She sends packing the “authorship skeptics” for whom a conspiratorial cover-up accounts for the differences between 17th-century sketches of this memorial and the frequently repaired and looted effigy (from which the actor David Garrick reputedly stole the “right forefinger”). Not the third, an effigy in painted limestone in Stratford’s Holy Trinity Church, in which Shakespeare looks like - as the scholar John Dover Wilson put it - a “self-satisfied pork butcher.” Orlin’s account of this monument is definitive. Another is the romantic Chandos portrait now in the National Portrait Gallery. One is the awkwardly executed woodcut that appears in the 1623 First Folio. Three contemporary images of Shakespeare are widely accepted as authoritative. Orlin doesn’t push this possibility too hard, but if this was the woman Shakespeare married - her first name inaccurately transcribed - Anne might have been two years younger than her husband. In her assiduous research Orlin came upon a baptismal record from 1566 for a Johanna Hathaway, daughter (as Shakespeare’s wife was) to a Richard Hathaway of Shottery. Anne Hathaway’s baptismal record does not survive, and the only reason for believing she was eight years older than Shakespeare is the number that appears on her memorial brass - often enough, Orlin shows, imprecisely remembered or rendered. She also shows that much of what we take as fact about Shakespeare’s life hangs by the slenderest of archival threads. While it was not, like many Jacobean wills, an “expressive” one, she shows how each gift that Shakespeare specifies, including apparel, sword, bowl and that notorious bed, shares “the imprint of an unnamed grief.” Most scholars have read Shakespeare’s last will and testament as at best chilly, especially when it came to his family. He is especially devoted to his father, whose fall from the height of Stratford’s leadership to a man who was afraid to leave his house for fear of arrest for debt was, for Orlin, “the defining event” of Shakespeare’s private life, from which “all else followed.” She interprets Shakespeare’s marriage at a young age (which would have brought to an end any apprenticeship and precluded as well a university education) as an act that helped restore his family’s fortunes. The transgressive image of Shakespeare circulating in recent years - cosmopolitan, perhaps secretly Catholic, most likely gay or bisexual, eager to flee Stratford - is replaced here by a Shakespeare who is “a family man” in a close economic partnership with his wife. It amounts to a revisionist portrait of the artist. Though most of it consists of dense scholarly analysis, it reads like a detective story in which a skilled investigator returns to a cold case. “Neither a literary biography nor a full biography,” this book looks more narrowly at what surviving documents tell us, and, when their trail runs dry, what documents about his neighbors might reveal about events that defined Shakespeare’s Stratford life: his father’s financial collapse, his marriage, his homes (including the “Birthplace,” likely damaged by fire in the 1590s, then rebuilt), his will and his memorial. He didn’t travel back and forth much, reportedly once a year, and was unlikely, Orlin writes, to have attended the funeral in Stratford of his son, Hamnet, or of either of his parents. He spent the intervening years, roughly half his lifetime, in London, where he acted and wrote plays. Shakespeare was born and raised in Stratford-upon-Avon, where he married Anne Hathaway at the age of 18, had three children with her and left town - only returning for good late in life. The great and lasting result of her labors is how punishingly she demolishes shoddy claims and biased inferences that have distorted our understanding of Shakespeare’s life. Anyone who has ever struggled to decipher Elizabethan “secretary hand” will know how daunting this task has been. She reads it afresh, along with thousands of contemporary wills and local records that provide context for those in which Shakespeare is mentioned. In “The Private Life of William Shakespeare,” Lena Cowen Orlin has re-examined all of the documentary evidence. Over the past 200 years these and similar claims have hardened into fact and have become enshrined in popular biographies. We have been told that his marriage to an older woman was an unhappy one, that Shakespeare’s bequest to his wife of a “second-best bed” confirms how “little he esteemed her,” and that the “Birthplace,” his house on Henley Street, a mecca for literary pilgrims, has remained virtually unchanged since Shakespeare’s infancy. Much of the evidence documenting Shakespeare’s life wasn’t discovered until the late 18th or early 19th century, and comes packaged in the assumptions of those who made these finds. THE PRIVATE LIFE OF WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE By Lena Cowen Orlin
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