Project and content management for Contemporary Authors volumes
WORK TITLE: The Faith of William Shakespeare
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE: 1947
WEBSITE:
CITY:
STATE:
COUNTRY:
NATIONALITY:
http://researchprofiles.herts.ac.uk/portal/en/persons/graham-holderness(62126e19-ecd7-402c-a104-f37b425ae58d).html * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graham_Holderness * http://globalshakespeares.mit.edu/graham-holderness/ * http://www.zero-books.net/authors/graham-holderness-prof
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Born 1947, in Meanwood, Leeds, England.
EDUCATION:University of Oxford, first class degree and postgraduate degree; Open University, M.Phil., University of Surrey, Ph.D., drama. Holds two more doctorates, in English and in literature and theology.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer and critic. University of Hertfordshire, professor of English literature and creative writing. Has taught at University of Oxford, Swansea University, University of Roehampton, and Open University. General editor of the journal Critical Survey.
MEMBER:English Association, Royal Society of Arts, and Royal Society of Medicine.
RELIGION: AnglicanWRITINGS
Also writes novels, poetry, and drama. Has contributed chapters to books and articles to journals.
SIDELIGHTS
Writer and critic Graham Holderness, a Shakespeare scholar, has written and edited dozens of books of Shakespeare studies during his lengthy career. Holderness took a first-class degree and a postgraduate degree at the University of Oxford. He holds a master of philosophy degree from the Open University and three doctorates, in drama, English, and literature and theology. He is professor of English literature and creative writing at University of Hertfordshire and has taught at University of Oxford, Swansea University, University of Roehampton, and Open University. His work ranges widely, from groundbreaking studies in Arabic adaptations of Shakespeare to analyses of Christian literature and theology.
Holderness’s early work in literary theory grew out of British cultural materialism, which analyzes how entrenched hegemonic power structures, such as the church, the state and the academy, appropriate the literary canon. One of Holderness’s earliest works, D.H. Lawrence: History, Ideology and Fiction, took a Marxist view of the writer’s work. His work on Shakespeare has ranged from criticism of the histories to studies of Shakespeare representation on television and film.
Holderness also writes novels, poetry, and drama. A play, Wholly Writ, has been performed at Shakespeare’s Globe and in Stratford-upon-Avon. His novel The Prince of Denmark reimagines the life of Hamlet. Another novel, Black and Deep Desires: William Shakespeare, Vampire Hunter, is a historical mystery cum supernatural thriller set in 1604 at the time of the Gunpowder Plot—a failed assassination attempt on the life of King James I. Commenting on the latter novel, Louise Geddes observed in Shakespeare Standard that in it “Shakespeare’s works (and the man himself) are put on a crash course with the gunpowder plot, a small army of vampires,” along “with a little bit of movie-style action.” The result, she reported, is “a literary scavenger hunt, and terrifically enjoyable read.”
The Shakespeare Myth and Shakespeare
In his early collection The Shakespeare Myth, Holderness brings together essays that shed light on Shakespeare from the perspective of cultural materialism, viewing the texts as conditioned on the circumstances in which they were created and as involved in the creation of political meanings. Lawrence Danson, writing in the Nation, remarked that the collection “includes essays, of widely varying quality, on Shakespeare in the English school curriculum, the BBC as a central agency of national culture mediating a hegemonic ideology, the Leavis influence on Cambridge’s theatrical hegemony, the conflict between residents of Southwark and proponents of a plan to reconstruct the Globe Theatre in their neighborhood and other issues that may strike an American as parochial.” Even so, these “materialist critiques of hegemonic Shakespeare . . . have already done much to transform the professional study of Shakespeare, and much of the transformation is exciting and good.”
In Shakespeare: The Histories, Holderness makes a close study of the plays Hamlet, Richard II, Richard III; Henry IV, Henry V, and Henry VI, Part 1. Neal Wyatt, reviewing the volume in Library Journal, recommended the book for its “mix of history and culture and the examination of how the two pull at each other.”
Nine Lives of William Shakespeare, Tales from Shakespeare, and The Faith of William Shakespeare
Biographies of Shakespeare have suffered from a paucity of historical information. In Nine Lives of William Shakespeare, Holderness imagines the bard’s life cast in various roles, each “life” written from a different perspective and style, ranging from memoir to fable to detective story. As Katherine Scheil put it in Shakespeare Studies, the text is “divided into facts, traditions, and speculations.” She went on: “This tripartite division is one of the most valuable parts of Holderness’s book: he lays out the factual information that we know from historical records, the traditions that may have some basis in truth or may be purely interpretive, and the many speculations often based on what he calls ‘the Shakespeare legacy.'” As Holderness himself comments, he “deliberately exploits the manifestly fictional character of much biographical writing” to “embrace freely the imaginative and fictional processes that are always at work” in biographies. Scheil concluded that his book is “much more rewarding and thought provoking than a standard biography with a single narrative thread.”
In Tales from Shakespeare: Creative Collisions, Holderness continues his hybrid “creative criticism” of Shakespeare. As he put it in the introduction, “This book should be thought of . . . not as a verbal description of a historical object, or as a linguistic analysis of a cultural process, but rather as the Large Hadron Collider of Shakespeare studies, designed to destroy ‘Shakespeare’ in order to understand what ‘Shakespeare’ is.” As he put it, “We need to observe Shakespeare colliding with objects that are not Shakespeare.” To this end, he looks at four different such encounters: performances of Hamlet and Richard II in 1607 on board the East India Company ship the Red Dragon, an imagined collaboration between Ben Jonson and Shakespeare on the writing of the King James Bible, the film adaptation of Coriolanus (2011), and a 2005 terrorist suicide bombing at a performance of Twelfth Night in Qatar. F.L. Den, reviewing the book for Choice: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries, found it an “intriguing study for those interested in adaptation studies and Shakespeare in transcultural contexts.” A. Costaldo, writing in Choice, characterized the book as “immensely thoughtful” and remarked that it “brilliantly shows how biography is built out of a writer’s desire to create a coherent life picture.” Sam Thompson, critiquing the book in Biography, pronounced it an “exercise in negative capability” and asserted that in this rendering, “beyond interpretation, ‘Shakespeare keeps his silence.'”
In The Faith of William Shakespeare, Holderness examines Shakespeare’s relationship to religion. A critic writing in Publishers Weekly called the book “illuminating and informative” as well as “valuable . . . for highlighting Shakespeare’s . . . advocacy of mercy and kindness” and his “deeply Christian underpinnings.” In Church Times, Jem Bloomfield noted that in his reading of Shakespeare’s plays Holderness “sees them expressing a definite theological and spiritual outlook.” She found the book “impressive in its grasp of the verbal and imaginative world of Shakespeare’s audiences, persuasively connecting doctrine with drama.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Biography, spring, 2012, Sam Thompson, review of Nine Lives of William Shakespeare, p. 433.
Choice, January, 2011, A. Castaldo, review of Gender and Power in Shrew-Taming Narratives, 1500-1700, p. 892; June, 2012, A. Castaldo, review of Nine Lives of William Shakespeare, p. 1870; April, 2015, F.L .Den, review of Tales from Shakespeare: Creative Collisions, p. 1312.
Library Journal, January, 2000. Neal Wyatt, review of Shakespeare: The Histories, p. 104.
Nation, October 16, 1989, Lawrence Danson, review of The Shakespeare Myth, p. 429.
Notes and Queries, December, 1994, Park Honan, review of The Cronicle History of Henry the Fift, with His Battel Fought at Agin Court in France, Togither with auntient Pistoll, p. 553.
Publishers Weekly, February 13, 2017, review of The Faith of William Shakespeare, p. 69.
Reference & Research Book News, August, 2012. review of Nine Lives of William Shakespeare.
Review of English Studies, 1996, David Womersley, review of The Chronicle History of Henry the Fift with His Battell Fought at Agin Court in France. Togither with Auntient Pistoll, p. 303.
Shakespeare Oxford Newsletter, summer, 2016, W. Ron Hess, review of Shakespeare and Venice, p. 32.
Shakespeare Studies, 2013, Katherine Scheil, review of Nine Lives of William Shakespeare, p. 248.
ONLINE
Church Times, https://www.churchtimes.co.uk/ (March 17, 2017), Jem Bloomfield, review of The Faith of William Shakespeare.
MIT Global Shakespeares, http://globalshakespeares.mit.edu (October 20, 2017), author profile.
Shakespeare Standard, http://theshakespearestandard.com/ (September 24, 2015), Louise Geddes, review of Black and Deep Desires: William Shakespeare, Vampire Hunter.
University of Hertfordshire Website, http://researchprofiles.herts.ac.uk/ (October 20, 2017), author profile.
Zero Books, http://www.zero-books.net (October 20, 2017), author profile.
Graham Holderness
Writer and critic Graham Holderness has published over 40 books, mostly on Shakespeare, and hundreds of chapters and articles of criticism, theory and theology. He was one of the founders of British cultural materialism, and published the first full-length Marxist study of D.H. Lawrence, D.H. Lawrence: History, Ideology and Fiction (Macmillan, 1982). He is acknowledged as a formative contributor to a number of branches of Shakespeare criticism and theory: criticism of Shakespeare’s history plays; cultural criticism; study of Shakespeare in film and television; textual theory and criticism; and he interplay between Shakespeare criticism and creative writing.
