This short volume by Stanley Wells is an edited version of a lecture series and it is a quick read. There is not much evidence of the man, William Shakespeare but Wells puts what evidence there is combined with examples from his work to give the reader an overall sense of Shakespeare the man. I especially liked the third chapter on the sonnets which Wells contends are the most private and personal of Shakespeare's writings. There is no huge reveal here, but it was overall an enjoyable read. I would recommend this to readers who love Shakespeare and who long for more about the great writer as a human being.

William Shakespeare, who wrote the plays with the name William Shakespeare on them, was a person outside of just being a poet and a playwright. Stanley Wells, who has probably learned and forgotten more abut Shakespeare than most of us, has many thoughts as to who this person was and bases them off the text of the plays and the sonnets. Adapted from a series of lectures, this is an eminently readable text from the mouth of an expert. Come for the discussion of all the dick jokes that made Shakespeare laugh, stay for the frank conversation around whether we as a reading public were supposed to ever have access to the Sonnets and what they say about the man who wrote them. My thanks to Cambridge University Press for the galley and I hope to see Dr. Wells states-side promoting this.

Don’t be frightened—this is an immensely readable book by one of the world’s pre-eminent Shakespeare experts.

We all long to know more about Shakespeare the man, because his achievement is so great, his insights to the human mind and heart so profound, and because we have so little reliable information about him. This has led to speculation, some of it wild. Wells’s book aims to set the record straight.

He does this by combining the sparse facts that have come down to us about the man with a close and highly discriminating examination of his work. He doesn’t assume that Shakespeare believed every bit of dialog he gave to his characters. The only literature that Wells believes expresses Shakespeare’s own feelings are SOME of the sonnets. He uses his knowledge of Shakespeare’s life to separate the sonnets he wrote for general consumption from those he wrote to express his personal feelings.

Using Shakespeare’s output as clues, Wells follows his development, emphasizing that people change over the course of their lives. His plays show that he was pragmatic, writing to suit the needs of his drama troupe—the number of actors he had at his command, the chronic shortage of boys to play the women’s parts, the strengths and weaknesses of individual actors, etc. He traces Shakespeare’s artistic development, such as the “relatively amateurish” plotting of his first play and the “masterly construction” of one written just a few years later, or the low humor of his earlier work and the far more subtle humor of his later work. He points out his ability to empathize with the suffering of animals, which was highly unusual for the time. He was sympathetically amused by human idiosyncrasy and charitable to morally dubious characters. Wells believes—again, on the strength of the plays—that he distrusted “a severely rationalistic” view of life and felt more at home with “skeptical irrationality.” He finds a recurrent concern with diminution and the coming together of opposites.

I would have liked to see more of this kind of deduction—what Shakespeare was thinking on the basis of what he wrote. For instance, the later plays show a preoccupation with the relationship between fathers and daughters, especially the father’s difficulty of relinquishing his girl to another man when she marries. Shakespeare was the father of two daughters, both of whom were of marriageable age at the time he wrote these plays (King Lear, The Tempest, etc.). One of them married during his lifetime; the other, not until after his death. But Wells is extremely cautious about this. He reserves his conclusions about Shakespeare’s inner thoughts to the evidence of some of the sonnets.

What makes this book so readable is the fact that it was initially written as a series of lectures. Covid scuttled that, and he later expanded the text for publication. But the result is a book that anyone can enjoy.

Thanks to Cambridge University Press and NetGalley for an advance copy of this book.

I have not read any of the author’s previous work, so my expectations were based on the cover and description. As a “modern reader” I was anticipating a more informal book, casual in tone with a straightforward approach. Unfortunately this book felt like a lecture (which makes sense after learning it was compiled from speeches and lectures) and was too densely packed with quotes and footnotes. I was hoping to feel more attached to Shakespeare as a real person but the drier tone and heavy content had the opposite effect. This scholarly approach did provide some insights to The Bard and I would recommend it as long as the reader has the right expectations before starting.

