Then there has been the detection of Shakespeare's opinions. Other playwrights give us characters or speeches that plainly stand, wholly or partly, for the author. We know what Ibsen or Brecht or David Hare think, and what they want us to think. Ben Jonson, whose poem to "My Beloved... Shakespeare" gives Jonathan Bate his title, tirelessly expounded his own views on morality and politics, and saw his plays as vehicles for them. But the infinite variety of Shakespeare's vision supplies a mirror to any opinion that is placed before it. Michael Portillo sees a Tory Shakespeare in it, Terry Eagleton a Marxist one. There is no end to the religious convictions that have been found in Shakespeare, or to the irreligious ones.
How has Professor Bate, now the author of two substantial biographical accounts of the man, maintained his sanity? Though the book more or less takes us from cradle to grave, it aims not so much to tell a life story as to recover patterns of mind and feeling, both in Shakespeare's writing and in the world around him, that might have brought his art and life together. No chronicler of Shakespeare has been more alert to the pitfalls. Wittily, he dispatches the theories, which "go in and out of fashion", that present him as a soldier, or a lawyer, or a schoolmaster, or a poacher. The identification of Master W.H. is "a fool's game". "Inferring Shakespeare's love-life from the plays" is a "game", too. Not that Bate can quite resist playing it. He has "an instinctive sense" that "the wooer whom Shakespeare most resembles is Bassanio in The Merchant of Venice". But he knows the difference between instinct and argument.
Given the obstacles, should serious scholars be attempting Shakespearian biography? I think they must. Human curiosity demands that we learn what we can, and that we ask where our knowledge might point. If disciplined commentators such as Bate eschew the speculation that alone can traverse his field, the undisciplined conjecture of others will fill the gap. His method is to probe observantly at the possibilities, with a novel hypothesis here and a refinement of a familiar one there, and to seek the pattern most plausibly compatible with sense and evidence. It is a mark of his incisiveness, and of the liveliness of his prose, that with so few solid facts to lean on he can sustain our attention through more than 500 pages. His vocabulary of qualification - "hunch", "guess", "One wonders whether", "Could it be that", "Could this be the moment when", "might just be the missing link", "we cannot rule out the possibility that" - somehow never palls.