He has published pioneering studies in Arabic adaptations of Shakespeare, culminating in The Arab Shakespeare Trilogy by Sulayman Al Bassam (Methuen Drama, 2014), and research in Christian literature and theology, in journals such as Harvard Theological Review, Journal for the Study of the New Testament, Literature and Theology, and Renaissance and Reformation.
Graham Holderness is also a novelist, poet and dramatist. His novel The Prince of Denmark was published in 2001; his poetry collection Craeft received a Poetry Book Society award in 2002; and his play Wholly Writ was in 2011 performed at Shakespeare’s Globe, and by Royal Shakespeare Company actors in Stratford-upon-Avon.
His more recent work has pioneered methods of critical-creative writing, exemplified by his innovative factual-fictional biography Nine Lives of William Shakespeare (Bloomsbury/Arden Shakespeare, 2011), which pairs critical chapters on biographical themes, with short stories on the same topic, written in styles as diverse as those of Dan Brown and Arthur Conan Doyle, Ernest Hemingway and Jonathan Swift. Extending these methods, and published this year, are Tales from Shakespeare: Creative Collisions (Cambridge University Press, June 2014), which includes a story about Shakespeare’s Richard II being performed on board the ship the Red Dragon during the Third Voyage of the East India Company, and a re-writing of Coriolanus as a James Bond adventure; and Re-writing Jesus: Christ in 20th Century Fiction and Film (Bloomsbury, November 2014), which incorporates a new historical life of Jesus, ‘Ecce Homo’. His latest publication is a historical fantasy novel Black and Deep Desires: William Shakespeare Vampire Hunter (Top Hat Books, 2015).
Graham Holderness
Graham Holderness has taught at the universities of Oxford, Swansea, Roehampton and Hertfordshire. Most of his 40 published books focus on Shakespeare, with particular interests in Shakespeare’s history plays, Shakespeare and the media, Shakespeare editing, Shakespeare and contemporary culture and transnational Shakespeare. Recent publications include Shakespeare in Venice (2009) and the innovative new biography Nine Lives of William Shakespeare (Bloomsbury, 2011).
Influential publications include: D.H. Lawrence: History, Ideology and Fiction (1982); The Shakespeare Myth (1988); Shakespeare: The Histories (2000); and the trilogy Cultural Shakespeare: Essays in the Shakespeare Myth (2001), Visual Shakespeare: Essays in Film and Television (2002), and Textual Shakespeare: Writing and the Word (2003). Graham Holderness is also a novelist, poet and dramatist. His novel The Prince of Denmark was published in 2001; his poetry collection Craeft received a Poetry Book Society award in 2002; and his play Wholly Writ was recently performed at Shakespeare’s Globe, and by Royal Shakespeare Company actors in Stratford-upon-Avon.
Contact
Professor Graham Holderness
University of Hertfordshire
Hatfield
Hertfordshire
AL10 9AB
United Kingdom
Graham Holderness
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Graham Holderness (born 1947) is a writer and critic who has published over 40 books, mostly on Shakespeare, and hundreds of chapters and articles of criticism, theory and theology. He was one of the founders of British Cultural materialism, a pioneer of critical-creative writing, and a significant contributor to interdisciplinary work in Literature and Theology.
Contents [hide]
1 Life
2 Fields
3 Research and writings
4 Positions
5 Personal life
6 References
Life[edit]
Holderness was born in Meanwood, Leeds, where he was educated at local state schools, including Leeds Modern School. He attended Jesus College, Oxford, where he obtained a First Class Degree in English language and Literature. and a postgraduate degree in 19th Century Literature and Society. He obtained an MPhil degree in Literature from the Open University, and a PhD in Drama from the University of Surrey. He also has a higher doctorate (D.Litt) in English, and a doctorate in Literature and Theology. During his academic career he has taught at the Open University, Oxford, Roehampton and Hertfordshire, becoming its professor of English.
Fields[edit]
He is acknowledged as a formative contributor to a number of branches of Shakespeare criticism and theory:
criticism of Shakespeare's history plays, from Shakespeare’s History (Macmillan, 1985) [1] to Shakespeare: the Histories (Palgrave, 2001);[2]
cultural criticism, from his edited collection The Shakespeare Myth (Manchester University Press, 1988) [3] to Cultural Shakespeare (University of Hertfordshire Press, 2001) [4] and Shakespeare and Venice (Ashgate, 2009);[5]
study of Shakespeare in film and television, from his contribution to Political Shakespeare (Manchester University Press, 1986) [6] to Visual Shakespeare: (University of Hertfordshire Press, 2002);[7]
textual theory and criticism, from his edited series Shakespearean Originals to Textual Shakespeare: Writing and the Word (University of Hertfordshire Press, 2003).[8]
Research and writings[edit]
Holderness published the first full-length Marxist study of D. H. Lawrence, D.H. Lawrence: History, Ideology and Fiction (Macmillan, 1982).[9] A pioneer of "cultural Materialism", Holderness demonstrates "an interest in historical cultural change by evaluating contemporary television and film versions of Shakespeare's plays or by examing the image of Shakespeare fostered by our British educational system." In doing so, he seeks to counter "conservative views of early post-Second World War theatrees and academics and to raise awareness that all textual approriation and examination have a political dimension."[10]
He has published pioneering studies in Arabic adaptations of Shakespeare, culminating in The Arab Shakespeare Trilogy by Sulayman Al Bassam (Methuen Drama, 2014),[11] and research in Christian literature and theology, in journals such as Harvard Theological Review, Journal for the Study of the New Testament, Literature and Theology, and Renaissance and Reformation.
Graham Holderness is also a novelist, poet and dramatist. His novel The Prince of Denmark [12] was published in 2001; his poetry collection Craeft [13] received a Poetry Book Society award in 2002; and his play Wholly Writ was in 2011 performed at Shakespeare’s Globe, and by Royal Shakespeare Company actors in Stratford-upon-Avon.
His more recent work has pioneered methods of critical-creative writing, exemplified by his innovative factual-fictional biography Nine Lives of William Shakespeare (Bloomsbury/Arden Shakespeare, 2011),[14] which pairs critical chapters on biographical themes, with short stories on the same topic, written in styles as diverse as those of Dan Brown and Arthur Conan Doyle, Ernest Hemingway and Jonathan Swift. Extending these methods, and published in 2014, are Tales from Shakespeare: Creative Collisions (Cambridge University Press, June 2014),[15] which includes a story about Shakespeare’s Richard II being performed on board the ship the Red Dragon during the Third Voyage of the East India Company, and a re-writing of Coriolanus as a James Bond adventure; and Re-writing Jesus: Christ in 20th Century Fiction and Film (Bloomsbury, November 2014),[16] which incorporates a new historical life of Jesus, Ecce Homo. May 2014 sees the publication of a historical fantasy novel on Shakespeare and the Gunpowder Plot, Black and Deep Desires: William Shakespeare Vampire Hunter (Top Hat Books, 2014).
His most recent book is The Faith of William Shakespeare (Lion Hudson, November 2016).
Positions[edit]
Holderness is General Editor of the peer-reviewed journal Critical Survey;[17] an elected Fellow of the English Association, the Royal Society of Arts, and the Royal Society of Medicine; and Professor of English at the University of Hertfordshire.
Personal life[edit]
Holderness is an Anglican Christian. He is a sub-deacon at the Church of St Michael and All Angels, Bedford Park, an Anglo-Catholic Church of England church.[18]
Professor Graham Holderness
Graham Holderness
Professor Graham Holderness
Postal address:
University of Hertfordshire, Hatfield, Hertfordshire
United Kingdom
g.holderness@herts.ac.uk
School of Humanities
English Literature and Creative Writing
English Literature
Overview Expertise Publications Projects Activities
Overview
Graham Holderness has taught at the universities of Oxford, Swansea, Roehampton and Hertfordshire. Most of his 40 published books focus on Shakespeare, with particular interests in Shakespeare’s history plays, Shakespeare and the media, Shakespeare editing, Shakespeare and contemporary culture and transnational Shakespeare. Recent publications include Shakespeare in Venice (2009) and the innovative new biography Nine Lives of William Shakespeare (Bloomsbury, 2011).
Influential publications include: D.H. Lawrence: History, Ideology and Fiction (1982); The Shakespeare Myth (1988); Shakespeare: The Histories (2000); and the trilogy Cultural Shakespeare: Essays in the Shakespeare Myth (2001), Visual Shakespeare: Essays in Film and Television (2002), and Textual Shakespeare: Writing and the Word (2003). Graham Holderness is also a novelist, poet and dramatist. His novel The Prince of Denmark was published in 2001; his poetry collection Craeft received a Poetry Book Society award in 2002; and his play Wholly Writ was recently performed at Shakespeare’s Globe, and by Royal Shakespeare Company actors in Stratford-upon-Avon.
Expertise
Teaching specialisms
Graham Holderness has supervised research degrees to completion at the universities of Swansea, Surrey and Hertfordshire, and examined research degrees at the universities of Birmingham, Kent, Warwick, Oxford, Cape Town, Sussex, Surrey, and King’s College London. Current PhD supervision includes programmes of research in Shakespeare, Reformation theology and Shakespeare in the Middle East.
