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Rodney Bolt
History Play
For my parents
About anyone so great as Shakespeare, it is probable that we can never be right; and if we can never be right, it is better that we should from time to time change our way of being wrong.
T. S. ELIOT
Contents
PROLOGUE A Dead Man in Deptford
CHAPTER ONE Prefaces to Shakespeare
CHAPTER TWO Une Histoire Inventée
CHAPTER FOUR Gentlemen of a Company
CHAPTER EIGHT Shakespeare in Love
CHAPTER TWELVE His Exits and His Entrances
CHAPTER THIRTEEN In the Bleak Midwinter
CHAPTER FOURTEEN Renaissance Man
CHAPTER FIFTEEN Under the Mask
CHAPTER SIXTEEN Themes and Variations
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN Prospero’s Books
How curious and interesting is the parallel – as far as poverty of biographical details is concerned – between Satan and Shakespeare. It is wonderful, it is unique, it stands quite alone, there is nothing resembling it in history, nothing resembling it in romance, nothing approaching it even in tradition. They are the best-known unknown persons that have ever drawn breath upon the planet. By way of a preamble to this book, I should like to set down a list of every positively known fact of Shakespeare’s life, lean and meagre as the invoice is. Beyond these details we know not a thing about him. All the rest of his vast history, as furnished by the biographers, is built up, course upon course, of guesses, inferences, theories, conjectures – a tower of artificialities rising sky-high from a very flat and very thin foundation of inconsequential facts.
FACTS
He was born on the 23rd of April, 1564.
Of good farmer-class parents who could not read, could not write, could not sign their names.
At Stratford, a small back-settlement which in that day was shabby and unclean, and densely illiterate. Of the nineteen important men charged with the government of the town, thirteen had to ‘make their mark’ in attesting important documents, because they could not write their names.
Of the first eighteen years of his life nothing is known. They are a blank.
On the 27th of November (1582) William Shakespeare took out a licence to marry Anne Whateley.
Next day William Shakespeare took out a licence to marry Anne Hathaway. She was eight years his senior.
William Shakespeare married Anne Hathaway. In a hurry. By grace of a reluctantly-granted dispensation there was but one publication of the banns.