Hesketh PearsonA Life of Shakespeare Othello’s plea for nothing more nor less than the truth tobe told when he is spoken of after his death, could be seen as aposthumous plea by Shakespeare to the generations of biographers, who have feltmoved to interpret his life and work according to their own characters andpersuasions.The plain truth is, however, that there are merely a handfulof known and substantiated facts about Shakespeare on which to build, includingthe year of his birth 1564 (though not the exact day) and his death in 1616. Between these hard facts exists a world of surmise andwishful thinking that has produced some very entertaining biographies and some,which are plainly ludicrous. ‘Extenuation’ has been necessary to satisfy thecurious. It does seem extraordinary that there are so fewcontemporary references to Shakespeare, or that no one saw fit to ask hissurviving family about him before the direct line became extinct in 1670. Thereare eulogies by his friend Ben Jonson (‘Sweet Swan of Avon’); and passingreferences, by his theatrical colleagues Heminge and Condell in their Prefaceto the first Folio, to his working practices: ‘What he thought, he uttered withthat easiness that we have scarce received from him a blot in his papers’. Thesetestify to his genius and the high esteem in which those who knew him well heldhim. But that’s about all we can safely testify to—opinions of the man and notfacts. All we really have are his will, registers of births, deathsand marriages, a few contracts for land and property deals and the occasionalinvolvement in a legal dispute. There are no letters or anything of a personalnature at all. His first tentative biographers, therefore, writing in the mid-to late 17th century were eager to grasp at anything to fill out the meagerfacts, and local legends and traditions found their way into print. It was inthese early biographies that the story of Shakespeare poaching deer and havingto flee Stratford began; or the fiction that his first contact with Londontheater was tending the horses for the gentry outside the London playhouses. The brief biographer John Aubrey (1626-97) was responsiblefor one of the most colorful legends: that Shakespeare’s father was a butcherand his son following in the trade: ‘when he killed a calf he would do it in ahigh style, and make a speech.’ These disparate tales were first gathered together into aformal biography in 1709 by Nicholas Rowe (1674-1718). It is traditional intone and prefaces the first edited edition of the Works. As the 18th centuryprogressed, a more scholarly approach was adopted towards Shakespeare’s life,and the renowned Edmond Malone (1741-1812) was the first to eschew hearsay andlegend and interpret the documented facts, few though they be. He set thestandard for all the main biographies that followed for the next hundred years,culminating in Sir Sidney Lee’s epic ‘Life’ of 1898, which ran into 14editions.‘He was not of an age, but for all time,’ said Jonson ofShakespeare, and it is a curious fact that Shakespeare’s life and character hasbeen interpreted by each succeeding age according to the prevailing literaryfashion of the time. Thus in the 18th century, the Age of Enlightenment,Shakespeare was seen as a rough, even uneducated poet, whose talent was‘natural’, and whose works demanded ‘improvement’ for a more refined age. For the Romantics the emphasis was on his poetry, his deepsense of feeling, and, like his own King Lear, a battler against the elements.It is not surprising therefore that the most famous actor of the day, EdmundKean, was described as acting Shakespeare like ‘flashes of lightning’. For the Victorians, Shakespeare was transformed into anEnglish gentleman, full of wise saws, epithets and patriotic odes, the nationalpoet and ultimately, by Edwardian times, the literary representative of Empire. It was in this era that the writer Hesketh Pearsonformulated his view of Shakespeare. He reacted against the stuffy academicbiographies that had proliferated in the 19th century. ‘I doubt whetherShakespeare himself would have liked the Shakespeareans any more than Christwould have liked Christians’ he wrote. Pearson sought out the man behind theliterary criticism, and wanted to make him accessible to the ‘man in the street’.Pearson was an actor, and worked briefly for the greatactor-manager Herbert Beerbohm Tree, playing minor parts in Tree’s epicproductions of Shakespeare. His very personal interpretation of Shakespeare’slife is from the viewpoint of a man of the theater. Shakespeare, like Pearson,had been an actor, and the man Pearson creates for us is very much in his ownimage. He brings an actor’s eye to his commentary on the texts, and is anundoubted labor of love. ‘Shakespeare filled my world’ he writes. When hospitalizedwith tuberculosis during the First World War, he attributes his survival to theBard’s ability to make him laugh in the Falstaff scenes from Henry IV Part 2.It was a lifelong love affair and if, at times Pearson getscarried away with his enthusiasm, (even at one point telling us the color ofShakespeare’s hair - unverified), we can forgive him, for he creates astimulating and real personality. Pearson wrote: ‘For me his works alone wouldhave made life worth living; so I am writing about something I love as much aslife.’ This is the infectious mood of Pearson’s ‘Life’. There have been many popular biographies of Shakespearewritten since Pearson’s was published in 1949, but few that make the reader (orlistener) want to know more of Shakespeare and his plays.Notes by David Timson About the Readers Simon Russell Beale is one of Britain’s leading classicalactors. He won Best Actor in the Evening Standard Awards for his individualinterpretation of Hamlet, and his Ariel in The Tempest was marked by an OlivierAward. Among his many other staring roles in London Theatre was Candide andMosca in Volpone. He has a busy career in television and film too, withappearances in Branagh’s production of Hamlet and in the outstanding TVdramatization of Persuasion.David Timson has performed in modern and classic playsacross Great Britain and abroad, including Wild Honey for Alan Ayckbourn,Hamlet, The Man of Mode, and The Seagull. He has been seen on television inNelson’s Column and Swallows and Amazons, and in the film The Russia House. Daniel Philpott trained at LAMDA and, after success in theprestigious Carleton Hobbs Award for Radio Drama, recorded for BBC Radio 4. Histheater work includes various productions on the London fringe. Caroline Faber trained at Webber Douglas. On leaving, shemade an immediate impact with performances at the Royal National Theatre,Watford Palace and other theaters in the UK. Her television appearances includeMidsomer Murders and Comedy Nation.