Graham Holderness
London: Bloomsbury, 2011
This unique hybrid biography self-consciously combines fiction and historical fact, emphasizing the scarcity of hard evidence about Shakespeare’s life and the speculative nature of other, more official biographies. Holderness suggests biographers of the Bard such as Ackroyd, Bate, Greenblatt, and others end up writing autobiographies in disguise – and without apology does the same himself.
He then proposes nine additional “lives” of Shakespeare. Each begins with three sections, “facts,” “tradition,” and “speculation,” then launches into a fictional account, written by Holderness himself, designed to bring its perspective to life. In order, the lives are Shakespeare variously “the Writer” (“pseudo-scientific romance thriller,” in the style of Dan Brown’s Da Vinci Code) “the Player” (an actor’s memoir of Shakespeare as an acting coach) “the Butcher Boy” (“faked historical document”) “the Businessman” (“stream-of-consciousness,” in the style of Joyce or Burgess) and “the Catholic” (“death-bed scene”), as well as three variations on Shakespeare “in Love”: “the husband, the gay lover of one or more men, and the heterosexual lover of one or more mistresses” (Victorian antiquarian controversy, in the style of A. S. Byatt’s Possession; detective story featuring Sherlock Holmes, in the style of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle; First World War novel, in the style of Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms).–PG