We know so little about Shakespeare's life. The facts could be put onto no more than a page. That has not prevented biographers from writing book-length works, featuring their favorite dodges: “must have been,” “must have felt,” “there is no reason to question,” “there is no reason to doubt,” “can there be any doubt?,” “no doubt,” “it seems extremely likely,” “it did essentially happen, we may be reasonably certain,” “undoubtedly,” “almost certainly,” “all but certainly,” “one can be sure that,” “could very well have,” and “nothing is more likely”—to cite just the favorite suppositions studded through Newton Arvin's biography of Herman Melville—a figure almost as opaque as his fellow Custom House predecessor, Geoffrey Chaucer.
The trouble with supposition is that it leads to escalation into a knowing narrative, with vague phrases like “ring of truth.” Too many biographies are built on the maybe so—like that summa of suppositional biography, Stephen Greenblatt's Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare, which takes leave from the land of fact for the enchanting world of make believe. The modern craving for intimacy, for understanding the psychology of the person, not merely the character of the subject, too often runs amuck. There is a better way, Marion Turner demonstrates.
How then do you write a biography of Chaucer without the biographical equivalent of prostheses and other surgical implants and appliances? Turner's subtitle is part of the answer: Track Chaucer's reading of Dante, Boccaccio, and other European writers and compare his treatment of his characters and themes with theirs. She achieves remarkable results, showing how contemporary Chaucer is in providing his characters with an individual identity—including women like the Wife of Bath. And the biographer matches her discussion of Chaucer's characters with his career at Court, showing him to be a superb diplomat and commercial traveler with a worldly perspective that made him stand out in the provincial English aristocracy. Unlike many of his contemporaries he did not lose his head or his property by backing the wrong side. He was adept at playing both sides of the street.
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