The Complete Life of William Shakespeare, with Paul Menzer

How do you write a “complete” life of Shakespeare when very little complete information about his life exists?

Four centuries after Shakespeare’s death, the legends that have grown up around him have taken on a cultural significance of their own. As Inaugural Folger Chair in Shakespeare Studies Paul Menzer puts it, “The verifiable facts of his life would fit on the back of a postcard. But the stories that we have told about them would fill a dozen phone books.”

Menzer’s new book, The Complete Life of William Shakespeare, dives into the life story of one of history’s most editorialized yet most enigmatic figures, navigating the space between fact and fancy. Did Shakespeare embark on a lone hero’s journey, or was his move to London more of a family road trip? Could such a great poet have also been a shrewd businessman? And why aren’t there more Shakespeares out there?

In this episode, Menzer lays out the known facts of the Bard’s biography and posits how we might connect the dots on what’s missing—while throwing some “wobbles into the orbit” of well-trenched folk wisdom.

From the Shakespeare Unlimited podcast. Published September 22, 2026. © Folger Shakespeare Library. All rights reserved. This episode was produced by Matt Frassica. Garland Scott is the executive producer. It was edited by Gail Kern Paster. Technical support was provided by Voice Trax West in Studio City, California. Web production was handled by Megan Fraedrich. Transcripts are edited by Leonor Fernandez. Final mixing services provided by Clean Cuts at Three Seas, Inc.

Paul Menzer is Executive Director and professor of Shakespeare and Performance at Mary Baldwin University, where he served as the Dean of Arts and Sciences and as Provost. A renowned Shakespeare scholar, he has written several biographies of the playwright. He has also written several books about performance studies and theater history, scholarly editions of early modern plays, and written about the American Shakespeare Center at the Blackfriars Playhouse in Staunton, Virginia, a repertory theater known for embracing Shakespearean theatrical practices. He is also an acclaimed educator, winning teaching awards at Mary Baldwin and serving as a visiting faculty member for the Folger’s Teaching Shakespeare Institute. He is the inaugural Folger Chair in Shakespeare Studies.

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FARAH KARIM-COOPER: From the Folger Shakespeare Library, this is Shakespeare Unlimited. I’m Farah Karim-Cooper, the Folger director.

[Music fades]

KARIM-COOPER: I’m Farah Karim-Cooper, the Folger Director.

Anyone trying to write a biography of William Shakespeare faces some difficult choices. Do you stick to the known facts, as sparse as they are, or do you allow your imagination to fill in the gaps? And how much biography should you read into the plays and poetry?

Each biographer has to strike a balance.

At the beginning of his new Complete Life of William Shakespeare, Paul Menzer admits that the book, quote, “mingles fact and fancy, artifacts and anecdotes,” end quote. The resulting biography is rigorously researched, marvelously witty, and speculative where necessary.

Paul Menzer is executive director and professor of Shakespeare and Performance at Mary Baldwin University. He’s also the Inaugural Chair in Shakespeare Studies here at the Folger.

Here’s Paul Menzer in conversation with Barbara Bogaev.

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BARBARA BOGAEV: Great to have you on the podcast, Paul.

PAUL MENZER: It is wonderful to be here. Thank you. A pure, pure pleasure.

BOGAEV: Well, why tackle telling a story that blends “fact and fancy,” as you write in your introduction about the life of William Shakespeare? And I love that quote that you give us from Seamus Heaney in your introduction: “The curve of binding energy that gives his story such a charge.”

MENZER: When one is asked to write a biography of William Shakespeare, it’s first a very exciting thing to take on. It’s also a little bit daunting. There is such a long biographical tradition of Shakespeare, and you sit down to the task, and you sort of find yourself wishing you were writing about a lesser-studied subject like Abraham Lincoln or Winston Churchill.

But the Shakespeare biographical tradition is so deep and so rich that you have to sort of think to yourself, “Well, what can I bring to this conversation? What can I bring to this history?”

