Shakespeare to the rescue!

Lately I’ve been reading a lot about William Shakespeare. I recently finished Anthony Burgess’ imaginative biography and I’m now well into Stephen Greenblatt's own award-nominated study on the life of The Bard. It’s been fascinating. Throughout my formal education, I’ve had a guiltily unoriginal obsession (when people find out I’m a Literature major, I always feel like they want me to have a more unique response to the inevitable conversation provoker: “Who’s your favorite author?”) with Shakespeare. So I felt that now—over a year out of college and currently without full-time employment—was as good a time as any to make an invested effort in learning more about him as a person.

Despite being widely accepted as the greatest playwright of all time, Shakespeare “the man” remains largely an impenetrably equivocal figure. There just isn’t a lot of hard historical evidence about his personal life. As Burgess put it, “Infuriatingly, whenever Shakespeare does something other than buy a lease or write a play, history shuts her jaws with a snap.” As my recent readings have led me to discover, any detailed biography of the glover’s son from Stratford must rely heavily on speculation.

For instance, there is a period of Shakespeare’s life, between his leaving Latin Grammar School in the 1670s to his appearance in the London theatre scene in the early 1690s, about which we know close to nothing. Plenty of scholars like to speculate that he worked as a schoolteacher or a lawyer’s clerk (which would account for the professional familiarity with legal vernacular that he demonstrates in several of his plays), but we do know this much: he didn’t attend university, produce plays, or do anything of historical notability for over a decade.

Suddenly I feel an intimate connection with this mysterious genius from the past. It’s possible that, if anyone would forgive my lack of tangible productivity at this point in my life, Shakespeare would. I like to imagine him at my age: working odd jobs; studying up on classic literature, recent history, or whatever seemed to tickle his fancy; living with his parents (yes, Shakespeare likely lived with his parents following his shotgun marriage to Anne Hathaway and before moving to London); listening to a lot of Mirah and Damien Rice on his iPod; looking forward to something greater.

I guess if Shakespeare had an awkward transitional phase in life, then I can have one, too. It has been all too easy to become frustrated by the books that warn me that no respectable graduate program will want to take me if I’ve spent more than a year or two out of college, or to see my peers already locked into life paths that I’ve yet to find the trailhead for; but at least I’m in good company.