Publications
1 - 25 out of 148
Sort by: Publication year
2017
'Tell my story': Hamlet the Dane
Holderness, G. 31 Dec 2017 Shakespeare and Millenial Fiction. Hartley, A. (ed.). CAMBRIDGE UNIV PRESS
Chapter (peer-reviewed)
'This is Not Shakespeare!'
Holderness, G. 31 Dec 2017 Shakespeare/Not Shakespeare. Desmet, C. (ed.). Palgrave Macmillan
Chapter (peer-reviewed)
Open Secrets: Ian Fleming and James Bond
Holderness, G. 30 Dec 2017 Bond Uncovered. Strong, J. (ed.). Palgrave Macmillan
Chapter (peer-reviewed)
Entry in progress
Shakespeare Among the Ruins
Holderness, G. 28 Feb 2017 Shakespeare and the Visual Arts in Italy. Marrapodi, M. (ed.). Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing, (Anglo_Italian Renaissance Studies)
Chapter (peer-reviewed)
'Beauty too rich for use?': Shakespeare and Advertising
Holderness, G. 2017 Shakespeare and Quotation. Maxwell, J. & Rumbold, K. (eds.). Cambridge University Press
Chapter (peer-reviewed)
Shakespeare and the Undead
Holderness, G. 2017 The Shakespeare User: Critical and Creative Appropriations in a Networked Culture. Geddes, L. & Fazel, V. M. (eds.). 1 ed. Palgrave Macmillan, (Reproducing Shakespeare)
Chapter (peer-reviewed)
2016
The Faith of William Shakespeare
Holderness, G. 18 Nov 2016 London: Lion Hudson. 150 p.
Book
Shakespeare and the Novel
Holderness, G. 11 Aug 2016 Shakespeare's Creative Legacies: Artists, Writers, Performers and Critics. Holbrook, P. & Edmondson, P. (eds.). 1 ed. London: Bloomsbury Publishing, p. 93-105 8 p.
Chapter (peer-reviewed)
Ales, Beers, Shakespeares
Holderness, G. & Loughrey, B. 1 Jun 2016 Shakespeare's Cultural Capital: His Economic Impact from the Sixteenth to the Twenty-first Century. Keenan, S. & Shellard, D. (eds.). London: Palgrave Macmillan
Chapter (peer-reviewed)
Editorial
Loughrey, B. & Holderness, G. 1 Mar 2016 Critical Survey, 28, p. 1 1 p.
Editorial
2015
Who Was William Shakespeare?
Holderness, G. Dec 2015 In : Memoria di Shakespeare. 1, 2, p. 61-79 18 p.
Article
Remembrance of Things Past: Shakespeare 1851, 1951, 2012
Holderness, G. 1 Nov 2015 Celebrating Shakespeare: commemoration and cultural memory. Calvo, C. & Kahn, C. (eds.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, p. 114-139 25 p.
Chapter (peer-reviewed)
Hamnet Shakespeare
Holderness, G. 31 Oct 2015 The Shakespeare Circle: an Alternative Biography. Edmondson, P. & S. W. (eds.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, p. 101-109 8 p. 8
Chapter (peer-reviewed)
Gender and Sexuality in Dracula
Holderness, G. 24 Oct 2015 In : The Dark Arts Journal. 1, 1
Article
Black and Deep Desires: William Shakespeare, Vampire Hunter
Holderness, G. 25 Sep 2015 UK: John Hunt Publishing. 262 p.
Book
Tales from Shakespeare
Holderness, G. 21 Aug 2015 In : TLS - The Times Literary Supplement. p. 6 1 p.
Letter
Review of Ewan Fernie's 'The Demonic: Literature and Experience', Foreword by Jonathan Dollimore
Holderness, G. 2015 In : Literature and Theology. 29, 2, p. 238-241 3 p.
Book/Film/Article review
2014
Review of 'The Demonic: Literature and Experience' by Ewan Fernie
Holderness, G. 31 Dec 2014 In : Critical Survey. 26, 3, p. 110-113 3 p.
Book/Film/Article review
'Thirty year ago': the complex legacy of Political Shakespeare
Holderness, G. 1 Dec 2014 In : Critical Survey. 26, 3, p. 47-60
Article
Review Article: Shakespeare and Perception
Holderness, G. 1 Dec 2014 In : Critical Survey. 26, 3, p. 92-108 17 p.
Article
Re-Writing Jesus: Christ in 20th Century Fiction and Film
Holderness, G. 20 Nov 2014 London: Bloomsbury Academic. 264 p.
Book
'Introduction' to Sulayman Al Bassam, The Arab Shakespeare Trilogy
Holderness, G. 25 Sep 2014 The Arab Shakespeare Trilogy: The Al-Hamlet Summit, Richard III, an Arab Tragedy, The Speaker's Progress. Al-Bassam, S. (ed.). London: Bloomsbury Academic, 10 p.
Other chapter contribution
Tales from Shakespeare: Creative Collisions
Holderness, G. 30 Jun 2014 Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 250 p.
Book
'An Arabian in my room': Shakespeare and the Canon
Holderness, G. 1 Jun 2014 In : Critical Survey. 26, 2, p. 73-89 7 p.
Article
Stratford Revisited
Holderness, G. 2014 Renaissance Shakespeare, Shakespearean Renaissances: Proceedings of the 9th World Shakespeare Congress, Prague 2011. Prochazka, M., Hoefele, A., Scolnicov, H. & Dobson, M. (eds.). Newark: University of Delaware Press, p. 363-373 11 p.
Conference contribution
Projects
1 - 2 out of 2
Sort by: Start date
Arab Shakespeare
Holderness, G.
£7,827.00, Arts and Humanities Research Council
Overseas Conference Grant
Holderness, G.
£800.00, British Academy
Activities
1 - 25 out of 32
Sort by: Start date
2017
Shakespeare and Fear
Holderness, G. (Keynote/plenary speaker)
13 Jan 2017
Participation in conference
2016
Shakespeare and Money
Holderness, G. (Keynote/plenary speaker)
7 Oct 2016
Participation in conference
Shakespeare and Faith
Holderness, G. (Keynote/plenary speaker)
9 Sep 2016
Participation in conference
World Shakespeare Congress
Holderness, G. (Invited speaker)
5 Aug 2016
Participation in conference
Bedford Park Festival
Holderness, G. (Presenter)
16 Jun 2016
Participation in festival/exhibition
'All the world's a stage': Shakespeare in Europe and the Americas
Holderness, G. (Invited speaker)
10 Jun 2016
Participation in conference
Shakespeare and Intercultural Performance
Holderness, G. (Invited speaker)
22 Apr 2016
Participation in conference
Shakespeare Association of America Annual Congress
Holderness, G. (Speaker)
25 Mar 2016
Participation in conference
2015
Celebrating Shakespeare: commemoration and cultural memory
Holderness, G. (Keynote/plenary speaker)
5 Nov 2015
Participation in conference
Shakespeare and Scandinavia
Holderness, G. (Keynote/plenary speaker)
9 Oct 2015
Participation in conference
The Wars of the Roses
Holderness, G. (Invited speaker)
1 Oct 2015
Invited talk
Adapting the City
Holderness, G. (Keynote/plenary speaker)
24 Sep 2015
Participation in conference
Lecture: 'Anthony Burgess in Chiswick'
Holderness, G. (Invited speaker)
12 Sep 2015
Oral presentation
Young Scholars' Workshop
Holderness, G. (Chair)
29 May 2015
Participation in workshop, seminar, course
'The Merchant of Venice: genre, race, sexuality
Holderness, G. (Speaker)
2 May 2015
Oral presentation
Shakespeare Association of America
Holderness, G. (Invited speaker)
3 Apr 2015
Participation in conference
Richard III: Histories--Transformations--Afterlives
Holderness, G. (Keynote/plenary speaker)
15 Mar 2015
Participation in conference
Jan Kott our Contemporary
Holderness, G. (Invited speaker)
19 Feb 2015
Participation in conference
Hamnet Shakespeare: a Joycean Life
Holderness, G. (Invited speaker)
5 Feb 2015
Oral presentation
2014
Invited Talk Arab Shakespeare Trilogy
Holderness, G. (Speaker)
7 Oct 2014
Invited talk
Australia and New Zealand Shakespeare Association Conference
Holderness, G. (Keynote/plenary speaker)
2 Oct 2014
Participation in conference
Public Lecture Who Was William Shakespeare?
Holderness, G. (Speaker)
1 Oct 2014
Oral presentation
Invited Talk Arab Shakespeare
Holderness, G. (Speaker)
24 Sep 2014
Invited talk
Invited Talk Arab Shakespeare Trilogy
Holderness, G. (Speaker)
19 Sep 2014
Invited talk
Terror and Faith in Elizabethan England
Holderness, G. (Speaker)
13 Sep 2014
Oral presentation
The Faith of William Shakespeare
Publishers Weekly.
264.7 (Feb. 13, 2017): p69.
COPYRIGHT 2017 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
The Faith of William Shakespeare
Graham Holderness. Lion Hudson, $16.95 trade paper (240p) ISBN 978-0-7459-6891-9
Holderness (RewritingJesus), a prolific writer on Shakespeare, makes a bold claim in his latest book: "that ...
