THE STAGE: To Man From Mankind's Heart

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Shakespeare never sermonizes—his "largesse universal like the sun" showers on saint and sinner, fool and sage, king and commoner. To modern playwrights, man is puny; to Shakespeare, who knew all his faults, he was nevertheless "the paragon of animals." To an Age of Anxiety, he incarnates the courage, humor and fortitude that have always seen men through their dark nights of the soul; to a burnt-out drama he is the ever-renewing fire in the ashes. Immortal, he became a myth; miraculously, he was once a man.

Second-Best Bed. "Shakespeare led a life of allegory," wrote Keats. "His works are the comments on it." The allegory is gap-filled, encouraging the strange game of pseudoscholarship designed to show that Shakespeare did not really write the plays, that he was a front man for Sir Francis Bacon or Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford,* or Christopher Marlowe or Sir Walter Raleigh or Queen Elizabeth or even the Bard's wife, Anne Hathaway. Amateur cryptographers have thought they found hidden codes in Shakespeare's writing, pointing to the true authors.

Underlying all this is a peculiar kind of snobbery—the notion that a man of simple origins and education could not have been so great a genius. These theories have been refuted in many ways, but the strongest refutation, apart from the historical record, is the plays themselves; the style is the man—the unmistakable code in which life and work meet.

His life was a very Shakespearean mixture of the familiar and the strange, of petty peace and dark tragedy, acted out against the incomparable backdrop of the Elizabethan Age. Young Will had a far better family background, and probably far better schooling, than the anti-Shakespearean theorists usually concede. The Shakespeares were Warwickshire farmers, but Will's father, ambitious John, moved to Stratford and became a glover. He was one of the town's official aletasters, and donned the scarlet robes of high bailiff, or mayor, when Will was four. The boy presumably went to Stratford's King's School —no doubt unwillingly, since the schools of the day consisted of Latin drill, long hours (7 a.m. to 5 p.m., often longer in summer), and Spartan discipline.

Although John Shakespeare applied for a gentleman's coat of arms around 1576, he slipped into money troubles and was dropped from the list of aldermen. Will had not been overly prudent himself. According to parish records, he and Anne Hathaway were married posthaste, without the customary three readings of the banns—Anne was three months pregnant. By Elizabethan standards, Anne's pregnancy was no great scandal, but her age —an antique 26 or so to Will's 18—was. The sole clue as to how they got on together is a rather ambiguous bequest in Shakespeare's will: "Item, I give unto my wife my second-best bed with the furniture." Since Will spent most of his mature years in London, leaving Anne and their children behind in Stratford, it might be argued that she had always had the second-best bed.

Beauty & the Bestial. The swan-dappled Avon may have been the Styx to a London actor, but the best touring companies played in Stratford. Englamoured by them, Shakespeare, some time around 1587, left for the big town and joined an acting company. As actor and playwright, Will was a quick study in