What Was Shakespeare Really Like?  by Stanley Wells  (Cambridge University Press 2023)

Review by Graham Wyles, September 2023

Few scholars or practitioners, certainly in our own time, could claim with unchallenged justification to be the Shakespeare Wallah. Professor Sir Stanley Wells would however head any list of contenders. A professional lifetime of grappling with the Bard has given him an unparalleled insight into Shakespeare the man as well as Shakespeare the writer. So when Professor Wells allows himself, ‘The personal view’, that Shakespeare was a Protestant who disliked Puritans and had little sympathy for Catholicism, we may take the view as having a certain intellectual clout.

Wittgenstein noted that certain problems gave rise to a sense of mental block, so diverse were the potential angles of attack that a kind of inertia overcame the mind. Something similar applies to the notion of befuddlement by being spoilt for choice. Perhaps paradoxically, for a subject about whom there is seemingly little contemporary record, a similar problem faces someone trying to get behind the playwright to the man. Professor Wells helpfully breaks the problem down into four questions, each of which forms a chapter based on a series of lectures which were originally delivered electronically during the Covid pandemic. Firstly, there are the problems encountered in discerning Shakespeare’s personality. Secondly there are questions around how he went about writing. Thirdly and perhaps more famously there are the sonnets and what they might reveal about his personality. Finally, there is the altogether engaging question of what made Shakespeare laugh?

The first problem skims over historical attempts to pin down Shakespeare’s personality (Freud getting short shrift) and the associated problems of the reliability of contemporary references from sources antagonistic or congenial. He does point out however that the, ‘Upstart Crow jibe is the only denigrating surviving reference’, suggesting that Shakespeare’s contemporary, Ben Jonson, is closer in his assessment with the warm, ‘Sweet Swan of Avon’ comment on his character.

Other details in the historical record, such as his purchase of New Place at the age of thirty-three and a mere three years after the formation of The Lord Chamberlain’s Men, remind us of how swift was Shakespeare’s rise and how successful he rapidly became. Other judgements come from Professor Wells’ close association with the writings, as when he says, ‘We can envisage Shakespeare as both a playgoer and a reader of dramatic and poetic texts.’ Nonetheless questions remain, he says, over his relationship with his various collaborators.

However as in all Shakespeare studies, besides the odd outlier, all roads lead to predictable praise with phrases such as, ‘imaginative fecundity’ and ‘emotional ferment’, shoring up the iconic status of a cultural keystone.

One of the aspects of a creative life revealed by extended close study is the process of maturing from the early, ‘commercial’ plays like the Two Gentlemen of Verona to the later plays that Prof. Wells suggests could have been written for his own satisfaction rather than any commercial imperative. This is the type of speculative insight that puts flesh on the bare bones of what is revealed in the public record.

It is perhaps comforting to mere mortals to know that even genius has its methods and the chapter on Shakespeare’s working methods reminds us that a good deal of research went on – we might say plundering – as he was not above lifting whole gobbets of text from both his historical and fictional sources. Again we are reminded that Shakespeare was a company man and was writing for a group whose individual strengths, particularly those of his leading men such as Burbage and Kemp, he knew and understood; perhaps even writing after consulting with them over what the company – and indeed the public – needed. And only one with the familiarity and academic clout of Prof. Wells can say, whilst discussing Shakespeare’s revisions, that he, ’was not always on top of his material.’

Unlike A.L. Rowse, who claimed to have discovered the identity of  ’The Dark Lady’ of the sonnets, Prof. Wells claims no revelations. Instead his discussion of the man behind the sonnets suggests one struggling with a complex emotional life, yet even on occasion, turning them out to order for an inexperienced patron. At the same time, suggests Wells, we find a bisexual lover mischievously outed by one of his circle and unhappy with the publication of private material. It seems irresistible to attribute Shakespeare’s, ‘darkening palette’ as tragedian and comic writer to his maturity and life experience, including and significantly the death of his son, Hamnet.

However, Professor Wells devotes his final chapter to what he describes as Shakespeare’s natural bent as tending towards comedy. What emerges is a writer who takes trouble and delight in his craft whilst developing his art as his humanity, understanding and sympathy with the human condition inflects his creativity.

This is a richly entertaining and illuminating book which will find an enthusiastic readership amongst Shakespeare lovers worldwide.