Colin Burrow channels Dan Green

Well, no, not really, but Colin Burrow's full frontal assault on Stephen Greenblatt's new biography of Shakespeare certainly reminded me of Dan Green's well-known dislike of literary biography in general. As a literary historian, I'm particularly fond of this line in Burrow's review: "Shakespeare may or may not have been Catholic, but generally if a document that sounds too good to be true is found exactly where you’d hope to find it and then goes missing in mysterious circumstances it is indeed too good to be true."

I don't particularly share Dan's loathing for this particular genre--an enjoyable biography is its own kind of pleasure, no matter what kind of biography it is--but biographical interpretations of literature tend to drive me up the wall and through the ceiling, especially because such interpretations look so easy and, in practice, prove to be so difficult. Undergraduates and graduate students often grasp the point that a "real event" transformed into fiction takes on a whole new meaning and shape, but getting them to apply that point in an essay is an entirely different ball game. (For that reason, I usually issue a blanket injunction against anything that looks remotely like a biographical reading.) Given the kind of literature I work on, biographies can certainly come in handy for basic empirical data (just when was Emma Leslie born, anyway?), but it's dangerous to presume one-to-one correspondences between What the Book Says and What the Author Thought in even the most didactic of novels. Osborn W. Trenery Heighway can't be the only convicted fraud out there, after all.

Comments

[Sharon]

Have you seen the latest: since Shakespeare described syphilis so vividly and accurately in some of his plays he probably suffered from the disease himself? (This is being put forward by a medical rather than a historical researcher, from what I can make out.) There are several online sources publishing exactly the same piece about this claim, some with the title 'Shakespeare's writings indicate he may have had syphilis'. I'm slightly flabbergasted.

[Jonathan Dresner]

Literature as autobiography is indeed the most stifling heuristic possible. People were pretty well informed about syphilis in those days, actually....

But the discussion of financial records, etc does highlight something which I point out to my students: most great works of art were produced for money. Artists are professionals. Our 20th century fascination with "pure" artistry and vision aside, there are only rare exceptions to this. Shakespeare was immensely successful as a businessman: that doesn't mean that his works are any less important, but that they are properly contextualized.

[silvergirl]

I wonder if your students learned the bad habits of autobiographical interpretation in high school. I took a class rather inaccurately titled "College Composition" my senior year, where the final project was a research paper in which we were required to look at an author's life in relation to his biography. Come to think of it, I had to do a similar paper my freshman year of college as well. This is probably the sort of thing that kept me out of English departments until graduate school.