Contested Will by James Shapiro

introduced to describe the way in which Shakespeare deliberately concealed autobiographical traces: for Robert Willmott, writing in 1858, the ‘Sonnets are a chapter of autobiography, although remaining in cipher till criticism finds the key’.
    The best contemporary explanation I have come across for this frenzy of biographical detection – and it is worth quoting at length – is offered by Anna Jameson, in her Memoirs of the Loves of the Poets , published in 1829. Jameson was at least honest about her motives, admitting that it’s ‘natural to feel an intense and insatiable curiosity relative to great men, a curiosity and interest for which nothing can be too minute, too personal’. Yet the few facts of Shakespeare’s life left her hungry for more:
    I felt no gratification, no thankfulness to those whose industry had raked up the very few particulars which can be known. It is too much, and it is not enough: it disappoints us in one point of view – it is superfluous in another: what need to surround with the common-place, trivial associations, registers of wills and genealogies, and I know not what.
    Missing was the only thing that really mattered: that which could connect us to ‘a presence and a power … diffused through all time, and ruling the heart and the fancy with an incontrollableand universal sway!’ The desire to feel that presence, experience a sense of intimacy with Shakespeare, was not going to go away simply because not enough facts about his personal life were known. It was easier for critics who shared that desire to make stuff up rather than admit defeat.
    Soon enough, what started with the Sonnets migrated to the plays, though the claim that Shakespeare was speaking for himself through his dramatic characters was more difficult to sustain. John Keats was among the first to do when he wrote that Shakespeare’s ‘days were not more happy than Hamlet’s, who is perhaps more like Shakespeare himself in his common everyday life than any other of his characters’. It was but a short step from here to Keats’s self-identification with both Hamlet and Shakespeare: ‘Hamlet’s heart was full of such misery as mine is when he said to Ophelia, “Go to a nunnery, go, go!”’ Coleridge made the case more simply and directly: ‘I have a smack of Hamlet myself, if I may say so.’ Over-identification on the part of Shakespeare’s biographers had mutated into an over-identification on the part of his readers.
    Critics began identifying moments when Shakespeare accidentally slips out of writing in character and into self-revealing autobiography. Coleridge, for example, was sure that this was the case with Capulet’s lines in Romeo and Juliet :
    Such comfort as do lusty young men feel
    When well-appareled April on the heel
    Of limping winter treads, even such delight
    Among fresh female buds shall you this night
    Inherit at my house.
    Â Â Â Â Â  (1.2.26–30)
    â€˜Other passages more happy in illustrating this’, he adds, ‘might be adduced where the poet forgets the character and speaks in his own person.’ Coleridge was also the first to suggest that Prospero, the great image of artistic authority in the nineteenth century, ‘seems a portrait of the bard himself’ – a claim that would echo, with increasing volume, through the rest of the nineteenth century.
    Coleridge was also the first to take the ultimate biographical leap: reading the trajectory of the entire canon of Shakespeare’s plays as a story of the poet’s psychological development. For as Coleridge himself recognised, he was ‘inclined to pursue a psychological, rather than a historical, mode of reasoning’ (and in doing so, was not only the first to use this new term ‘psychological’ in its modern sense, but also one of the first to engage in psychobiography). In February 1819, Coleridge