Shakespeare's Lives

I admire authors of conspicuous erudition, who seem to have read everything relevant, and to have apposite quotations in easy reach as they write: Barzun, Friedell, Pelikan, and Schopenhauer come to mind. Though I have no possibility of matching their reading, yet I imagine it as involving not only labor but fascination. Reason says that they must have made their way through some awfully dull stretches of history, theology, philosophy, and literature: imagination is happy to remember the Xenophons, Augustines, Platos, and Shakespeares as if they made up a greater proportion of the reading than they must have.

Samuel Schoenbaum's Shakespeare's Lives is another work of astonishing erudition. Yet here the dull comes to the foreground regularly, and one regularly encounters biographers mad or just tedious who had the energy to write thousand-page books. At the the bottom of page 427, one encounters

Similar theories are expounded, in much the same judicial tone, in John H.Stotsenburg's depressingly long An Impartial Survey of the Shakespeare Title (1904).

About two-thirds of down page 427 is

Usually associated with the Baconian stalwarts, Sir George Greenwood (in his dauntingly  voluminous writings) more than once denies membership in the club.

On page 435 is

Canon Gerald H. Rendall, sometime Gladstone Professor of Greek at University College, Liverpool, [who] read Looney and, at the age of eighty, experienced a conversion [to the Oxfordian cause]. He proceeded to advance the cause with a series of volumes: Shakespeare Sonnets and Edward De Vere (1930), Shake-speare: Handwriting and Spelling (1931), Personal Clues in Shakespeare Poems & Sonnets (1934), and Ben Johnson and the First Folio Edition of Shakespeare's Plays (1936). So prodigious was the display of energy that one admirer was prompted to exclaim in 1944 that Canon Rendall  'represents one of the biological reasons why the Germans, despite all their sound and fury, will never overcome the British.'

 Even the sane and level headed wrote at great length. E. K. Chambers, who was not mad, wrong-headed, or, I gather, on the whole tedious, might speak for many:

Contemplating the two volumes, which run to over a thousand pages he confessed, 'I have not found it possible to use quite that brevity of words which the confident surmise of youth anticipated.

If one wishes to learn how our scant information about Shakespeare has been assembled, Shakespeare's Lives has that information. If one wishes to learn about forgers (Ireland, Collier) who have confused the record, or thieves (Halliwell-Phillips, apparently) who have advanced it, the book has that. If one wishes to learn how the unfortunate have sought cryptograms within the plays, and been wildly mislead, these unfortunates get about seventy pages.

Schoenbaum did not contract prolixity from his mad or long-winded subjects. What he writes is to the point and lucid. Yet he required almost six hundred pages for the book. Near the end I thought I detected signs of weariness: references to books not previously named or named in passing, perhaps more typographical errors left to stand. If I projected the weariness I felt onto the energetic author, his shade has my apologies.

It is a remarkable book, one that I am glad to have read. I don't know that I need to read it again. Perhaps Schoenbaum's Shakespeare: A Compact Documentary Life would contain much of what I wish to know, and take up less space on the shelves.