The Final Act Of Mr Shakespeare by Robert Winder
Little, Brown $39
And so the Shakespeare industry rolls on with an unending catalogue of biographies, biographical novels and commentaries. The industry exists because not enough is known personally about the great playwright to be able to join the few factual dots of his life and shape a portrait. Thus both fans and detractors can make of him what they Will, to coin a pun of the sort he used so prolifically himself.
Winder's novel, well reviewed in Britain, depicts a troubled man late in his life, wrestling with his conscience over not writing accurate biographies about such monarchs as Henry Tudor and Richard III who, in the eponymous play, is depicted as a mean, humpbacked killer of children with a claim to the throne more compelling perhaps than his. To make amends and continue his sequence on English monarchs, Shakespeare wants to write one last play about Henry Tudor, father of Henry VIII, and set the record straight about both of them.
The trouble is Jacobean England is as dangerous a place to start telling historical truths as Tudor England had been — perhaps more so since Guy Fawkes' infamous gunpowder plot. Thus the shape of the new play, as always a collaborative exercise, is thrashed out by a group of theatre professionals in secret venues around London. Then Shakespeare would write it in full, adding the magical lightning that illuminates his work.
Shakespeare dares to go to The Tower to see Sir Walter Raleigh, for 10 years out of royal favour, and on the way out is roughed up by guards and then warned by James I's heavy, Sir Edward Coke, to concentrate on a Henry VIII play, which would need to be some kind of hagiography.
After that, Winder has the Bard say to his co-conspirators: "My only wish is to set our history straight. In Richard III we made Henry Tudor a hero, but it goes heavy with me that I should be the author of a falsehood that may outlive us all. Call it an old man's wish ..."
Well, my imagination sees him as an entirely different man to Winder's romantic, charismatic, risk-it-all, politically defiant man who would confuse facts with truth. I believe it was not luck or charisma but a shrewd prudence that saved Shakespeare from arrest and some jail time for offending the authorities, the fate of most of his contemporaries.
After assiduously reading the plays and so many of the biographies over decades, I think of Shakespeare as a shrewd businessman, politically astute and cautious, usually affecting insouciance, but brilliantly aware of the world and its ways, and never likely to confuse profound truth with an assemblage of historical facts. Whatever the facts about the historical Richard III, Shakespeare uses him to display a profound, imaginative grasp of the virtues and frailties, the egomania and the generosity of spirit, the complete human emotional register.
Winder has the courage, the gall perhaps, to include a play on Henry Tudor which he pretends Shakespeare wrote in his declining years. I admit it's fun reading it but the long accounts of the group discussing the work in progress at various secret meetings I did not find convincing.
Gordon McLauchlan is an Auckland writer.
