For both of them, what Shakespeare was doing in his “lost years” depends on his family connections and their backgrounds. but both have done vast amounts of research, and try to persuade us that their perspective is correct. Neither has uncovered new documentary evidence, for instance. Neither Fallow nor Moorwood try to establish exactly what Shakespeare was doing from around 1582 to 1589. Greenblatt’s book Will in the World is subtitled How Shakespeare became Shakespeare“, and he spends a good deal of time picking over the “mountains of speculation” relating to the years after Shakespeare drops out of the official records in Stratford before he reappears as an actor and playwright in London some seven years later: during this period he somehow became Shakespeare. The answers that they’ve come up with, though, are completely different.įor some perspective I’ve also been looking at the more conventional biographies by Stephen Greenblatt and Michael Wood. In her afterword to the new book * The Shakespeare Circle, Margaret Drabble suggests “to receive interesting answers you have to ask interesting questions”, and the authors I’ve been reading, David Fallow and Helen Moorwood, have asked questions about whether the conventional view is the right one. In the last week or so I’ve been hearing about, and reading about, Shakespeare’s parents, who they were, what they were like, and how his family life might have impacted on his career.
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