The Shakespeare Circle: An Alternative Biography

Marsha S. Robinson

A collection of 25 essays, The Shakespeare Circle: An Alternative Biography (eds. Paul Edmondson and Stanley Wells, Cambridge UP, 2015) was written as part of the international commemoration of the 400^th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death. This richly researched and innovative work eschews the birth to death trajectory of the conventional biography. Instead, these essays, “like a handful of pebbles” cast in the water, form a plethora of “concentric circles” that echo the different “kinds of circles that emanate from the center of Shakespeare’s life and help to shape its peripheries” (329). Independent accounts of at least one member of the circles to which Shakespeare belonged, these essays recover Shakespeare’s place in the lives of others and his place in theirs.

The first circle is titled “Family.”  These essays evoke a transitional moment in history– a “shift in wealth, education and opportunity which marked the later Tudor age” (14) exemplified in the record of four generations of the Shakespeare family. Specific documents as well as an investigation of the brogger’s trade in Tudor England ground David Fallow’s revisionary essay, “His father John Shakespeare.” Fallow challenges the well-known narrative of financial adversity.  Our poet, he argues, was the son of a prosperous brogger (a wool broker) and a money-lender, a shrewd, self-made man who secured land, houses and even a title for his family. Informed speculation must necessarily supplement the absence of records about Shakespeare’s family life.  For example, in her…