Shakespeare of London

Rating:
Summary: Superb evocation of Shakespeare and his times
Review: We know very little about William Shakespeare. He wrote in a time after the invention of the printing press, but before the invention of newspapers and magazines, so the sort of journalism which we rely on today to tell us more than we want to know about the inner lives of show-business figures did not exist during his lifetime.

Anyone who wants to write a full-length biography of this man, one of the greatest writers of our planet, has two choices. She can either make up stuff along the way, as countless Shakespeare biographers have done since the 1600s, or she can stick to the fragmentary facts and fit them into a picture of the social structure and life that Shakespeare lived in. This is what Chute does in her now out-of-print classic, and as readers of this review can see, I think she did a superb job.

Chute's book is superb not only because she is a vivid writer, not only because she tells us why certain things were the way they were, but because she respects the people she is writing about. When she tells us why Elizabethan "players" and their property managers liked tawny-orange dye for their costumes, she not only tells us why they liked it (it was a "color-fast" dye which would not fade) but conveys to us some of the combination of freedom and limits which made up Elizabethan society. The men and women of London were people who, on the one hand, could not buy the color-stable, wash-and-wear clothes we wear without a thought today, but on the other hand, if they could find a good dye or could afford to wear a bright color, they could gaudy themselves up in a way which grownups are too shy to do nowadays. As always, something has been lost and something has been gained, and Chute knows this and doesn't write history on the basis of "look at how many mistakes those poor little people made" or "look at all those great heroes of the past." They are men and women and children who could have learned from us, and we can learn from them. All of them, Shakespeare first among them but not the only one.