The Goodreads header above the editing pane I see says "by Stephen Fry," which fortunately is not the case, because as much as I like Fry in many of his moods, Golden-Calfing Shakespeare ("a depth, scale, and poetic power and insight that no playwright, novelist, film director, or screenwriter has since come close to") isn't one of them, and the disclaimer in the next paragraph ("He and his works are famous for exhausting superlatives, and tiresome declamations of his genius [like mine] are of no help") is, as Fry himself admits, no help. We must all think Shakespeare Is Best, or else. There's something a little desperate about such insistence, not least because (as Fry again admits, and stop it already, Stephen, you're not doing any good here) it just puts people off if they're already disposed to think that Shakespeare is a load of boring bunk. Which, uh, he isn't, as obviously I think since I requested this ARC in the first place.

Thankfully, although Stanley Wells has devoted his entire intellectual life to Shakespeare and for all I know does worship him, the manner of this little book is down-to-earth. It derives from four lectures Wells gave remotely during the first year of the pandemic, so there are a few recapitulations, the kind of thing that comes with the territory when you heard the previous installment last week. This is trivial; what matters is that Wells wears his learning lightly, is not ashamed to pun, and sits on the admiration side of the divide between admiration and worship.

There being relatively little solid information about Shakespeare's life, Wells speculates a fair amount -- but he's good at it. Was Shakespeare law-abiding, for example? Wells points out that most of his fellow playwrights did time for offenses ranging from murder to debt, whereas it appears that Shakespeare got in (mild) trouble twice, once likely for being tanked and rowdy, another time for not paying his taxes promptly. But no prosecutions are recorded. In combination with other established facts (his ownership of property, etc.), this makes a pretty good basis for believing that he was at least outwardly conventional.

What did Shakespeare look like? His peers took note of others' good looks, their long red hair, their gigantic bellies, and so on, but no one seems to have had much to say about Shakespeare's appearance -- so, Wells says, he was probably unremarkable. That might have seemed like a stretch at first, but Shakespeare was a known, admired, prominent figure, someone whose appearance would (surely?) have elicited comment if there was much to comment on.

Shakespeare as team player: he had collaborators, he revised the plays for performance, he wrote to his actors' talents. (This discussion led to one of Wells's most interesting points, about the paucity of female characters in the plays. Women and girls had to be played by adolescent boys, and adolescent boys with enough emotional maturity to portray, say, a grieving adult woman would have been thin on the ground. "Chronic Shortage of Boy Actors Syndrome," Wells calls this. Some historical novelist has absolutely got to take note of this passage, because in it Wells also points out that "both As You Like It and Twelfth Night, for instance, written close together, call for a well-matched pair of accomplished boys to play respectively the substantial roles of Rosalind and Celia and of Viola and Olivia." God, but I want to know more about those boys -- who were they, what was their relationship with each other and with the playwright, what became of them after their voices broke?)

For my money, the best chapter here is the one on the sonnets. Wells puts them in context with the vogue for sonnet sequences, makes a good case for Shakespeare having intended them as private meditations, and has a lot of plausible things to say about what they reveal of Shakespeare's emotional and sexual life. By contrast, Don Paterson's Reading Shakespeare's Sonnets is a lot of fun but takes the poems as so straightforwardly and literally autobiographical that it's ultimately unconvincing overall even though he's usually an insightful analyst of the individual sonnets.

And yet here I am dinging a star. This is for two reasons. One, the epilogue starts out strong, with a discussion of how Shakespeare studies, as a field, has historically neglected performance (Wells points out that staging and acting are themselves forms of literary criticism), but winds up as a recitation of, basically, Wells's resume. It's not that Wells comes off as bragging, exactly -- he's so eminent that nothing he can say about his professional life can count as bragging -- but honestly, who cares about the umpteenth award he's gotten? I'm sure there was some purpose to including all this detail, not that I know what that purpose might have been. I drifted off.

