Will

‘After 400 years, Shakespeare breaks his silence', proclaims the front cover of Christopher Rush's 459 page stream of consciousness reconstruction of Shakespeare's deathbed thoughts and memories. Yes, ‘Will' is a quasi Elizabethan pun, since Will (Shakespeare) and his gourmandising Stratford lawyer Francis Collins are engaged in drawing up the famous will in which Anne Hathaway is left her husband's ‘second best bed', a bequest which has tantalised commentators ever since 1616.

Shakespeare's life is followed literally womb to tomb and considering how very few biographical details survive, Christopher Rush's achievement is monumental, a true imaginative tour de force. Basically, the author's lifelong interest in the subject together with the literary expertise born of thirty years of teaching Shakespeare have enabled him to construct an utterance drawn from the language of the plays in almost seamless continuance; only very rarely does the list of little known contemporary playwrights or the obscure sources of Shakespeare's plots appear contrived; and the story gathers momentum after a slightly slow start covering Will's less than idyllic Warwickshire childhood.

Rush's Shakespeare is perhaps somewhat more obsessed with excrement, torture, lurid sexual encounters and the sounds and (especially) the smells of late Tudor London than we might have imagined. Personally I found this antidote to dryly academic responses refreshing, although I felt that this Shakespeare was less happy, if certainly nearly as pragmatic, as I had imagined. And perhaps it is unfair to wish that Rush had given us more of the backstage life of the Globe; for example, little was made of the life of the young male actors who carried the female roles. At the same time there were plausible suggestions about the Dark Lady (or as Rush would have it, Ladies) of the Sonnets and particularly about Will's relationship with the young Earl of Southampton; not a homosexual passion ( and indeed Rush's Will is all too heterosexual, and evidently a breast, rather than a thigh, man) but a male friendship informing Hamlet and Horatio or Romeo and Mercutio.

The vexed question of Shakespeare's possibly Catholic heritage and leanings was very intelligently handled, and the only point at which I really parted company with the book was the Epilogue in which the Ghost of Will addresses the reader in somewhat school masterly fashion, at one point enquiring What is the purpose of drama? Somehow I don't see Will, jobbing actor, scribbling playwright struggling with deadlines, shrewd businessman and opportunist, stopping to consider that...

If you have studied Shakespeare's plays, this book will give you the satisfaction of spotting the quotes and origins of much of Will's discourse; if not, the colourful evocation of life in the late sixteenth century may well appeal, and inspire you to seek out performances of his plays.