Reviewed by Harriet
Plenty of people will be thinking about Shakespeare at the moment, following the release of the wonderful film Hamnet. It’s taken from the novel of the same name, which I reviewed on here in 2020, and although some changes have been made in the film adaptation (not all of which I liked), it manages to capture the spirit of the book, with its magic and grief and love. And it makes you feel very warm towards the man himself. But there have been plenty of people over the ages who have said that Shakespeare couldn’t have written the plays attributed to him. According to Wikipedia’s entry on ‘the Shakespeare authorship question’, more than eighty people have been suggested as possible candidates. The usual argument is that Shakespeare, as a middle-class boy from a small Warwickshire town, lacked the education, and the familiarity with the aristocracy and the court, which are displayed in the plays. I’m not going to go into all this here – though I can’t resist pointing out that one of the prominent Shakespeare deniers was aptly named Thomas J. Looney – but I have to say it’s always seemed ridiculous to me, and I’ve spent a lot of time reading, and reading about, Shakespeare.
And so has Susan Dwyer Amusson. She is a historian of the early modern period, which covers the years in which the plays were written, performed and published, a group of people who are, as she says in the Prologue, ‘conspicuously absent’ from the list of people who deny Shakespeare’s authorship. Her book essentially goes on to show that the society of the period was far more ‘porous’ than non-historians imagine, with members of different ranks of society meeting often, and that education was for more thorough than is often thought. Analysis of the plays is not in her remit, and nor is straightforward biography; instead she examines both direct evidence – what is actually known of Shakespeare the man – and indirect evidence, placing ‘one person’s experience in dialogue with others who lived at the time’ or setting them in a broader social context.
The book is divided into three parts. The first one looks at Shakespeare’s life and family in Stratford and the explains the impressive curriculum of grammar schools of the period; the second takes Shakespeare to London, describing the cultural, economic and social life of the era; and the third concerns the theatre world in which he worked. I have to say I found this section the most interesting. The first chapter, Theatre Before Shakespeare, demonstrates how actual buildings devoted to staging plays were a very new development when Shakespeare moved to London. In fact the first purpose-built theatre dates from 1567, three years before Shakespeare was born. By the time he moved to London in his twenties, ‘at least fifteen adult companies’ were performing in various venues, several had built their own theatres, and a number of playwrights had begun to get established. So Shakespeare, who began as an actor, was establishing himself in an up and coming, and soon to be thriving, world, in which he not only had his plays performed but also became part owner of the Globe Theatre, as well as investing in property elsewhere. All this is historical fact, as is the rather comforting information that Anne (named Agnes, as her father referred to her, in the book and the film) Shakespeare sometimes joined her husband in London. Amusson also argues that the fact that he left Anne his ‘second best bed’ was not an indication that he did not care for her – it was ‘the marital bed, the one they slept in. The best bed would have been reserved for guests’.
In the Epilogue, Amusson asserts firmly that ‘There is no mystery about who wrote Shakespeare’s plays….there is nothing in the plays, or in Shakespeare’s life, that is incompatible with what we know of the man from Stratford’. I for one found her arguments wholly convincing.
The book provides helpful further reading listed chapter by chapter, and copious notes. There are also useful maps and other illustrations.
Harriet is one of the founders of Shiny and a co-editor.
Susan Dwyer Amusson, What’s in a Name: How Historians Know Shakespeare was Shakespeare (Manchester University Press, 2026). 978-1526191908, 232pp., hardback.
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