Shakespeare was ... a faithful Protestant in the way of the Church of England." This may seem uncontroversial, given
that Shakespeare lived in post-Reformation England, but recent scholarship has argued Shakespeare as both a closet
Catholic and a closet agnostic, and almost no evidence exists about Shakespeare's personal thoughts (he left no
personal letters or journals). Nevertheless, Holderness reads 10 plays, from Henry II through Henry VIII by way of
Hamlet, King Lear, and The Tempest, to tease out ways that they mirrored Anglican language and theology. For
example, he explains how Hamlet's exhortation that his mother examine herself mirrors language in The Book of
Common Prayer. The readings are illuminating and informative, underscoring how deeply Shakespeare leaned into
biblical and religious texts. If Holderness doesn't show conclusively that Shakespeare himself believed in Protestant
theology, the book is valuable all the same for highlighting Shakespeare's persistent advocacy of mercy and kindness,
and the deeply Christian underpinnings of his work. (Apr.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"The Faith of William Shakespeare." Publishers Weekly, 13 Feb. 2017, p. 69. General OneFile,
go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA482198232&it=r&asid=f4a687dab5750cd58c117ebc3df35320.
Accessed 8 Oct. 2017.
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Shakespeare: The Histories
Neal Wyatt
Library Journal.
125.1 (Jan. 2000): p104.
COPYRIGHT 2000 Library Journals, LLC. A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution
permitted.
http://www.libraryjournal.com/
Full Text:
Holderness, Graham. Shakespeare: The Histories. St. Martin's. Jan. 2000. c.256p. permanent paper. illus. bibliog.
index. LC 9939444. ISBN 0-312-22713-2. $29.95. LIT
A mix of history and modern theory is applied to a close examination of Hamlet; Richard III; Henry VI, Part One;
Henry V; Henry IV; and Richard II. Holderness's chief arguments focus on the nature and constructed order of the
works, the juxtaposition of Shakespeare's own cultural setting and that of the histories, the sexual politics at play in
Elizabethan England, and the values pulling and pushing at the texts. It is at times a heady mix of ideas, but as a
prolific author of many works on Shakespeare and as the dean of humanities, languages, and education at the
University of Hertfordshire, England, Holderness is more than qualified to undertake the exploration. The detailed
readings offer much for students to consider; the mix of history and culture and the examination of how the two pull at
each other make this work recommended for all academic libraries.
--Neal Wyatt, Chesterfield Cry. P.L., Richmond, VA
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Wyatt, Neal. "Shakespeare: The Histories." Library Journal, Jan. 2000, p. 104. General OneFile,
go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA59187072&it=r&asid=79b1d98fc989c1477ba1ddf03100e957.
Accessed 8 Oct. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A59187072
10/8/2017 General OneFile - Saved Articles
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MARK_LIST&userGroupName=schlager&inPS=true&prodId=ITOF&ts=1507498013529 3/17
The Shakespeare Myth
Lawrence Danson
The Nation.
249.12 (Oct. 16, 1989): p429.
COPYRIGHT 1989 The Nation Company L.P.
http://www.thenation.com/about-and-contact
Full Text:
There's something very American about Gary Taylor's large ambitions, his desire both to shock and please, his thirst for
notoriety. His work therefore makes an interesting comparison with that of the British critics self-identified as "cultural
materialists." According to Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield, two of its leading exponents, "Cultural materialism
... sees texts as inseparable from the conditions of their production and reception in history; and as involved necessarily
in the making of cultural meanings which are always, finally, political meanings." So far that also describes Taylors
point of view, and indeed much of current American critical practice. But cultural materialism claims to be more than a
critical theory: "It registers its commitment to the transformation of a social order that exploits people on grounds of
race, gender, sexuality and class." That quotation comes from their foreword to The Shakespeare Myth, a volume of
essays edited. by Graham Holderness, the latest in a series s of books in which the same group of names, influential
beyond their number, reappear in various configurations: John Drakakis edited Alternative Shakespeares, with essays
by (among others) Dollimore and Sinfield; Dollimore and Sinfield edited Political Shakespeare, with an essay by
Holderness; Holder-, ness's The Shakespeare Myth has essays by Sinfield and Drakakis.
Unlike Taylor, these British critics are consistently ideological. In The Shakespeare Myth the word "hegemony"
reoccurs with the persistence of a hiccup: Cultural materialism intends to expose (as the subtitle of one essay has it)
"Shakespeare as a Hegemonic Instrument."
The cultural materialists have made attempts at rapprochement with the American new historicists, but style
(which is history as well as personality) gets in the way: There's no political imperative that could make Stephen
Greenblatt write anything that wasn't eloquent, subtle and elegant. Terry Eagleton contributes an afterword to The
Shakespeare Myth that contains the best defense of bad writing I've ever read. He claims that "any society which
survives by structural injustice must secrete rhetoric as readily as it equips an army; and this is one reason why those
who hold the view of the contributors to this book can never thrill innocently to such verbal resourcefulness as mere
eloquence."' He invokes the authority of that failed revolutionary, Caliban, who knew that language was ambivalently
emancipation and enslavement; and there is,' Eagleton claims, much to be said for a Caliban school of Shakespearean
criticism." (Yet the afterword to Dollimore and Sinfield's Political Shakespeare is written by Raymond Williams in a
finely tuned literary voice that might make Caliban be wise hereafter and seek for grace.)
ican Shakespeareans feel as embattled in their society as these British critics feel in theirs; thus the Americans turn
their attention to the first Elizabethan age while the cultural materialists are more embroiled with the second. The
Shakespeare Myth includes essays, of widely varying quality, on Shakespeare in the English school curriculum, the
BBC as a central agency of national culture mediating a hegemonic ideology," the Leavis influence on Cambridge's
theatrical hegemony, the conflict between residents of Southwark and proponents of a plan to reconstruct the Globe
Theatre in their neighborhood and other issues that may strike an American as parochial. But for cultural materialists,
"Shakespeare" has always been parish property; they aim to wrest control.
The Shakespeare Myth is not the strongest work by this school of critics, and it suffers from the absence of their
sharpest member, Terence Hawkes. Holderness's innovation is what he calls a polyphonic medium . . . productive of
great cultural difference and ideological contradiction." This means that the volume contains interviews with some
perceived opponents, like Terry Hands of the Royal Shakespeare Company and John Wilders, literary consultant to
the BBC/Time-Life Shakespeare Series. The interviews are generally preceded and followed by cultural materialist
essays which tend to dampen the polyphony. Sam Wanamaker, for instance, the quixotic campaigner for the rebuilt
Globe Theatre, protests to his interviewer that he's an old socialist and the son of a union organizer, only to be
described in the succeeding essay as "one of the representatives of the alliance of capital and culture."
Holderness's collection is dedicated "to the memory of the Reverend Francis William Gastrell," who in 1756 chopped
down Shakespeare's mulberry tree and, in 1759, his house, "and thus entered history as one of the great cultural
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vandals." But at the jubilee a decade later Garrick's bardolators were enshrining bits of that tree, and for a small sum
you can still visit the remains of that house. Will Gastrell's heirs be any more successful? Shakespeare, like liberal
democracy, has an amazing capacity to enfold the opposition. In the 1985 volume Political Shakespeare, Alan Sinfield
described the R.S.C.'s practice of using scholarly material in its program notes as a "convergence of the academic and
theatre Shakespeares" to advance the political and cultural "concerns of the higher-educated audience." In 1988-89,
Sinfield wrote the program notes for the R.S.C.'s megaproduction The Plantagenets,
a three-part, nine-hour adaptation of the first historical tetralogy. Sinfield's notes tell how, in the plays, "a
precarious social arrangement succumbs to contradictions in its struc- ture," and how a director might reveal "the
ideological character of dialogue. and imagery that seems to represent the prevailing power arrangements as nat- ural,
inevitable, and right." It's a very good essay, but on the day and night I saw The Plantagenets at the Barbican (that
dismal fortress of privilege) none of Sinfield's production ideas were apparent on stage.
Even in Thatcher's England the liberal establishment disarms opposition by granting the appearance of success. It's
unlikely that the materialist critiques of hegemonic Shakespeare will go far toward transforming that social order. But
those critiques have already done much to transform the professional study of Shakespeare, and much of the
transformation is exciting and good, even if it portends no withering away of the great rooted blossoming Shakespeare
tree.
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Danson, Lawrence. "The Shakespeare Myth." The Nation, 16 Oct. 1989, p. 429+. General OneFile,
go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA7991999&it=r&asid=392820d716a8688b996cba16e2b29e76.
Accessed 8 Oct. 2017.
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Shakespeare and Venice
W. Ron Hess
Shakespeare Oxford Newsletter.
52.3 (Summer 2016): p32.
COPYRIGHT 2016 Shakespeare Oxford Society
http://www.shakespeare-oxford.com/
Full Text:
Shakespeare and Venice, by Graham Holderness Ashgate Publishing, 2010, 155 pp.
