Murderers and Other Friends by John Mortimer Page A

excellent poetry. Evelyn Waugh entertained himself by acting a curmudgeonly country squire with an ear trumpet, and then the wind changed and he was stuck with it. John Osborne and Kingsley Amis, having been called, in some distant dawn of the world, angry young men, have opted to become cross old blimps and have performed their roles with considerable success. But Shakespeare, engaged full-time in writing parts for other people, was apparently unable to think up one for himself.
    If he had committed a murder, like his friend Ben Jonson, we should have known a great deal more about him. If he had been a double agent, in trouble with the Privy Council, and a noted atheist who died with a dagger in his eye like Marlowe, we might have had a good deal more to go on. As it is, Shakespeare, who transcended all other writers, beat them all in keeping potential biographers guessing. In fact we know a great deal about him, quite enough to cover a whole packet of postcards, but it’s mercifully dull. We have details of his law-suits, his property-buying, his will; the unsensational moments of a life spent keeping out of trouble. He was kind enough to give us some blank years, between leaving Stratford and turning up in the London theatre, during which time you can create your own Shakespeare: a lawyer’s clerk, a soldier, a traveller to Italy, a tutor in an aristocratic household – what you will. It is clear that he was born the son of a semi-literate glovemaker, went to London to act, wrote plays with considerable success, was admired by Ben Jonson, known and revered by his fellow actors, Hemmings and Condell, and returned to New Place in Stratford to enjoy his money and die, perhaps on his birthday. He was either William Shakespeare or someone else with exactly the same name. What is perfectly obvious is that he wasn’t Francis Bacon; he had nothing whatever in common with that cold-hearted, urbane, secretly corrupt judge whose scientific interests led him to die stuffing a goose with snow; and yet the penalty of writing anything at all about Shakespeare is to receive weekly propaganda from the Francis Bacon Society. Somewhere, in some dusty office, some dullard spends his life collecting evidence that there never was a Shakespeare. If a writer keeps out of trouble he can be denied all existence.
    The best I could do was to invent six patently fictional stories about Shakespeare’s life. This subject allows a wide degree of speculation because of the form of his art. The novelist is for ever present in his work, sometimes addressing us directly like Dickens, Trollope or Thackeray, sometimes causing every scene to vibrate with his peculiar sensitivity like Henry James or, following Flaubert’s precept and being like God in his universe, everywhere present and nowhere visible. The playwright is only on stage when he is pretending to be someone else, lost in his characters, whose views shouldn’t be too readily mistaken for his. So you can prove that Shakespeare was a liberal anarchist – ‘handy-dandy, which is the justice, which the thief?’, or a conservative devoted to law and order and the class structure – ‘Take but degree away, untune that string, And, hark! what discord follows’, a pre-Christian stoic – ‘As flies to wanton boys, are we to the gods; They kill us for their sport’, or a man with a touching belief in Christian mercy – ‘Why, all the souls that were were forfeit once, And He that might the vantage best have took, Found out the remedy’. You can also spell a great variety of plots out of the sonnets, no doubt the nearest he came to autobiography. Did he love an aristocratic patron called Henry Wriothesley or, as Oscar Wilde thought, a boy actor called Willie Hughes? Did his fair, male lover sleep with his dark girl-friend or were there other causes for his bitterness and burning sense of ingratitude? Such historical questions are best