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The Real Shakespeare: Retrieving the Early Years, 1564-1594

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1.Eric Sams' The Real Shakespeare constitutes a determined attempt to reconstruct the early part of the playwright's life. It shows Shakespeare not as a late developer but as an early starter who assiduously revised his work and who, in fact, was responsible for early dramas, including apparent source texts, not usually accepted as part of the conventional canon. Clearly the result of much work and contemplation of extant records and other details, The Real Shakespeare looks initially at biographical issues: a Roman Catholic Shakespeare leaves school, probably at the age of thirteen, to help with family farm chores, becomes involved (as a clerk) with the legal profession (hence the character of his hand-writing), marries Anne Hathaway (already pregnant), and departs soon after for London to escape the consequences (whipping, at the least) of poaching deer owned by the influential, anti-catholic Sir Thomas Lacy. In London, Sams asserts, Shakespeare makes his connection with the Shoreditch Theatre, working his way up the proverbial ladder as ostler, call-boy, prompter and soon becomes a Queen's Man far earlier than Schoenbaum et al. are inclined to allow (58). 2.Biographical issues, however, cannot be detached from literary matters (which particularly dominate the second part of the book), and Sams, in looking at the Bard's young life, also takes into account the work and comments of contemporaries (e.g., Marlowe, Greene, Nashe, Spenser, et al.), the Parnassus plays, and Willobie his Avisa (1594) before turning to the Sonnets, the association with the 3rd Earl of Southampton, and the problem of the dedication in the first edition. He then moves to a consideration of the "early style" and ascription of both the 1589 and 1603 (Q1) Hamlet to Shakespeare, as well as A Shrew (c.1588), The Troublesome Reign of King John (c.1588), the first part of the Contention...(1594), and The True Tragedies of Richard... (1595); also offered as possible candidates for canonical authority are Faire Em and Locrine (of which there is, indeed, pace Sams, p.166, a modern edition). Attention is also given to bad quartos and the matter of memorial reconstruction, source-plays, derivative plays, dating, "collaboration," so-called "stylometry," and handwriting (a script, Sams suggests, of a law clerk suggesting links to the hand of Edmund Ironside [c.1588]). Curiously, for this strongly argued book, which contends in a detailed way with the conclusions of much twentieth-century scholarship (references to contrary opinion are carefully included), there is no concluding chapter, and the reader is left to pull the threads together. However, by way of addendum, Sams provides a section headed "The Documents 1500-1594," 205 biographical details and citations in chronological order, which under-pin especially the reconstruction of the early (Schoenbaum's "lost") years; and a bibliography (with + and * marks denoting items which support or counter Sam's arguments). An index concludes the volume. 3.It is always important to review evidence for conventional knowledge, to challenge the validity of accepted views, and to suggest plausible solutions to bothersome problems. Yet, at times, the greater wisdom, unfortunately, lies in uncertainty, in being sure of what one can and cannot know, and in Shakespearean scholarship, the fields of speculation are rather broad. Given the available documentation, many readers will find some of Sams' arguments, while intriguing, still unconvincing and will prefer to rest with the more cautious approach of Schoenbaun, Vickers, Wells, and others. The academic community has not blindly or wilfully rejected solid evidence, and should not be reproached for what might appear, to some critics, to be tradition-bound precepts or unduly conservative empiricism. 4.Could Shakespeare have known about ostlers and law-clerks without being an ostler or a law-clerk? Probably? Did he write Locrine? Almost certainly not -- given the style, and if he did, why did he not revise it? If Shakespeare was the dedicated reviser Sams claims that he was, why did he not rework the questionable scenes in Titus and Pericles? Were all the source plays (e.g., King Lear and Famous Victories) really by Shakespeare? Doubt could enter here. Does revision necessarily or "normally" mean that the resulting work will manifest two separate styles? No, it does not; though the reference to the Brahms' piano trio (Op.8) on p.187 is interesting, it does not, I think sufficiently support the general point. And what is the difference between an "ordinary" reader of Shakespeare and other kinds of readers (105)? Is one to infer that academic readers and textual editors lose some sensitivity? 5.Certainly, Sams' The Real Shakespeare will shake the scholarly stage a little, which is not a bad thing. But I should guess that, when the tremors have subsided, many -- perhaps most -- of the props will be more or less where they were before and others, which would be nice to have -- some certainty about the early years, for instance -- will still be absent.