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
This 2010 book is part of the "Anglo-Italian Renaissance Studies" series, with series general editor Michelle
Marrapodi, of the University of Palermo, Italy. Written by a University of Hertfordshire Professor, it is a fairly recent
addition to the growing Stratfordian assault on the idea that Shakespeare (whoever he was) "had to have traveled to
Italy." Its consistent premise is that there existed a "myth of Venice" which provided would-be travelers to--and writers
about--Venice with a great deal of pre-packaged expectations of what to find in the most extraordinary city on the
Adriatic Sea, and its environs. Thus, Holderness concedes that the Shakespeare "plays evince a breadth of
understanding and a depth of immersion in what Lewes Lewkenor [translator of 1599 The Commonwealth and
Gouernment of Venice] called the 'particularities' of the place that has prompted some scholars to argue for a direct
Shakespearean acquaintance; and the idea of the Bard in Venice has populated some fictional spaces with the
compelling image of Shakespeare literally wandering among the streets and canals of Venice, finding his way into the
Ghetto, eavesdropping on the tongues of barbarous ethnics, noting the qualities of the people" (135). As it so happens,
that neatly summarizes our anti-Stratfordian view. And there's no doubt that Holderness gives much detail about
Venice, and Shakespeare's apparent knowledge of it, which can only improve our knowledge, although some of it is
superfluous to our interests. Its table of contents includes: (1) "Renaissance Venice"; (2) "Jew and Moor"; (3)
"Merchant and Jew of Venice"; (4) "Moor and Whore of Venice"; (5) "Shakespeare's Venice in Fiction" (much of it
modern fiction); and (6) "Shakespeare's Venice on Film" (which includes allusions to the likes of James Bond in From
Russia With Love, the end of which involves Venice and the island chain approaching it).
And yet, throughout the slim book, wherever concessions like the above were made, Holderness soon continued with
language such as his conclusion: "But this is not a necessary, or even a to-be-wished-for, assumption [i.e., it would
queer his side's preconception of Shakespeare the rustic from Warwickshire, who traveled no farther than London]....
Venice was very well known throughout Europe, long before Shakespeare's time, as a great commercial city-state, with
lucrative maritime trade links across the globe, an extensive empire and an unusually diverse and international
population. It also had a reputation as one of the most beautiful of modern cities, with exemplary political systems and
a remarkable degree of tolerance towards liberty of thought and speech. It was considered a place of high culture and
civilization, displaying not only great wealth, but good taste in matters of fashion, ornament, finery, and a thriving
intellectual culture, with its free public philosophy lectures and its elegant printing presses. It was known as a great
capital of pleasure, with codes of morality that seemed to some visitors enviably free."
Since the book is pricy (on Amazon a used copy can be had at $108, and a new one for $120), readers should consider
obtaining a copy through their local library, if possible. Even the Kindle edition is expensive (now offered at $99.95).
But if money is no object, then by all means buy!
However, an even graver failing of this book diminishes its value to us: Holderness chooses to concentrate almost
exclusively on Venice, to the relative exclusion of Shakespeare's allusions to other Italian localities. This is
understandable in that it boils down what could be a massive tome into a slim treatise. But in doing so, it (likely
purposely) sidesteps the full extent of our view about Shakespeare's travels, since Venice was an important, but
certainly not the only, venue in Italy that anti-Stratfordians point to. Regardless of their particular candidate, most antiStratfordians
believe that each viable candidate had significant travels on the continent, almost invariably including
Paris and Venice, and that some, if not all, of the Shakespeare allusions to Italy can imply a datable framework (e.g.,
two allusions to "Friar Patrick's cell" in Two Gentlemen of Verona may help date that play's inspiration to circa 1575-
76, when Friar Patrick O'Hely traveled to Spain and Italy to urge an invasion of England via Ireland, before he returned
to County Mayo as a newly flocked Bishop, and was hanged by the English in 1578 in the midst of suppressing an
actual Italian-Spanish invasion of precisely that Irish locale).
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The fuller anti-Stratfordian discussion of the Bard's travels was most persuasively laid out for our Derbyite cousins in
Georges Lambin's Voyages de Shakespeare en France et en Italie (1962), which was translated (by permission) in its
entirety in Appendix A to Vol. I of my The Dark Side of Shakespeare in 2002 (BN.com or iUniverse.com), in which I
added a "Senior Editor's" preface and endnotes to transform Lambin's persuasive work into a far more powerful
Oxfordian one. As plausible as Lambin was overall, most of his arguments in support of the 6th Earl of Derby's travels
and experiences in 1582-87 were relative misfits for the Bard's travel allusions when compared to Oxford's 1574-76
travels.
In Appendix C to my 2003 Vol. II, I laid out a detailed scenario for Oxford's 1574-76 travels to Belgium, France,
Venice, Greece, and "the rest" of Italy. I argued that Oxford was no mere tourist, but rather was on a vital mission--to
destabilize the capability of Spain's most powerful war-man, Don Juan of Austria (the bastard half-brother of Spain's
King Philip II), to pursue his own rather public mission from the Pope to invade England, free Mary Stuart, put Mary
on the throne, and then marry her. I was pleased to see that Mark Anderson's 2005 "Shakespeare " By Another Name
laid out a very similar travel scenario for Oxford.
Further studies in articles by the late Dr. Noemi Magri and in the book by the late Richard Paul Roe (2011, The
Shakespeare Guide to Italy: Retracing the Bard's Unknown Travels), and others, have given us more insights into
Shakespeare's travel allusions. On the whole they are consistent with the insights of Lambin and myself. Our collective
view of Oxford's travels correlates solidly and forcefully with Shakespeare's travel allusions. In a time when foreign
travel was a perilous and ruinously expensive undertaking, that correlation comes as close to "cause and effect" as any
other set of arguments that can be made in "the Shakespeare Authorship Question."
I've elaborated on these Oxfordian studies not just because my works are included in them, but because, taken together
they underscore the error in Holderness's approach of treating Venice as if it "proves" the Stratfordian argument that
Shakspere could have written his thirteen Italian-set plays by reading the likes of Lewkenor's 1599 work, the 1549
Historie of Italie translation by William Thomas, or early 17th century works by other writers; and of course whatever
he mythically absorbed through sharing glasses of stout or sack at the "Mermaid Tavern" with itinerant hypothetical
Italians. Venice was an exception not just because of the elaborate "myth of Venice" which appears to have existed, but
because virtually every viable candidate for writing the Shakespeare canon can be found to have visited Venice, and
thus that city gives no particular advantage to any candidate, unless not having visited Venice can be perversely made
into an advantage, as Holderness apparently wants us to believe.
Shakespeare's travel allusions span thirteen plays, not just Othello and The Merchant of Venice (the two set partly in
Venice or its surrounds). The silly notion that the Bard was ignorant in his travel knowledge only betrays the ignorance
of modern critics and commentators. In fact, if Oxford's travels had not so marvelously coincided with Shakespeare's
collective travel allusions, I would have likely chosen a candidate with better travels. Oxford's "literary mentor," as I
have dubbed him, Thomas Sackville, Lord Buckhurst and Earl of Dorset, had impressive travels, with a documented
stay in Venice in 1565-66, as did Oxford's son-in-law, 6th Earl of Derby, in Rome, 1582-83 and a brief visit to Venice
in 1599. Even Sir Henry Neville and Roger Manners, 5th Earl of Rutland, reached Venice, while failure to visit Italy at
all is a critical blow to the insufficient Baconian theories.
Except for Oxford, no viable candidates had documented visits to Milan (importantly described in great detail in The
Two Gentlemen of Verona) or to Florence (with detailed sight and acoustics information about its interior in All's Well
That Ends Well). Oxford visited Milan at least twice (per letters sent to Burghley by bankers) and allegedly dwelled in
Florence (per a letter from Oxford listing it as his destination, another from Siena, just south of Florence, and evidence
cited [albeit with exaggeration] over a century later by John Aubrey). It was those two cities, not just Venice, which
have made me into a devoted Oxfordian, not a Sackvillian or Derbyite! I trust that each reader has arrived at much the
same conclusion after careful considerations--the travels made "our man!"
Hess, W. Ron
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Hess, W. Ron. "Shakespeare and Venice." Shakespeare Oxford Newsletter, vol. 52, no. 3, 2016, p. 32+. General
OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA462685848&it=r&asid=eda4efe4531f94e58f47c54432cbe70b.
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Holderness, Graham. Tales from Shakespeare:
creative collisions
F.L. Den
CHOICE: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries.
52.8 (Apr. 2015): p1312.
COPYRIGHT 2015 American Library Association CHOICE
http://www.ala.org/acrl/choice/about
Full Text:
Holderness, Graham. Tales from Shakespeare: creative collisions. Cambridge, 2014. 245p Index ISBN 9781107071292
cloth, $44.99
52-4064
PR2880
2014-2312 CIP
Spanning imaginative historical fiction, a comedic play set at the gates of heaven, and a spy thriller, Holderness's
"tales" examine encounters between the Shakespearean drama and what prior critical discourse has marked as "notShakespeare."
The tales and the more traditional essays that accompany them are centered on a collision metaphor:
post-collision one cannot separate the original from the material with which it has collided. Tales from Shakespeare is
an innovative departure from criticism on adaptation and appropriation, which, even as it has steadily moved away
from concerns with fidelity to the source text, often still cannot help but concern itself with what is and is not source
material. Although in his introduction Holderness (Univ. of Hertfordshire, UK) situates his four "tales" within his prior
work on film and stage adaptations of Shakespeare's dramas, this book offers a useful line of flight for adaptation
studies, presenting four examples of adaptation as criticism. An intriguing study for those interested in adaptation
studies and Shakespeare in transcultural contexts. Summing Up: *** Highly recommended. Lower-division
undergraduates through faculty.--F. L. Den, Modern Language Association
Den, F.L.
