Book Note: What Was Shakespeare Really Like?

Wells, Stanley. What Was Shakespeare Really Like?. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2023.

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Stanley Wells rarely disappoints, excelling as he does in both scholarship and communication. He's one of those authors (like Simon Winchester) whose works I'll always read, no matter the topic. Fortunately, Wells' topics are strongly centered in Shakespeare.

What was Shakespeare Really Like? is a brief, engaging look at Shakespeare and his works in four sections:

1. What Manner of Man Was He?
2. How Did Shakespeare Write a Play?
3. What Do the Sonnets Tell Us about Their Author?
4. What Made Shakespeare Laugh?

The sample I'll provide is from the first section, and it demonstrates the right balance between acknowledging what we don't know, what we do know, and reasonable speculation, and Wells mostly maintains that method. However, in the third section, like all Shakespeare scholars who work to find specific biographical elements in the sonnets, Wells goes off the rails a bit. But the exuberance of the book's prose makes that easy to overlook.

Here's part of Wells' "What Manner of Man Was He?" section (the nifty ribbon bookmark usefully crosses out sections you can skip). Note the proper tentative-yet-reasonable beats of the argument: "We can think . . . . We can deduce . . . . We can observe . . . ." 

If that doesn't convince you that you should seek out and read this book at your earliest convenience—and it really should!—then let me point you toward the epilogue. I was aware of most of the points that Wells made in the book (but thrilled to have them related in his compelling style), but the epilogue was mostly new to me. It's titled "Eight decades with Shakespeare—and More," and it provides a brief biographical sketch of Wells' career. The directions Shakespeare studies have taken over those decades (combined with Wells' various roles in its development) was utterly fascinating.

And, with that cliffhanger, I leave you, hoping to encourage you even more to track down Stanley Wells' What Was Shakespeare Really Like?

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