Free Contested Will by James Shapiro

forgery, reliance on anecdote, or turning to the works for fresh evidence about the author’s life. The impulse to interpret the plays and poems as autobiographical was a direct result of the failure torecover enough facts to allow anyone to write a satisfying cradle-to-grave life of Shakespeare.
    Malone’s commentary on ‘Sonnet 93’ was a defining moment in the history not only of Shakespeare studies but also of literary biography in general. What has emerged in our own time as a dominant form of life writing can trace its lineage back to this extended footnote. While the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries had seen a handful of literary biographies, the genre didn’t come into its own until the eighteenth century, spurred by an intense interest in life writing, swept along not only by a torrent of biographies and memoirs, but also by great collaborative efforts such as the multi-volume Biographia Britannica of 1747–66. The Biographia Britannica marked a conceptual leap forward, recognising that accurate biographies could act as a check on self-interested memoirs:
    the work before us becomes both a supplement and a key, not only to our general histories, but to particular memoirs, so that by comparing the characters of great men, as drawn by particular pens, with their articles in this Biographical Dictionary , we see how far they are consistent with, or repugnant to, truth.
    William Oldys was one of the principal contributors to the Biographia Britannica. He was possessed of a prodigious memory, an obsession with uncovering biographical facts and a familiarity with the many archives where he might find them. He’d sort his notes into separate parchment bags, one for each biographical subject. His patience and tenacity were rewarded by many biographical discoveries, and he went on to write the lives of over a score of major figures, including William Caxton, Michael Drayton, Richard Hakluyt, Edward Alleyn and Aphra Behn. Oldys was content with just the facts and unearthed a great many of them. But facts alone were not enough to breathe life into his subjects. Writers like James Boswell (in his Life of Johnson ) and Dr Johnson himself, who relied heavily on the Biographia Britannica (which covered a majority of the poets treated in his four-volume Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets ), understood this, and went on to redefine how lives were written and read.
    Yet even Dr Johnson drew the line at reading individual poems or plays autobiographically. Though deeply interested in writers’ lives, he understood well enough that authorial and personal identity were not one and the same, and he refused to collapse the two. In fact, he went out of his way to ridicule those who did so, as he makes clear in his life of James Thomson. Johnson had read that an earlier Thomson biographer (probably Patrick Murdoch) had carelessly ‘remarked, that an author’s life is best read in the works’ – and pointed out the folly of such a claim. He recalled how the author Richard Savage (friend to both Thomson and Johnson himself) had once told him ‘how he heard a lady remarking that she could gather from [Thomson’s] works three parts of his character, that he was a great Lover, a great Swimmer, and rigorously abstinent ’. Savage set the record straight: the lady’s reading of The Seasons as autobiographical was wrong on all three counts – Thomson was not the kind of devoted lover she imagined, was ‘never in cold water in his life’, and ‘indulges himself in all the luxury that comes within his reach’. So much for reading backwards from the works.
    Johnson was even wary of using letters as evidence, mocking the notion that ‘nothing is inverted, nothing distorted’ in writers’ correspondence, and he made little use of them in his biographies. He was no less distrustful of so-called autobiographical poetry, sidestepping the confessional verse