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Den, F.L. "Holderness, Graham. Tales from Shakespeare: creative collisions." CHOICE: Current Reviews for Academic
Libraries, Apr. 2015, p. 1312+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA416401846&it=r&asid=d253dcb2b54c3309f3070083b206515f.
Accessed 8 Oct. 2017.
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Nine Lives of William Shakespeare
Katherine Scheil
Shakespeare Studies.
41 (Annual 2013): p248.
COPYRIGHT 2013 Associated University Presses
http://www.aupresses.com
Full Text:
Nine Lives of William Shakespeare
By Graham Holderness
London: Continuum, 2011
No fewer than a dozen biographies of Shakespeare have appeared in the last decade, despite no new major archival
discoveries of material related to Shakespeare's life. Readers might well ask why we need yet another biography of
Shakespeare. Graham Holderness's recent book Nine Lives of William Shakespeare shows that there is indeed room for
another contribution to the field of Shakespeare biography, but this time it's "Nine lives for the price of one" (23).
Most biographers of Shakespeare begin by acknowledging the lack of surviving factual evidence about Shakespeare's
life in order to justify the itinerary they have chosen for their subject--Stephen Greenblatt's Will in the World, for
example, seeks to tell the story of "how Shakespeare became Shakespeare." Jonathan Bate pitches Soul of the Age as
"an intellectual biography of the man in the context of the mind-set into which he was born and out of which his works
were created." Once a particular track is chosen, biographers must then figure out how to fill in the gaps in
Shakespeare's life story, and how much to use the works as illustration of the life. This enterprise naturally involves
much speculation and imaginative reconstruction, often widely far afield from any historically documented fact, and
frequently resulting in "a thinly disguised self-portrait of the biographer" (12).
Holderness confronts this challenge head-on in Nine Lives of William Shakespeare by not choosing a life, but rather by
demonstrating how multiple lives can be written with a slight tweaking of the same material. He writes a "life" of
Shakespeare in nine variations, basically rewriting the life each time according to a different focus. This brilliantly
innovative structure avoids the aforementioned problem of choosing a single through-line or organizing principle for
the biography, and thus losing the complexity of the multiple possibilities of Shakespeare's lives. As he puts it,
"Shakespeare has many more lives than a cat, and nothing can kill his endlessly regenerating life stories" (21).
Each of Holderness's nine lives, or "micro-biographies" of Shakespeare, is divided into facts, traditions, and
speculations. This tripartite division is one of the most valuable parts of Holderness's book: he lays out the factual
information that we know from historical records, the traditions that may have some basis in truth or may be purely
interpretive, and the many speculations often based on what he calls "the Shakespeare legacy" (17). He reviews
existing biographies to expose "personal bias, ideological inflection and unconscious attachment to certain questionable
assumptions," mainly focusing on recent biographies for the mainstream market (by Peter Ackroyd, Jonathan Bate, Bill
Bryson, Katherine Duncan-Jones, Stephen Greenblatt, Stanley Wells, and Michael Wood) (18). In this sense, Nine
Lives is both a biography and a book about Shakespeare biography.
In his introductory chapter, Holderness sets out the brief facts we know about Shakespeare: "birth, marriage, children,
acting, publication, theatre management, business dealing, property acquisition and speculation, death" (6). Holderness
explains that these details were not all known at once, but rather gradually accumulated over the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries, after Nicholas Rowe's pioneering biography in 1709. Alongside the discovery of facts that can be
verified by historical records also came the development of many "traditions" about Shakespeare which are probable
but not verifiable. The remainder of Holderness's book explores the intersection of these facts with various traditions,
in two ways. In each chapter, Holderness gives a "life" of Shakespeare, combining both facts and traditions to produce
a composite life. Second, each chapter explores the boundaries between fact and fiction with a deliberately fictional yet
no less compelling imaginative component, what he calls a "cocktail of fact and fiction" (21). The fictional sections he
describes as "metabiographical," in the sense that they are "concerned with the means by which a life is written, as well
as the nature of the life itself" (19). As Holderness points out, there often is little difference between an ostensibly
factual biography and an imaginative work, and he "deliberately exploits the manifestly fictional character of much
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biographical writing" and "embrace[s] freely the imaginative and fictional processes that are always at work" in
biographies (17).
The first four chapters are organized according to various occupations--Shakespeare the Writer, Shakespeare the Player,
Shakespeare the Butcher Boy, and Shakespeare the Business Man. Holderness then devotes three chapters to versions
of "Shakespeare in Love," as the husband of Anne Hathaway, as the gay lover of one or more men, and as a
heterosexual lover of one or more mistresses. The final two chapters cover the question of Shakespeare's religion (was
he a Catholic?) and his physical appearance.
Graham Holderness's Nine Lives is much more rewarding and thought provoking than a standard biography with a
single narrative thread. After reading Nine Lives, I doubt any reader will be able to approach a standard garden-variety
Shakespeare biography in the same way again. Paradoxically, Holderness's work encourages additional multifarious
lives as a way to continuously complicate the idea of the monolithic "Shakespeare biography." As he puts it, "perhaps
there are as many lives as there are biographers" (21).
Scheil, Katherine
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Scheil, Katherine. "Nine Lives of William Shakespeare." Shakespeare Studies, vol. 41, 2013, p. 248+. General
OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA349721061&it=r&asid=2165afde7e9ce442bdbae4a3aa8ba95e.
Accessed 8 Oct. 2017.
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Nine lives of William Shakespeare
Reference & Research Book News.
27.4 (Aug. 2012):
COPYRIGHT 2012 Ringgold, Inc.
http://www.ringgold.com/
Full Text:
9781441151858
Nine lives of William Shakespeare.
Holderness, Graham.
Continuum Publishing Group
2011
215 pages
$27.95
Hardcover
Shakespeare now!
PR2894
Holderness (English, University of Hertsfordshire, UK) presents nine scenarios of Shakespeare's possible 'lives' and his
various roles and identities, such as writer, actor, business man, and Catholic. The scenarios are in the form of fictional
narratives in various writing styles, such as short story, magical realism fable, memoir, and even a Sherlock Holmes
story. Each scenario includes an essay outlining the biographical facts and historical documents used for the scenario
and how they've been interpreted, and examines traditions of literary biography, providing insight on how literary
biographies are written and how literary tradition becomes 'fact' over time. The book is part of a series that attempts to
recover the freshness of criticism through emphasis on the vitality of the aesthetic/literary experience, without
sacrificing rigor.
([c] Book News, Inc., Portland, OR)
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Nine lives of William Shakespeare." Reference & Research Book News, Aug. 2012. General OneFile,
go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA298704118&it=r&asid=4f1c8c56f6b68f037d7adc92c01c85bf.
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Holderness, Graham. Nine lives of William
Shakespeare
A. Castaldo
CHOICE: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries.
49.10 (June 2012): p1870.
COPYRIGHT 2012 American Library Association CHOICE
http://www.ala.org/acrl/choice/about
Full Text:
49-5519
PR2894
MARC
Holderness, Graham. Nine lives of William Shakespeare. Continuum International Publishers Group, 2011. 215p index
ISBN 1441151850, $27.95; ISBN 9781441151858, $27.95
In recent years, the understanding of what a biography of Shakespeare is has expanded dramatically. There have been
biographies of a single year, of a specific legal dispute, and of an avowedly speculative nature. Now Holderness (Univ.
of Hertfordshire, UK) interrogates the nature of biography itself. In nine chapters, he investigates the very idea of
Shakespeare's life and how biographers set about constructing that life. In each chapter, he takes a specific aspect of
Shakespeare--his acting career, his love life, his religion--and investigates it from four angles: facts (verifiable
historical evidence, always the shortest section); tradition (oral history that may have basis in fact, but cannot be
independently verified); speculation (contemporary commentary by scholars and writers); and fiction (Holderness
writes short stories that engage with elements of the other sections). By using this method rather than the traditional
chronological/narrative method, Holderness brilliantly shows how biography is built out of a writer's desire to create a
coherent life picture, one that explains a particular view of Shakespeare (Holderness references specific recent
biographies to make this point). The book is immensely thoughtful and written so clearly that it will engage all readers.
Summing Up: Highly recommended. *** Lower-division undergraduates through faculty.--A. Castaldo, Widener
University
Castaldo, A.
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Castaldo, A. "Holderness, Graham. Nine lives of William Shakespeare." CHOICE: Current Reviews for Academic
Libraries, June 2012, p. 1870. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA291615519&it=r&asid=03c946096904f0c085085b0b3e67fc56.
Accessed 8 Oct. 2017.
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Shakespeare, William: Nine Lives of William
Shakespeare
Sam Thompson
Biography.
35.2 (Spring 2012): p433.
COPYRIGHT 2012 University of Hawaii Press
http://www.uhpress.hawaii.edu/t-biography.aspx
Full Text:
Shakespeare, William
Nine Lives of William Shakespeare. Graham Holderness. London: Continuum, 2011. 240 pp. 18.99 [pounds sterling].
