The Hindu Business Line : Shakespeare, ‘literary equivalent of an electron’

The Bard left nearly a million words of text, but we have just 14 words in his own hand, says Bill Bryson in Shakespeare ( www.harpercollins.co.uk). His name signed six times and the words ‘by me’ on his will make the tally of 14. “Not a single note or letter or page of manuscript survives.”

We have no written description of him penned in his own lifetime, informs Bryson. “The first textual portrait – ‘he was a handsome, well-shap’t man: very good company, and of a very readie and pleasant smooth witt’ – was written 64 years after his death by John Aubrey, who was born 10 years after that death.”

Bryson considers the iconic playwright to be ‘a kind of literary equivalent of an electron – forever there and not there.’ As a result, “we can know only what came out of his work, never what went into it.” “Faced with a wealth of text but a poverty of context, scholars have focused obsessively on what they can know.” Such as that Shakespeare’s works contain: “1,38,198 commas; 26,794 colons; 15,785 question marks”. He spoke of ears 401 times; love is referred to 2,259 times but hate, just 183 times. He used 29,066 different words.

Academic researchers have pursued ‘dogged investigations’. Sample these: ‘Linguistic and informational entropy in Othello,’ ‘Ear disease and murder in Hamlet,’ ‘Poisson distributions in Shakespeare’s sonnets,’ ‘Was Hamlet a man or a woman’…

As for Shakespeare’s wife, Anne, precious little is known. “Apart from the gravestone, there is no evidence for her age on record,” informs Bryson. “Her gravestone describes her as being 67 years old at the time of her death in 1623. It is from this alone that we conclude that she was considerably older than her husband.”

Nothing at all is known about “her temperament, intelligence, religious views or other personal qualities. We are not even sure that Anne was her usual name.”

Theatres as dedicated spaces of entertainment were a new phenomenon in England in Shakespeare’s lifetime, narrates the book. The Bard is often accused of anatopism – that is, getting his geography wrong. Why else would he, in The Taming of the Shrew, put a sailmaker in Bergamo, a landlocked city in Italy, ask critics? He is guilty of many anachronisms too: “He has ancient Egyptians playing billiards and introduces the clock to Caesar’s Rome 1400 years before the first mechanical tick was heard there… In Coriolanus, he has Lartius refer to Cato 300 years before Cato was born.”

Bryson reasons that Shakespeare’s genius was not really to do with facts, but with ambition, intrigue, love, and suffering – things that aren’t taught in school. Delightful read.

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