The dark gent
Robert Phiddian reviews Katherine Duncan-Jones' Ungentle Shakespeare. (extract)
Ungentle Shakespeare: Scenes from His Life, Katherine Duncan-Jones, The Arden Shakespeare (Thomson Learning), 2001. ISBN 1 90343 626 5, RRP $49.95
'Duncan-Jones' Shakespeare is an operator. Her argument is as convincing as any argument about a Renaissance playwright's life can be; that is, factual in some of the details and no better than plausibly inventive in the psychology.
This is as it must be. The archive of known facts about Shakespeare's life has mounted over the centuries, but parish registers, political history, folk recollection, theatrical archaeology and legal documents can give us nothing that we would recognise these days as psychological depth. We have more direct access to Iago's or Cleopatra's personalities from one of their speeches than we do to Shakespeare's from all his works. Not only did he live before novels and Romanticism told us that we all have complicated emotional histories; he was also a playwright, an inventor of personalities. He wrote the traces of multiple identities, then gave them to actors to realise. What he was really like himself is just about irretrievable from the gallery of possibilities he imagined.'
- For Robert Phiddian's full review, please see Eureka Street January-February 2002 print edition, available by subscription and at bookshops and newsagents.
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