"The idea that no Shakespearean portrait can truly capture its subject governs Graham Holderness's biography ... which
offers not a single account of the playwright but nine divergent and mutually contradictory 'micro- biographies.' ... This
approach, which frees him to argue every case and commit himself to nine, is also a way to scrutinize the mechanics of
life writing... . He is scrupulous about the facts, but denies that 'the more data we possess, the more solid and
dependable will be our understanding of the life', and instead offers Shakespeare biography as an exercise in negative
capability: a form of storytelling which knows that, beyond interpretation, 'Shakespeare keeps his silence.'"
Sam Thompson. TLS, Jan. 27, 2012: 13.
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Thompson, Sam. "Shakespeare, William: Nine Lives of William Shakespeare." Biography, vol. 35, no. 2, 2012, p. 433.
General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA306971099&it=r&asid=eef2a7e8d63fd8da89bd937b85c05cc6.
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Gender and power in shrew-taming narratives,
1500-1700
A. Castaldo
CHOICE: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries.
48.5 (Jan. 2011): p892.
COPYRIGHT 2011 American Library Association CHOICE
http://www.ala.org/acrl/choice/about
Full Text:
48-2527
PR658
2010-2691 CIP
Gender and power in shrew-taming narratives, 1500-1700, ed. by David Wootton and Graham Holderness. Palgrave
Macmillan, 2010. 236p bibl index ISBN 9780230240926, $80.00
This exciting collection illuminates the context of Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew and related "shrew taming"
literature of the early modern period. Because the essays approach the cultural idea of "the shrew" from so many
angles, the book as a whole breaks out of the simplistic "secretly feminist or oppressively patriarchal" dichotomy that
has ruled much of the scholarship in recent years. Essays look at how modern editing decisions enshrine cultural
beliefs; speculate on whether the text also demonstrates the taming of the boy apprentice playing Kate; and show how
the medieval history of the word "shrew" helps one understand its use on stage. Some essays look at related literary
texts, from John Fletcher's The Tamer Tamed to Danish translations to Restoration adaptations. This rich tapestry
provides what is so often lacking--literary context. Whereas New Historicism focused attention on the cultural context
of Shakespeare's works, scholars still too often pretend that no one else wrote on the subjects Shakespeare did. The
range of texts discussed is, therefore, of great value. Summing Up: Highly recommended. *** Upper-division
undergraduates through faculty.--A. Castaldo, Widener University
Castaldo, A.
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Castaldo, A. "Gender and power in shrew-taming narratives, 1500-1700." CHOICE: Current Reviews for Academic
Libraries, Jan. 2011, p. 892. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA249310725&it=r&asid=42e3de87033b9064dfed10cd3972a7a0.
Accessed 8 Oct. 2017.
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The Cronicle History of Henry the Fift, with His
Battel Fought at Agin Court in France, Togither
with auntient Pistoll
Park Honan
Notes and Queries.
41.4 (Dec. 1994): p553.
COPYRIGHT 1994 Oxford University Press
http://nq.oxfordjournals.org/
Full Text:
Andrew Gurr's important edition of Henry V includes, in his `Note on the Text', some theoretical remarks on the nature
of Shakespeare's dramas, and the remarks help to explain certain aspects of his edition. Subject to the dynamics of
stage production, as he says, Shakespeare's plays have been unstable for some four centuries, and will continue to be
so. Since they are involved in constant change and adjustment there can be no moment of perfection for any of the
dramas, either on stage or in any text. That being so, a good new editorial attempt acknowledges its position in time,
and may have a kind of implicit, built-in obsolescence. Mr Gurr's edition, I think, is very time-conscious. It is
excitingly fresh, factual, judicious, and useful in its Introduction, notes, and other apparatus; but on the structure of
Henry V it is also argumentative, sceptical, and in some ways hostile, taking in questions about the play's
contradictions, confusions, and `patriotic triumphalism' that have become increasingly sharp in recent criticism. The
editor is as alert to 1982-92, as he is to the 1590s; he qualifies, counters, or approves, and continues on from Gary
Taylor's Oxford edition of Henry V in 1982, while implying that both editions of Shakespeare's play reflect a modern
bias and will be properly superseded.
It is not easy to imagine how some features of Gurr's edition will be bettered. He is especially good on Henry V's
relation to politics in the 1590s, to military propaganda, the succession problem, French Salic Law which rears its head
again, and Shelley's Case of 1579-81. Perhaps his knowledge of the Elizabethan theatre is unrivalled, and he draws on
it as when he explains the difference between an amphitheatre theatre flourish and a hall theatre one, or when he leaves
the problem of the `wooden O' allusion (to the Curtain or the Globe?) in a state of definitive doubt. He attends specially
to `frontal' sources for the play, Holinshed's Chronicles which was followed closely, and early plays which prompted
that anonymous, extant The Famous Victories of Henry V. Since early plays about Henry V are known chiefly from a
remark by Nashe, and a wretched 1,550-line text of Famous Victories, he can seem too familiar with them, but his
arguments do not hinge on speculation.
Henry V shows signs of `discontinuous composition' in Gurr's view, and was not easy to write in the summer of 1599.
Its author had been buffeted by trouble with the authorities over Richard II and his `Olcastle' gaff in 1 Henry IV; his
company was short of funds. The new play was confused if not incoherent, but it relied on a clear story in Holinshed.
Confusions remained. Whether or not Chorus speeches were added later, Henry V's Chorus gets nearly everything
wrong. To cite minor examples, it moves the action to the coast instead of to Eastcheap; it sends Henry's army off to
France from Southampton and Dover alike, and on the eve of Agincourt talks of a `little touch of Harry in the night',
though Harry cheers up neither man nor devil in the night. The King lies to his troops about brotherhood. As `the star
of England', he has found it impossible to be honest with anyone, even before starting a doubtfully just war against his
neighbours. He is a kind of stolid, `opaque' iceblock, who in the play eschews the famous field-device of archers
protected by stakes against the French cavalry. But the Deity or good luck sees him through, and at last he claims
Katherine with his `franglais gallantries' in a kind of rape. Out of that man, we make a hero. Almost the whole history
of the play as performed amounts to a series of patriotic and emotional readings' rather than analyses of `ambivalence',
Gurr holds, for what we read is very different from what we see and hear on stage, or in the films of Olivier (1944) or
Branagh (1989), though at least Branagh's Henry watches as Bardolph is hanged. What worries us, now, is whether our
cultural materialists are right in thinking ideological ambivalence determined the play, or whether Shakespeare was
pained by most ideologies of the 1590s. Gurr includes a rare useful discussion of the availability of books to
Shakespeare, and proposes a new play-source in Richard Crompton's Mansion of Magnanimitie which Richard Field
printed early in 1599.
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Though Gurr has reasons for it, one hopes his change of Fluellen to `Llewellyn' is a piece of built-in obsolescence. The
Welsh captain's name is `Fluellen' in the 1623 Folio, `Flewellen' in the 1600 Quarto. A `Fluellen' is listed as a recusant
at Stratford with John Shakespeare, as the editor knows, and M. C. Andrews points to Gerard's Herbal (1597) with its
remarks on the speedwell, which is `in Welch ... called Fluellen' and contrasts with the leek; see Notes and Queries,
ccxxxi (1986), 354-6. Though Gurr is reasonable and provocative, his modernizing of `Fluellen' perhaps leads to an
associative loss. More wary of Q readings than Taylor, he follows F rather than Q for Act IV, Scene V, which has five
more lines than in Taylor, but he agrees in giving the Dauphin's speeches at Agincourt to the Duke of Bourbon.
Happily, Gurr and Taylor both follow Theobald in letting us hear, of Falstaff, that `a babbled of green fields'; and Gurr
will not have `Ensign', but `Ancient' Pistol. One may miss three oaths, which I do not find even in this edition's notes,
though all are in Q and may be Shakespeare's if the Act of 1606 led to their being deleted from the F text: gads lugges'
(God's ears) at II.i.26, `Godes sollud' (God's lids?) at IV.i.74, and `Mas' (By the Mass) at IV.i.175. Perhaps Pistol, even
if his profanity is really Kempe's, could be allowed to swear quietly in textual notes? Gurr is helpful with other oaths,
and fresh and close in arguing that Q was meant to be a reading text, for the printer, `not the stage'.
Graham Holderness and Brian Loughrey, in their edition of Q, or The Cronicle History of Henry the fift, say little about
the text's possible origins or purpose. Their methods are casual; they misspell Edmond Malone's name, drop `Caesar'
from Thomas Platter's report in 1599 (`vom ersten Keyser Julio Caesare'), loosely describe a photo-facsimile of the
1600 text as a `modern version', and nearly give up with Katherine's first scene which they say is `difficult to annotate':
the reader is left to swim through a mishmash of Tudor franglais and printer's errors, with little help. But their critical
enthusiasm is keen, and their argument that this raw, brief, quick-paced Tudor version of Henry V is worthy of
criticism in its own right is surely sound. Henry the fift needs to be more devotedly edited, but it is helpful to have an
original-spelling edition of the text of 1600 in this inexpensive paperback form.
