BOOKS: Hidden Shakespeare: A Biography. By Nicholas Fogg

Nick Fogg at a book-signing in Waterstones, Stratford upon Avon, recently

Published: 21 June, 2012

ILLTYD HARRINGTON admires a new biography of Shakespeare by a former colleague, and says the literary pathologists should shut up

THE high visibility trial was intended to show the authority and legality of apartheid.

The leaders of the African National Congress were being arraigned on charges of high treason.

Their defence was led by outstanding lawyers who placed themselves between the defendants and state fascism.

Two of the most formidable and honest were slung into South African prisons as a warning and a public act of repression.

But this did not bring darkness – it lit a lantern of hope.

Nelson Mandela and his leading comrades had little sign of an end to their troubles, but even Robben Island – a grim, cold, dark place – failed to break them. One of Mandela’s organised tests was to get them to read the banned works of Shakespeare.

The collection of plays was made to look like a prayer book, or a series of sacred texts. Mandela loved Julius Caesar in particular, where his favourite quote was on facing death: “The valiant never taste of death, but once.” I had five minutes with him on his first official visit to London. He was mesmerising and radiant. Hamlet’s words spring to mind: “What a piece of work is a man.”

I have no doubt that he would heartily endorse the latest biography of Shakespeare, by Nicholas Fogg, a man of Stratford as well as a supply teacher in my school in Bethnal Green in the 1960s. He went on to teach at Marlborough College, where Kate Middleton went.

Shakespeare was born in Stratford on April 23 1564 and died there exactly to the day 52 years later. There is an industry of self-assumed authority about the Bard.

Was he gay?

Did he really write 37 plays and 154 sonnets?

The Roman Catholics claimed him as one of them, but was he a double agent for Queen Elizabeth? All this about a man whose father made and sold gloves.

All opinion agrees that he was a member of the Earl of Southampton’s Company and certainly a member of the King’s Men after Elizabeth died. She reigned from 1558 to 1603, and James I reigned for the rest of Shakespeare’s life.

Fogg’s control of his subject is strong, and the timeline is laid out with great skill.

The plays are set in their time and place. Our school in Bethnal Greeen, ironically enough, was within a three-mile radius of where Shakespeare spent all his time in London. Burbridge, one of his favourite actors, is buried half a mile away in Shoreditch.

Shakespeare had hard times and big debts. He loved low-life and tolerant landlords.

His was a peaceful existence compared to the life and behaviour of his belligerent companion, Ben Jonson, who preached anarchy.

As a boy, Shakespeare’s family experienced the equivalent of our social security.

They had to apply to the Poor Roll, but the strong family background made him prepare for his future by investing quietly in land and property.

His heart was in Stratford: his brain and body near the walls of the City of London.

Will’s is the voice of humanity, but he never isolates himself from the rough and tumble of a buoyant and turbulent daily life in London.

At one stage he had to move across the river to avoid the City Corporation’s laws.

He took up residence near The Clink, an infamous prison in an unpleasant area, where whores and felons, cut-throats, murderers, were the citizenry.

He preferred going back to the calmer atmosphere of lodgings in the city, with a family who embraced an open marriage. To him, four in a bed was not seen as part of a permissive society. He knew what was going on around him.

Then as now immigrants were blamed for most social difficulties – houses, jobs, sexual impropriety.

Read the subtext of Othello.

Racism was so bad that on the May 11 1593, the Privy Council demanded that “divers lewd and mutinous libel against French and Dutch Protestants should cease”.

They were asylum-seekers in our vocabulary.

Shylock demands his pound of flesh.

It is often mis-interpreted as being anti-Semitic.

It was probably based on the notorious Dr Lopez, a Portuguese Jew who cheated the Exchequer and the Queen. But who else could put such wonderful language into Shylock’s mouth?

Hamlet is an anticipation of Freud in  a text which has uncluttered knowledge. Fogg stands back and invites us to share in this feast of human suffering, wrapped up in profanity and triumph. There is no doubt that if Shakespeare were alive today as a working playwright, he would have understood the locations of EastEnders and Coronation Street.

Being a prudent man, at the end, he returned to his roots, where he had fixed his equivalent of a care home, or sheltered accomodation. It came down to one of his great lines, Hamlet’s last words. “The rest is silence.”

Fogg lets Shakespeare make his own case. The literary pathologists should shut up. When he and others opened the Globe Theatre, Shakespeare had a sign placed above: Totus Mundus Agit Historionum (All the world’s a stage). And, as Rebekah Brooks said of the News of the World, all human life is here.

• Hidden Shakespeare: A Biography. By Nicholas Fogg, Amberley, £20