What We Can Know

by Ian McEwan

By the late Victorian era, letter-writing and journal-keeping were highly evolved, but as one reaches back through time, before the Penny Post, the evidence of daily life thins out. By the time you reach the beginning of the seventeenth century, you are reliant on a handful of well-off and well-connected individuals, often aristocratic, with leisure to record quotidian existence or the goings-on at court. On the Barn’s bookshelves were a dozen biographies of Shakespeare, and another thirty covering the lives of other Elizabethan and Jacobean writers. These books contrived to convey a fair degree of intimacy with their subjects. But Shakespeare’s case can stand for the rest. We still know very little about him. The cultivation and examination of the self, as represented by the character of Hamlet – a revolutionary moment in world literature – had yet to be translated into a general habit of reflective journal-keeping. Handwritten letters tend to get lost. Though printing technology existed, there were no newspapers that took an interest in the lives and thoughts of mere playwrights. The author interview was a long way off. Traces of Shakespeare’s existence are mostly to be found in public records. He bequeathed centuries of dispute. He was an atheist, no, a Catholic. He kept a much-loved second ‘wife’ in London. He travelled to Poland. He didn’t write those plays.