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Honan, Park. "The Cronicle History of Henry the Fift, with His Battel Fought at Agin Court in France, Togither with
auntient Pistoll." Notes and Queries, vol. 41, no. 4, 1994, p. 553+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA16626073&it=r&asid=f52bea6a756733bfeda44cc5adc3d0ee.
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The Chronicle History of Henry the Fift with His
Battell Fought at Agin Court in France. Togither
with Auntient Pistoll
David Womersley
The Review of English Studies.
47.186 (May 1996): p303.
COPYRIGHT 1996 Oxford University Press
http://res.oxfordjournals.org/
Full Text:
The principles and practice of editing have, over recent years, become freshly controversial. The theoretical work
undertaken by Jerome McGann in preparation for his Clarendon Press Byron exposed the ideological underpinning of
the prevailing consensus of editing in accordance with the author's presumed final intentions. McGann's project of
'editing socially', in which the concerns of contemporary publishers, amanuenses, collaborators, and readerships weigh
more heavily in the modern editor's decisions, has revitalized the whole field of scholarly editing. McGann's work
coincided with the innovative textual groundwork of the Oxford Shakespeare carried out by Wells and Taylor. The
most striking result of this was the disaggregation of plays which had been conflated by editors working on other
principles; hence the two Lears in the Oxford Complete Works of Shakespeare. Although Wells and Taylor seem not to
share McGann's Marxism, and write as if they still have faith in the notion of a dominant (if not transcendent) authorial
imagination and will, nevertheless their work has become conscripted into the cohorts of editorial revisionism, because
in their departure from the orthodoxies of Shakespearian editing established by Malone in the late eighteenth century,
they appear to be aligned with commentators such as de Grazia, whose work on Malone, although disablingly in thrall
to modern critical fashion, has been influential in suggesting that Shakespeare needs to be freshly edited on less
'repressive' principles.
Such is the moment of this shallow and opportunistic series. Early Shakespearian quartos are 'diplomatically' represented,
prefaced by a General Introduction outlining the justification for and procedures of the new series, and a
longer Introduction indicating points of interest in the play itself. The General Introduction contains much huffing and
puffing about the shortcomings of 'editorial practices dominant since the eighteenth century', which have allegedly
shortchanged 'the complex material practices of the Elizabethan and Jacobean theatre industry'. But, as might have
been expected, it proves easier to denounce those 'traditional editorial practices which have sought to impose a single,
"ideal" paradigm' than wholly to renounce them. The pose struck in the General Introduction is one of zero
interference: 'there is in fact no philosophical justification for emendation, which foregrounds the editor at the expense
of the text'. And so when the text is nonsense, our editors sit on their hands and preface their proposal of the obvious
true reading with a pious 'probably': 'rrue: probably an error for true.' As Housman said: 'there is no trade on earth,
excepting textual criticism, in which the name of prudence would be given to that habit of mind which in ordinary
human life is called credulity.'
In so far as this new series stimulates a practical and theatrical interest in these early plays, it may prove worth while.
But there is little in this volume to suggest that theatrical possibilities have been uppermost in the minds of its editors,
who instead are far more mindful of current contests in the academy. And we may judge the seriousness of their claim
to be concerned to rescue 'the early modern play-texts' from neglect by noting that the appendix of photographic
facsimile pages reprints pages from the 1875 Shakespeare Society facsimile, not the 'sample of the original text' -
presumably the quarto of 1600 - which the General Introduction promises.
DAVID WOMERSLEY Jesus College Oxford
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Womersley, David. "The Chronicle History of Henry the Fift with His Battell Fought at Agin Court in France. Togither
with Auntient Pistoll." The Review of English Studies, vol. 47, no. 186, 1996, p. 303. General OneFile,
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p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA18579324&it=r&asid=3c62c20a5e4a23adcec519f9249b365e.
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Gale Document Number: GALE|A18579324
Black and Deep Desires: William Shakespeare, Vampire Hunter | Pop Bard
By Louise GeddesSeptember 24, 2015 No Comments
holderness cover
Based on title alone, Black and Deep Desires: William Shakespeare, Vampire Hunter might seem to be just another pulpy horror knock-off, but book’s pedigree sets it apart. Black and Deep Desires is the brainchild of the venerable literary critic, Graham Holderness, born out of a larger scholarly, pedagogical, and creative experiment (which I shall let Graham explain more carefully in my next article, an interview with the author) that seeks to explore what occurs when one sets Shakespeare in a “creative collision” with other cultural phenomena. In this case, Shakespeare’s works (and the man himself) are put on a crash course with the gunpowder plot, a small army of vampires, and tops it off with a little bit of movie-style action.
The result of this mash-up is Black and Deep Desires: William Shakespeare, Vampire Hunter. And it is a hell of a lot of fun. Unlike the similarly named Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter, Black and Deep Desires isn’t a slash-and-stake bloodfest, but rather a more carefully crafted narrative that engagingly ambles through Macbeth, Hamlet, Measure for Measure, Dracula, 1001 Nights, “The Wreck of the Deutschland,” and Dante’s Inferno, on its way to a Hollywood-worthy finale. As the novel opens, William Shakespeare, recusant Catholic, joins Guy Fawkes and his cluster of co-conspirators in a plot to dig under the walls of parliament, to plant enough gunpowder to kill the King. When the plotters hit a wall (quite literally), Fawkes heads to Europe to find workers, and is eventually led to a shadowy eastern European aristocrat, who offers him a small company of strange nocturnal labourers, who travel to England in wooden boxes. If you think you know where this is going, you’re mostly right, but don’t get too comfortable. As the story unfolds, to become the play-that-was-nearly-Macbeth, Will encounters the Dark Lady, Robert Cecil, and Simon Forman.
Holderness’ Shakespeare is a middle-aged man in search of something to believe in. His Catholicism, which begins as an unpaid debt to his late father, is not manifest until experience changes his mind (I know that’s Marlowe, but just wait). Will is disconnected, ambivalent about everything but his art, forced into action by the ghostly echoes of his father, and machinations of state authority. Yet, as one might hope from William Shakespeare, he is a quick witted, amiable, lusty fellow, whose response to the demand that he become a hunter of the undead is, “well, to be honest, you know, it isn’t really my line of work” (192).
As the narrative twists and turns to incorporate the Dark lady, the Gunpowder Plot, Simon Foreman, and a delightful cameo appearance by Kit Marlowe, the novel’s wry humor remains an ongoing wink to the reader that is indicative of the gleeful ease with which Holderness plays with his Shakespeare. Holderness’ comfort with the text, and own philosophy on the use of Shakespeare manifests itself in the endless flow of humorous references throughout the book. For example, when William meets Kit Marlowe in the sodomite’s circle of hell, he can’t resist asking him “Hell’s not a fable, then?” Even more enjoyable is Kit’s reply: “I’m still not convinced” (136). These characters are everything you want them to be, and more.
Ultimately, Black and Deep Desires blends criticism, history, and a fast-moving narrative that will keep you turning the pages. It’s a literary scavenger hunt, and terrifically enjoyable read.
The Faith of William Shakespeare by Graham Holderness
17 MARCH 2017
Jem Bloomfield on a question of identity
The Faith of William Shakespeare
Graham Holderness
Lion £9.99
(978-0-7459-6891-9)
Church Times Bookshop £8.99
SHAKESPEARE’s Christianity is like many of his characteristics (including his identity as William Shakespeare of Stratford-upon-Avon): it was completely assumed for years, and arose as a controversy only when he became the single most admired author in the English canon. Since the 19th century, Shakespeare has been presented as a radical Protestant, a crypto-Catholic, a secular humanist, and a committed atheist.
As with Shakespeare’s politics and sexuality, more is at stake in these arguments than a simple historical query. To reshape the image of Shakespeare is to reshape the most potent non-religious cultural icon of English-speaking societies.
Graham Holderness’s new book, The Faith of William Shakespeare, investigates this question, while being aware of the ways it can easily become a cipher for a historian’s own prejudices. He gives a brief history of the Reformation in England, the religious contexts of Shakespeare’s life, and the evidence available, before embarking on a reading of the plays which sees them expressing a definite theological and spiritual outlook.
His approach focuses mostly on verbal echoes, putting speeches from the plays next to passages from the Bible, the Book of Common Prayer, and writings by Luther and Calvin. But he is also keen to discern the theological implications of the plots, probing how the denouement of Measure For Measure or the dilemmas of Hamlet reveal a set of assumptions about the spiritual dimension of life.
The book is impressive in its grasp of the verbal and imaginative world of Shakespeare’s audiences, persuasively connecting doctrine with drama.
Through these readings of the dramatic texts, Holderness argues for a Shakespeare who moved away from his father’s Catholicism towards an increasingly Reformed understanding of spirituality. His reading of the plays culminates in a tragedy of Lear in which judgement is terrible and unsearchable, and romances in which grace is transforming but mysterious.
Holderness is also careful to emphasise that this does not situate Shakespeare as either a radical or a reactionary, and that the theological movements that he traces are comfortably within the Church of England of the time. Although he acknowledges the anachronism of the term, it is Shakespeare the Anglican whom Holderness presents in this book.
Given the crisis over the past few decades in the identity and meaning of Anglicanism, it is striking that this book offers us Shakespeare himself as another possible “Anglican identity” from the past.
Dr Jem Bloomfield is Assistant Professor in Medieval and Early Modern Literature at the University of Nottingham.