To some extent, to your question about mingling fact and fancy, you have to think a little bit about, like, you are engaging in the retelling of a story that’s oft told. It’s almost like you’re writing the life of a saint at this point, and so, you’re engaged in almost a liturgical tradition of retelling a life that is incredibly important to people, and you want to honor that. At the same time, you might want to throw some wobbles into the orbit of a story that’s grown very familiar.

For instance, the new book is called The Complete Life of William Shakespeare, and that may sound audacious. It may sound like it’s an encyclopedic book, and it’s not. It’s actually a relatively brief one.

But what I mean by “the complete life” is that Shakespeare’s life, the received life of William Shakespeare, has all the elements of a classic romance. You had the early departure of a small town for a big city. You have his chance and creative encounter with patrons and players who enable his career.

BOGAEV: The hero’s journey.

MENZER: Absolutely, absolutely right. You have the recovery of his father’s fortune and name. You have the lady of temptation, while the lady of duty awaits at home in Stratford. You have the depth of personal despair and the heights of professional success, and then you have those late plays of romance and returning and recuperation, and of course, the return to Stratford where he dies a respectable death, leaving really no work undone.

And so, it’s got this beautiful hero’s journey, as you say, this kind of classic romance story. And that story is not not true, you know? It’s not entirely fable, although it is fabulous. But there are also ways that we might want to have a little bit of skepticism about some of the elements out of which we have built that story, the straw that we have turned into gold.

BOGAEV: Okay, well let’s get to his life. Is Stratford really that significant in Shakespeare’s life story as a writer? And by that, I mean could he just as easily have come from any provincial market town in England?

MENZER: I think the provincial origin is really critical to the story, whether it has to be Stratford… It does mean that he’s from the Midlands. It does mean that he’s not from a metropolitan area. It does mean that he is, at least inside of England, an immigrant, right, who journeyed, like so many of his fellow countrymen and countrywomen who moved to London at this period of time. And so, he was an outsider to London, and I think that’s more critical to the story than that he’s particularly from Stratford.

He doesn’t really write very much about London proper. It’s there. It leaks, of course, into the plays, but he doesn’t write city comedies. Even late in life, he signed himself “William Shakespeare, Stratford-upon-Avon.” That’s always where, how he identified. That was his home, Stratford. London was where he worked.

BOGAEV: Well, you write that if you drew up a manual of how to train a playwright, it would be hard to improve on the schooling that Shakespeare received, which is counter to what some Shakespeare, I guess, agnostics would say. So why? Was it because it was so steeped in the classics and rhetoric?

MENZER: Yeah. The grammar school education that Shakespeare underwent, you know, from our perspective, we might think, “Well, he had just a grammar school education.” But it was just bogglingly comprehensive, and serious, and immersive.

Grammar school at the time, they taught the three Rs: rhetoric, rhetoric, and rhetoric. He was not learning about science and technology and math. He was steeped in the classics, particularly Ovid. William Shakespeare’s desert island reads were the Bible and Ovid.

BOGAEV: Well, you also say he made a really important connection from school: Richard Field.

MENZER: Yeah, Richard Field is a really interesting character. Richard Field was at school with Shakespeare, as far as we can tell, maybe just a year or two ahead of Shakespeare.

Now, Richard Field left Stratford before Shakespeare did and became a printer and a stationer and a bookseller in London. So, he may have provided a really important early connection, somebody who, well, as it were, field-tested the idea of moving from Stratford to London and setting up a life there. And Shakespeare’s earliest printed works, Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece, were printed by Richard Field, a school chum.

BOGAEV: So, you said “may.” This is where a little bit of fancy, a little bit of speculation, wanders into our story.

MENZER: One hundred percent.

We have been studying and trolling the archives for many, many years looking for hints of Shakespeare, and we actually have turned up quite a bit. Still, you know, the verifiable facts of his life would fit on the back of a postcard. But the stories that we have told about them would fill a dozen phone books.

But you’re absolutely right. This is where the “may have” and the “must have” begin to become one and the same when you tell the life of William Shakespeare.

