|
Will
By Christopher Rush
Beautiful Books £14 99
460 pages
Dateline: 14th October, 2007
It has taken 400 years, but at long last a publisher is offering us
the opportunity to read William Shakespeare's autobiography. A life
that has until now been an enigma is fully explained and numerous mysteries
that have baffled academics, historians and biographers across the centuries
are finally resolved.
The obvious question is why this book has remained out of the public
eye are so many generations? The answer is that its true author is not
the man who penned so many plays and poems but academic and writer,
Christopher Rush, someone who has devoted much of his life to studying
Shakespeare's canon and therefore is possibly as well placed as anybody
to write a novel purportedly telling the Bard's story in his own words.
Will is an absolute gem of its kind, unrestrained by the need
to prove every statement and thus freed to tell a coherent story in
language that is subtly modernised but often imitates the real thing,
drawing heavily from Shakespeare's own writings to tell a rattling good
yarn of one man's life in Elizabethan and Jacobean times.
There may be criticism that much of the substance of this book is untrue.
However, who knows? It is at least possible that Rush's intuitions and
instincts are so reliable that he has materially told the tale as good
old Will would have done himself, will lead to the discovery that he
had written his own autobiography and that tome had survived into the
21st century. It would be nice to think so, since according to Rush,
our hero lived a good and highly entertaining life in troubled times.
It says a lot for this talented writer that nothing put forward is totally
implausible, based on the extremely limited information that is available
and which he makes as much of as anybody could.
Where Christopher Rush really scores is in getting under the skin of
an ordinary man made great by an extraordinary talent. The playwright's
history is related from his deathbed, to a solicitor, Francis Collins
who is supposed to be writing Will's will that will inevitably include
a bequest of a second-best bed to a far from grateful and, to be honest,
shrewish wife.
Rush starts out with the Shakespeare and Arden family histories in
and around Stratford prior to the birth of one of the few children that
survived infancy. Childhood is covered well, as is the butcher's boy's
lust for the considerably older Anne Hathaway, who far too quickly turned
18-year-old Will into a father.
His move to London results seems motivated by the desire to escape
a harping wife rather than an adventurous move by a closet Catholic
with ambitions. Once the action reaches the capital, the truth comes
out about Christopher Marlowe and the great libeller, Robert Greene.
In addition to the story of England's greatest playwright, the author
also paints a spectacular portrait of London life as the horrifically-described
plague threatened the city's whole future.
The multi-talented Mr Rush manages to blend in his life of Shakespeare
with the writer's own work, thus explaining why certain plays were written
at particular times in his life. While some of this might be open to
debate, the combination of The Gunpowder Plot, Catholicism and syphilis
is a suitably heady brew from which one can imagine the witches and
Macbeth might emerge. We even get a perfectly plausible explanation
for the existence of the sonnets and their contents.
In addition to précising many of the plays, the best of which
is a masterly summary of Macbeth in little more than a page,
every one, including one or two of dubious provenance, is considered.
As one would expect with this writer's background, there is also some
pretty pithy criticism that could make this book a must for A-level
students or undergraduates looking for that much-needed shortcut to
higher grades.
We will never know how accurate Christopher Rush's painstakingly written
take on Shakespeare really is. It is undoubtedly a stunning achievement
that puts most biographies in the shade and deserves to win some awards,
either for theatre books or even, dare one suggest it, the Booker Prize
or the Whitbread.
Philip Fisher
Articles from 2007
Articles from 2006
Articles from 2005
Articles from 2004
Articles from 2003
Articles from 2002
Articles from 2001
Articles from 2000
Articles from 1999
Articles from 1998
Articles from 1997
|
