda, but the present work does not even suggest a useful way to begin such a project. In my experience most Shakespeare scholars are "indifferent honest," though God knows we are certainly fallible. Almost everyone who has ever worked in this field has felt grumpy and impatient at the deplorable absence of perspicacity in the work of all those other critics. The Real Shakespeare does express this chronic and pervasive exasperation; unfortunately it contributes very little knowledge either to discussion of Shakespeare's life or to interpretation of his works.

MICHAEL D. BRISTOL McGill University