This book is in large part an attack on the orthodox "Stratfordian" academic 'establishment'; not however from the point of view of someone claiming that a person other than William Shakespeare of Stratford Upon Avon wrote the works of Shakespeare (an impression which the cover picture and title might give at first glance). Rather, Eric Sams accepts that Shakespeare was Shakespeare, so to speak, but claims that the account of the writer's early life and literary development promulgated by 'orthodox" 20th Century British Shakespeare scholars is basically eroneous, and distorted by fashionable, unproved theories. His main claim is that Shakespeare started acting on, and writing for, the stage, much earlier than most modern academics allow, that he wrote plays (and perhaps pamphlets) other than the 'canonical' plays (i.e. those plays included in the First Folio of 1623, plus "Pericles"), and that he frequently revised or rewrote his own plays. In the first few chapters of the book Sams speculates on Shakespeare's early background and upbringing in Stratford. Sams sometimes brings in quotes from the plays to support his view of Shakespeare's early life, and this is perhaps a bit problematic, but on the whole his contentions are pretty convincing, and he persuasively argues that the oral traditions about Shakespeare should be taken seriously, and not simply dismissed as gossip or folk-tales. Sams' main bugbear is probably the 'memorial reconstruction' theory, which holds that the so-called "bad quartos" are the botched piratings of Shakespeare's plays by unscrupulous actors. Sams contends that there is absolutely no evidence for this theory, and instead favours the simpler and more convincing proposition that these "bad quartos" are in fact early versions of these plays by Shakespeare himself, which he later revised. There is much more in this book than I have mentioned above, and it is definitely well worth reading.

I have nothing to add to the other reviews. I have read this dense, fascinating book about the young Shakespeare at least four times over ten years, and always find something new and stimulating in it. I usually follow up a more recent 'Shakespeare biography" with a re-read of Sams and find it utterly refreshing.

Sams' work is above all a triumph of common sense over the often fancier, hide bound and foolish nonsense published as somehow 'authoritative' about Shakespeare. Sams explicitly attacks the Academic Shakespeare industry where tenured professors and those aspiring to that rank must pay appropriate homage to their canonized predecessors even when they contradict themselves, treat obvious fictions and laughable improbabilities as facts, and repeat, with tendentious accretions of their own, received dogmas about Shakespeare, often with too little attention to what can be discovered about him from documents of his own time.

Sams especially loves to mock the 20th century Academicians' disregard for the first written accounts of this renowned author, though their authors were no less distinguished as scholars and were much closer to his culture, his time, and had the advantage of interviewing neighbors and close descendants of his fellows -- who in some cases were distinguished literary men themselves and who would have had little incentive to lie or fabricate.

Sams is especially valuable for his examination of "The Parnassus Plays" and "Willobie his Avisa", works which are easily demonstrated to be about a thinly disguised Shakespeare and his circle, including the Earl of Southampton. Moreover, there is good reason to believe "Willobie of Oxford" actually had first hand knowledge of Shakespeare's life, family and friends in Stratford. The similarity of the tale he tells of a poet, his closest friend -- a hugely wealthy, foppish young aristocrat -- and the deceitful woman with whom they both become involved is eerily similar to the supposed story of the Sonnets, providing a pre-echo of some of the preoccupations in that great collection: venereal disease, sexual ambiguity (especially on the part of the aristocrat), the intense closeness, despite the vast difference in station between poet and aristocrat, and the capricious and cruel "dark lady" -- with misogynistic generalizations about women made from her behavior. This provides a likely date for the composition of most of the sonnets, and a far more plausible suggestion of how they came to be published (much later than they were written) than one usually encounters.

Sams' understanding of the hardscrabble farming milieu in which Shakespeare was born and raised, of the way life was actually lived by people of his station and background, and his instincts for how great artists tend to make their way in the world (based on his study of other artists from 'improbable' backgrounds who went on to great fame) are invaluable.

No one will know "everything" about Shakespeare's daily life or actual personality; and Sams, though sensitive to what must have been his remarkable combination of steely ambition and personal charm, avoids trying to construct a "character", inevitably a fiction. Yet his understanding of how (again) writers and actors actually established themselves in that period, made a living, made useful connections (importantly with wealthy patrons) and indeed, how they also made enemies, puts many aspects of Shakespeare's early career into a persuasive, again, unglamorized or melodramatized context.