ânearly all Shakespeareâs dramatis personae are intended to have some resemblance to characters in his own dayâ. Such readings turned the plays into something other than comedies, histories and tragedies: they were now coded works, full of in-jokes and veiled political intrigue for those in the know. Andgiven the great number of characters in Shakespeareâs plays and the many things that they say and do, the range of topical and biographical applications was nearly limitless. I donât think that Malone really thought this through â he was just trying to bolster a shaky chronology and show off his knowledge of Elizabethan culture. But in doing so he carelessly left open a fire door.
The problems with Maloneâs topical assumptions pale in comparison with those precipitated by his biographical ones. Until Malone had established a working chronology of Shakespeareâs plays, no critic or biographer had ever thought to interpret Shakespeareâs works through events in his life. About the closest anyone had come to reading the plays biographically was suggesting that Shakespeare had modelled comic characters such as Falstaff and Dogberry on local folk he had known. But such claims were never meant to reveal anything about Shakespeareâs character, other than perhaps suggesting that he had a bit of a vindictive streak.
Where earlier eighteenth-century editors such as Nicholas Rowe and Alexander Pope had prefaced the plays with a brief and anecdotal âLifeâ, Malone chose to fuse life and works through extended notes that appeared at the bottom of each page of text. So, for example, when Malone first discovered in the Stratford archives that Shakespeareâs son Hamnet had died in 1596, he thought it likely that Constanceâs âpathetic lamentationsâ about the loss of her son Arthur in King John (which Malone dated to this same year) were inspired by Shakespeareâs own recent loss. Perhaps they were. Perhaps the play had been written before Shakespeare learned of his sonâs death. Perhaps he waited until composing Hamlet to unpack his heart. Or perhaps Shakespeare had been thinking of something else entirely when he wrote these lines. Weâll never know.
Maloneâs argument presupposed that in writing his plays Shakespeare mined his own emotional life in transparent ways, and for that matter, that Shakespeare responded to lifeâs surprises much as Malone and people in his own immediate circle wouldhave. So that for Malone, Shakespeare was not the kind of man who could suffer such a loss without finding an outlet for his grief in his work: âThat a man of such sensibility, and of so amiable a disposition, should have lost his only son, who had attained the age of twelve years, without being greatly affected by it, will not be easily credited.â There was no corroborating evidence in any case to confirm or refute Shakespeareâs amiability (an anachronistic term, not used in this sense until the mid-eighteenth century), how hard the death of his son hit him, and how or even whether he transmuted loss into art. Indeed, there was no effort to consider that even as literary culture had changed radically since early modern times, so too had a myriad of social customs, religious life, childhood, marriage, family dynamics and, cumulatively, the experience of inwardness. The greatest anachronism of all was in assuming that people have always experienced the world the same way we ourselves do, that Shakespeareâs internal, emotional life was modern.
Maloneâs decision to include the Sonnets and other poems alongside the plays proved even more consequential. As Margreta de Grazia has eloquently put it,
Maloneâs pursuit from the externally observed to the inwardly felt or experienced marked more than a new type of consideration: it signalled an important shift in how Shakespeare was read. Shakespeare was cast not as the detached
The problems with Maloneâs topical assumptions pale in comparison with those precipitated by his biographical ones. Until Malone had established a working chronology of Shakespeareâs plays, no critic or biographer had ever thought to interpret Shakespeareâs works through events in his life. About the closest anyone had come to reading the plays biographically was suggesting that Shakespeare had modelled comic characters such as Falstaff and Dogberry on local folk he had known. But such claims were never meant to reveal anything about Shakespeareâs character, other than perhaps suggesting that he had a bit of a vindictive streak.
Where earlier eighteenth-century editors such as Nicholas Rowe and Alexander Pope had prefaced the plays with a brief and anecdotal âLifeâ, Malone chose to fuse life and works through extended notes that appeared at the bottom of each page of text. So, for example, when Malone first discovered in the Stratford archives that Shakespeareâs son Hamnet had died in 1596, he thought it likely that Constanceâs âpathetic lamentationsâ about the loss of her son Arthur in King John (which Malone dated to this same year) were inspired by Shakespeareâs own recent loss. Perhaps they were. Perhaps the play had been written before Shakespeare learned of his sonâs death. Perhaps he waited until composing Hamlet to unpack his heart. Or perhaps Shakespeare had been thinking of something else entirely when he wrote these lines. Weâll never know.
Maloneâs argument presupposed that in writing his plays Shakespeare mined his own emotional life in transparent ways, and for that matter, that Shakespeare responded to lifeâs surprises much as Malone and people in his own immediate circle wouldhave. So that for Malone, Shakespeare was not the kind of man who could suffer such a loss without finding an outlet for his grief in his work: âThat a man of such sensibility, and of so amiable a disposition, should have lost his only son, who had attained the age of twelve years, without being greatly affected by it, will not be easily credited.â There was no corroborating evidence in any case to confirm or refute Shakespeareâs amiability (an anachronistic term, not used in this sense until the mid-eighteenth century), how hard the death of his son hit him, and how or even whether he transmuted loss into art. Indeed, there was no effort to consider that even as literary culture had changed radically since early modern times, so too had a myriad of social customs, religious life, childhood, marriage, family dynamics and, cumulatively, the experience of inwardness. The greatest anachronism of all was in assuming that people have always experienced the world the same way we ourselves do, that Shakespeareâs internal, emotional life was modern.
Maloneâs decision to include the Sonnets and other poems alongside the plays proved even more consequential. As Margreta de Grazia has eloquently put it,
Maloneâs pursuit from the externally observed to the inwardly felt or experienced marked more than a new type of consideration: it signalled an important shift in how Shakespeare was read. Shakespeare was cast not as the detached
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