Shakespeare's Letters

Abstract

Peace, print, and Protestantism seemed to the author of a famous textbook to be defining characteristics of the England shaped in the century before Shakespeare's birth.The formulation is neat and memorable; but rather than print, many historians might now prefer to say paper, whose increasing availability from the fifteenth century onwards supported textual production of new kinds and in new quantities, in manuscript as well as print.Alan Stewart's work has for some years led him through a number of paper-rich early modern environments, from schoolrooms to the closet, and from the records in the Castle of Alma to those used and cited in the Overbury murder case.He has in particular attended to letters, directing the ongoing Francis Bacon Correspondence Project and co-curating the Folger exhibition Letterwriting in Renaissance England.Stewart now brings his understanding of early modern English letter writing to Shakespeare's letters.As a title, this phrase invites a double-take: Shakespeare's Letters could be a very short book, like The Snakes of Ireland.Shakespeare must have written back from the metropolis where he worked to his home town, where his wife and children lived and he maintained business and property interests.But only one letter to him has survived, and none that he sent.Romantic responses to this absence of a Shakespeare correspondence frame Shakespeare's Letters, which begins with William Henry Ireland's production of letters from Elizabeth I and others to the Bard, and ends with the story of a signet ring with the initials WS, apparently found at Stratford upon Avon.But Stewart does not linger upon this theme-for "Shakespeare's letters survive in abundance."One hundred and eleven of them appear in his plays; all but five of the plays in the First Folio feature letters.Stewart's aim is "to capture the particular nature of the letters on Shakespeare's stage," in both historical and theatrical terms.He succeeds with considerable éclat.Readers of this book will never see those hundred and eleven letters in the same way again.The book begins with a materially oriented overview of the letters handled on Shakespeare's stage and known to his first audiences: paper, ink, and wax; miseen-page and folding.Strikingly important here is the person of the messenger, who carries the letter to the hands of its addressee, and may supplement its contents with a spoken message or bring back an account of its reception.Stewart rejects the Erasmian fantasy of the letter as making its sender incorporeally present to its

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