My second reason for dinging that fifth star is Wells' frankly peculiar silence about The Taming of the Shrew (I'd really like some help finding a non-poisonous reading of that play, or at least a discussion of its poisonousness) and his failure to supply or even point to any serious discussion of The Merchant of Venice (ditto, though Wells does nod to the anti-Semitism). How's this for obliviousness: "It’s fair enough, in my opinion, to get young students to learn selected passages by heart, and even to read with them more or less self-contained extracts, such as the witches’ scenes from Macbeth, or filleted versions of individual plays – perhaps the Shylock scenes from The Merchant of Venice, or the taming scenes from The Taming of the Shrew." I mean, sure, if you want to put kids off Shakespeare entirely; I didn't read Merchant till I was an adult, but boy do I remember the distress I felt as a high school sophomore reading Taming of the Shrew.

Still, if you're even halfway interested in Shakespeare's plays, or in theater generally, or in what even was up with those sonnets, What Was Shakespeare Really Like? is a great pleasure. I just advise skipping the foreword and bailing out of the afterword when the CV kicks in.

Many thanks to NetGalley and Cambridge University Press for the ARC.

Lettice Shakespeare (sister of William Shakespeare)
11th Great-Grandmother

Those were the words that jumped out at me recently while reviewing my family's family tree. It isn't that I didn't know this link already but it reminded me that I had this book in my TBR stack, albeit way down the list given it's publication day isn't for some time. Nevertheless, I decided, "Why not?" and bumped it right to the top of my list. I'm glad I did.

Author Stanley Wells, who I discovered should probably be referred to as Sir Stanley Wells, prepared these lecture notes just as covid restrictions went into place. The plan was to deliver them in person at the headquarters of the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust. That obviously couldn't happen so he ultimately presented them online. This is the slightly edited/updated print version of those video lectures which are currently available online. You may best know Stephen Fry, who does the foreword, as half of the comedy duo of Fry and Laurie, where he partners with Hugh Laurie, although he has a host of other credits including, cough-cough, performing on stage in works of Shakespeare. Check out that photo of him as Malvolio. Anyway, enough about them. On to the real star of the story, William Shakespeare. If you're reading this, you've obviously heard of him.

Seriously, this was a fascinating look at Shakespeare the man. I liked that Wells kept it simple, relying on fact, not wild hunches. Is he in agreement with other experts? No. Not always. Heck, Even the late Prince Phillip didn't agree with him. Ancestor or not, I'm no Shakespeare expert, so I generally had no true opinion on anything. Oh, okay, I had no clue about much of the info shared. Wells uses source material and the words of not just other experts but those of contemporaries of Shakespeare as well as Shakespeare's own works to illustrate his conclusions. There are even photos, well captioned, I'll note, and a lengthy list of books referred to in his lectures as well as an index for the book. If you're a fan of Shakespeare, you'll definitely enjoy the ample use of his written works, even the controversial sonnets.

Nope, not giving away details. Read the blurb. Buy the book. I think you'll like the man that emerges and find his likely creative pattern interesting. Not a dry read by any stretch of the imagination, which I'd sorta feared. Shakespeare had to juggle so many demands, even the availability of certain things, like a trapdoor, in the theatre, not to mention be aware of the limits and skills of his players as well as numbers, usually no more than fourteen. I'm sure most know all roles in Shakespeare's day were performed by men, but even then some had more than one role to play, which had to be a major drain on energy, both physical and emotional. Shakespeare loved puns and word play, so just coping with multiple character lines to learn was surely time consuming.

Bottom line, this is a book that will be finding a permanent place on my shelf. How delightful to find out the very human side of my celebrated ancestor. His words still have the power to stir us. Thanks #NetGalley and #CambridgeUniversityPress for this insight into a man few of us, related or not, truly know. Proud to call him an ancestor.

A set of four essayss plus an autobiographial essay written by a pre-eminent Shakespeare scholar. The essays are well-written and interesting.