he title of Stuart Kells's new book, Shakespeare's Library: Unlocking the Greatest Mystery in Literature, leads to false expectations.1 For most of the book, the author presents the fact that we have no authenticated volumes from Shakespeare's library as a profound enigma, and the search for them as a thrilling quest, before shrugging the matter off, in the last few pages, as perfectly understandable. After all, he reminds us, Shakespeare was a practical man of the theater, with a working library; later conceptions of the bibliophile would mean little or nothing to him. It would not occur to him that his autograph signature, or marginalia, in a book would someday be considered a treasure beyond price. The First Folio, published only after his death, began the process by which he became a hallowed author; nobody was clamoring to buy his books at auction in 1616. Moreover, the absence of books from his will, viewed with suspicion by Baconians and their ilk, is no surprise; such items, if thought worth recording at all, were commonly listed separately in an inventory, which, if it existed in this case, has disappeared. If, as is likely, the books passed to his family, they have simply not survived. That is, of course, regrettable, but, after all, if we want to know what books Shakespeare read—some, but not necessarily all, of which he would have owned—we can find out with the aid of the abundant scholarly work on the sources of his plays.
Kells has been poorly served by his editors. The unwary reader will be led astray by inaccuracies, distortions, and unsupported hypotheses (it's a long time since I read a book with so many conditional tenses). The suggestions for “further reading” are inexcusably scrappy; no modern editions or reliable literary-critical works are listed, and there are no references to plays in the index. There are no source notes, and although we are told that these are available on the author's website, stuartkells.com, that seems to me inadequate, especially when so many contentious claims are made.
Apart from the spurious detective-story element, much of Shakespeare's Library turns out to be yet another narrative of the disputes about the authorship of the plays, rehearsing arguments we have read dozens of times. It was at Monash University, Kells tells us, that he first encountered the outer reaches of Shakespeare conspiracy theory. There were cryptographers, mathematicians, philosophers, musicologists, historians, and others, all advocating some author for the plays other than the man from Stratford. Most of the candidates he mentions are all too familiar, but one, at least, was new to me: Sir Henry Neville (1562–1615), an Oxford graduate, member of parliament, ambassador to France, and friend of Henry Wriothesley, Earl of Southampton (another contender for the Shakespeare authorship), with whom he was involved in the Essex Rebellion of 1601. Rehabilitated under James I, Neville fell from favor again by supporting greater parliamentary influence over the Crown. The case for Neville-as-Shakespeare was first made by Brenda James and William Rubinstein in The Truth Will Out (2005). Kells comprehensively demolishes their arguments, concluding that their book does “great harm” to the Nevillian party for which it is intended as a manifesto. Neville's library contained some books which we know to be sources of Shakespeare's plays: the chronicles of Hall and Holinshed, or Sir Thomas Hoby's translation of Castiglione's The Book of the Courtier, for example. But these were hardly difficult to obtain. All other possible candidates for being Shakespeare (including Shakespeare) would have had to have them. Moreover, as a Puritan, Neville would hardly have thought playwriting a suitable leisure occupation.
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