Free Contested Will by James Shapiro Page A

of Milton, Otway, Swift and Pope, and saying in reference to the latter that ‘Poets do not always express their own thoughts’, and notes, as an example of this, that for all Pope’s ‘labour in the praise of music’, he was ‘ignorant of its principles, and insensible of its effects’.
    With Malone’s decision to parse the plays for evidence of what an author thought or felt, literary biography had crossed a Rubicon. Fictional works had become a legitimate source for biographies, and Shakespeare’s plays and poems crucial to establishing this new approach. In 1790 Malone had announced thathis long-promised life of Shakespeare was well along; he had already ‘obtained at very different times’ a great deal of material, though ‘it is necessarily dispersed’. At ‘some future time’, though, he would ‘weave the whole into one uniform and connected narrative’. He still had faith that Shakespeare’s commonplace book or personal correspondence would surface, which would enable him to flesh out the many lost years and mysteries of the life. As late as 1807, five years before his death, Malone was still reassuring friends that only a third of the Life ‘remained to be written’, that ‘all the materials for it are ready’, and that he even had £ 300 worth of paper ‘lying ready at the printing house’, to save time when it was ready to be published. It had taken Malone fewer than ninety days to write and publish a four-hundred-page book about the Ireland forgeries. Yet after decades of labour, his Life of Shakespeare remained unfinished, a puzzle still lacking most of its largest pieces. Even the works failed to supply the missing evidence. When James Boswell the Younger was given the unenviable task of gathering the disjointed remains and moulding them into a Life after Malone’s death, he saw soon enough that he was faced not with some tidying up of loose ends but with a ‘chasm’. 
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    Those who write about the history of Shakespeare studies cast Malone as an early hero and Ireland as one of the first villains of the story. I’ve been trained to think this way too and it’s difficult getting beyond it. It’s easy to see why: Malone, much like the scholars who tell his story, spent much of his life surrounded by old books and manuscripts, strained his vision poring over documents in archives, and struggled to complete his life work on Shakespeare. Ireland cheated, took a short-cut. But in truth, they were in pursuit of the same goal – which may account for the viciousness of Malone’s attack on his young rival. Both were committed to rewriting Shakespeare’s life; one forged documents, the other forged connections between the life and the works. In retrospect, the damage done by Malone was far greater and longer-lasting. He was the first Shakespearean to believe that hishard-earned expertise gave him the right, which he and many scholars have since tried to deny to others, to search Shakespeare’s plays for clues to his personal life. By the time that Boswell brought out an updated edition of Malone’s Shakespeare’s Plays and Poems in 1821, it was already ‘generally admitted that the poet speaks in his own person’ in the Sonnets.
    Malone had failed in his decades-long quest because every thread leading directly back to Shakespeare’s interior life had been severed. Most likely each had been cut for well over a century. Sufficient materials for a comprehensive biography were no longer available. One possibility is that Shakespeare went out of his way to ensure that posterity would find a cold trail. In any case, expectations about what evidence might reasonably have survived were wildly inflated. There may well have been bundles of letters, theatrical documents and even a commonplace book or two that outlived Shakespeare, but if so they have never been found and the