THE PRIVATE LIFE OF WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE (By Lena Cowen — cosmopolitan, perhaps secretly Catholic, most likely gay or

Orlin) James Shapiro, NYT 23-11-2021 bisexual, eager to flee Stratford — is replaced here by a
Shakespeare who is “a family man” in a close economic
Much of the evidence documenting Shakespeare’s life wasn’t partnership with his wife. He is especially devoted to his father,
discovered until the late 18th or early 19th century, and comes whose fall from the height of Stratford’s leadership to a man
packaged in the assumptions of those who made these finds. who was afraid to leave his house for fear of arrest for debt
We have been told that his marriage to an older woman was an was, for Orlin, “the defining event” of Shakespeare’s private
unhappy one, that Shakespeare’s bequest to his wife of a life, from which “all else followed.” She interprets
“second-best bed” confirms how “little he esteemed her,” and Shakespeare’s marriage at a young age (which would have
that the “Birthplace,” his house on Henley Street, a mecca for brought to an end any apprenticeship and precluded as well a
literary pilgrims, has remained virtually unchanged since university education) as an act that helped restore his family’s
Shakespeare’s infancy. Over the past 200 years these and fortunes. Most scholars have read Shakespeare’s last will and
similar claims have hardened into fact and have become testament as at best chilly, especially when it came to his
enshrined in popular biographies. family. But Orlin sees it otherwise. While it was not, like many
Jacobean wills, an “expressive” one, she shows how each gift
In “The Private Life of William Shakespeare,” Lena Cowen Orlin that Shakespeare specifies, including apparel, sword, bowl and
has re-examined all of the documentary evidence. She reads it that notorious bed, shares “the imprint of an unnamed grief.”
afresh, along with thousands of contemporary wills and local
records that provide context for those in which Shakespeare is She also shows that much of what we take as fact about
mentioned. Anyone who has ever struggled to decipher Shakespeare’s life hangs by the slenderest of archival threads.
Elizabethan “secretary hand” will know how daunting this task Anne Hathaway’s baptismal record does not survive, and the
has been. The great and lasting result of her labors is how only reason for believing she was eight years older than
punishingly she demolishes shoddy claims and biased Shakespeare is the number that appears on her memorial brass
inferences that have distorted our understanding of — often enough, Orlin shows, imprecisely remembered or
Shakespeare’s life. rendered. In her assiduous research Orlin came upon a
baptismal record from 1566 for a Johanna Hathaway, daughter
Shakespeare was born and raised in Stratford-upon-Avon, (as Shakespeare’s wife was) to a Richard Hathaway of Shottery.
where he married Anne Hathaway at the age of 18, had three Orlin doesn’t push this possibility too hard, but if this was the
children with her and left town — only returning for good late woman Shakespeare married — her first name inaccurately
in life. He spent the intervening years, roughly half his lifetime, transcribed — Anne might have been two years younger than
in London, where he acted and wrote plays. He didn’t travel her husband.
back and forth much, reportedly once a year, and was unlikely,
Orlin writes, to have attended the funeral in Stratford of his Three contemporary images of Shakespeare are widely
son, Hamnet, or of either of his parents. accepted as authoritative. One is the awkwardly executed
woodcut that appears in the 1623 First Folio. Another is the
Biographers confronted with the mystery of “How did romantic Chandos portrait now in the National Portrait Gallery.
Shakespeare become Shakespeare?” split into two groups: These two are endlessly reproduced. Not the third, an effigy in
those who see his early years in his hometown as formative, painted limestone in Stratford’s Holy Trinity Church, in which
and those (myself included) who place greater weight on his Shakespeare looks like — as the scholar John Dover Wilson put
experiences in London. Orlin, whose Shakespeare had a it — a “self-satisfied pork butcher.” Orlin’s account of this
“persistent allegiance to his hometown,” and whose choices monument is definitive. She sends packing the “authorship
there, she argues, determined the trajectory of his life, belongs skeptics” for whom a conspiratorial cover-up accounts for the
to the Stratford camp. Her title is somewhat misleading: “By differences between 17th-century sketches of this memorial
‘private life,’” she writes, “I mean Shakespeare’s family life in and the frequently repaired and looted effigy (from which the
Stratford.” Readers eager for revelations about who were actor David Garrick reputedly stole the “right forefinger”). She
Shakespeare’s friends and lovers, or what were his religious and goes on to suggest that Shakespeare likely commissioned the
political convictions (what we ordinarily mean when we speak effigy and had met Nicholas Johnson, the artist who made it. If
of someone’s private life), will not find answers here. so, like it or not, this is how Shakespeare wanted to be
remembered. Her account, detailed and dazzling, also left me
“Neither a literary biography nor a full biography,” this book melancholy, for all too soon, given cutbacks in funding and
looks more narrowly at what surviving documents tell us, and, training, this kind of scholarship may no longer be possible.
when their trail runs dry, what documents about his neighbors
might reveal about events that defined Shakespeare’s Stratford Shakespeare biography is often marked by overreach, and Orlin
life: his father’s financial collapse, his marriage, his homes is not immune. An academic herself, she can’t help recasting
(including the “Birthplace,” likely damaged by fire in the 1590s, Shakespeare as one, urging us to “picture Shakespeare
then rebuilt), his will and his memorial. Though most of it participating in the intellectual culture of Oxford” and asserting
consists of dense scholarly analysis, it reads like a detective that “Shakespeare is nearly certain to have taken in lectures
story in which a skilled investigator returns to a cold case. and sermons in college chapels.” There is no hard evidence
given for these claims. And having argued that Shakespeare had
It amounts to a revisionist portrait of the artist. The a study in New Place, the large house he purchased in Stratford,
transgressive image of Shakespeare circulating in recent years she can’t resist fantasizing that this is where he wrote his late
plays: “How many of his characters and episodes developed out
of the scenes that unfolded on the streets below him as he
wrote in the western light of the study window?” Her source?
The gossip-hunting vicar of Stratford from the early 1660s, John
Ward. Orlin’s meticulous handling of archival material fails her
here, as her eagerness to encroach upon the London
Shakespeare upends her usual accuracy. Ward never wrote that
Shakespeare “in his elder days lived at Stratford, and supplied
the stage with two plays every year.” He in fact jotted down
two separate anecdotes, which Orlin then combines, linking
them with a comma (those who are curious can consult a
facsimile at the Folger Shakespeare Library’s site, “Shakespeare
Documented”). Orlin knows that late in his career Shakespeare
collaborated with other dramatists, working with John Fletcher
on his last three: “Henry VIII,” “The Two Noble Kinsmen” and
the lost “Cardenio.” You don’t write plays with co-authors who
live a three days’ ride away. These are unfortunate missteps in
an otherwise impressive and valuable book, a biography that
will lead many to revise their classroom lectures.

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James Shapiro teaches at Columbia. His book “Shakespeare in a

Divided America” was one of the Book Review’s 10 Best Books
of 2020.

THE PRIVATE LIFE OF WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

By Lena Cowen Orlin
Illustrated. 430 pp. Oxford University Press. $40.