BOGAEV: Okay, let’s talk about his marriage, then, about which we know really very little, and Anne Hathaway even less. So, what do you find of significance here, besides how history has treated her with just immense heapings of misogyny?

MENZER: Yeah, absolutely. So, two things to say about this. I found it interesting—and I write about this in the book—that we still refer to her as Anne Hathaway, as though she never married. And I think there has been an effort, insidious and misogynistic, I think are the ways in which you put it, that history has wanted to withhold her marital status from her. The idea that singular men must be single, right? A lack of recognition that Shakespeare was part of a partnership from early in his life—he was around 18—until his death.

I think Anne Hathaway, Anne Shakespeare, has been roughed up by biography and history over the years. I think she’s beginning to have her due. A really interesting part of this story is actually, and I said earlier on when I said there’s not much new to be discovered, you know, there’s an asterisk here because there actually has been a very recent development that is helping trouble the story of what we think we know about Anne Shakespeare.

BOGAEV: And this is the letter that a scholar took a fresh look at recently, I think just last year, and it implies that Anne eventually joined her husband in London?

MENZER: Yeah, which, really, if true, and I think it’s highly plausible, begins to crumble one of the myths we tell about Shakespeare and his marriage, which is that he was an absentee husband entirely, or that it was even a loveless marriage.

Again, it’s not often when you’re writing a biography of Shakespeare that there’s a “stop the press” moment. But in fact, in the spring of 2025, I was about to send this manuscript to press, and on Shakespeare’s birthday, a wonderful scholar named Matt Steggle from the University of Bristol came out with a new interpretation of an old letter.

This is a letter that’s addressed to Mrs. Shakespaire, P-A-I-R-E, in Trinity Lane, London, and scholarship has known about this letter from the ’70s but has always discounted it. Like, “Well, we know Anne Shakespeare was not in London, so it can’t be the same Shakespeare.”

BOGAEV: But we don’t know that.

MENZER: But we don’t know that, and in fact, we know even more now than we did in the 1970s when the letter was discovered because of the massive digitization of demographic records that one can now search and geolocate names and places in ways that would’ve taken a lifetime in the past and now you can now do it from a laptop.

What Matt—Matt Steggle to whom all credit is due—has shown is that it is highly likely that this is the Anne Shakespeare who was married to William Shakespeare, and that she spent some time, even significant time, in London.

And we have to think about how that troubles even the romance story that I was telling at the outset of our time today, in that, you know, she may well have been there with him for a considerable part of his writing career in London. That changes the scenario.

BOGAEV: Right. Forget the sole hero’s journey. It might have been a couple.

MENZER: That’s right. The capital “R” Romantic idea we have of writers, particularly male writers working alone in their garret, now, we can begin to think, “Was Shakespeare’s move to London more of a family enterprise rather than the hero’s journey?”

It’s a very different story of Shakespeare, and I think a really fascinating one. And I suspect whoever writes the next biography, that this will become an even larger portion or feature of the way we tell this story.

BOGAEV: Every biography of Shakespeare refers to the “lost years,” from his marriage to Anne Hathaway in 1582 to living in London to around 1590–92 when Robert Greene refers to him as upstart crow. So, there are all these theories about what he was doing and how he went from zero to hero. So, what theories hold merit, and where do you take your story there?

MENZER: During those putatively “lost years”—and they’re not quite as lost as we think—there are a couple of law cases that suggest that he did travel to London to help recover some money that his father was pursuing in a legal case. So, he probably came to London not as part of the romantic story that we think about as a young man looking for immortality or immorality but rather trying to get some money back on his dad’s account.

But we don’t know exactly what his occupation was during those years. I think it not unlikely that he served as a tutor or a teacher—we have those wonderful scenes of pedagogy in some of the plays where he’s lampooning certain teachers, which doesn’t prove anything, but we have to account for him because he doesn’t account much for himself during those years.

BOGAEV: Well, how did he become an actor, and how did he meet Richard Burbage?

MENZER: Boy, wouldn’t we like to know?

He did become, obviously at some point, an actor. He quite likely got to London as part of a playing company. When and where and why did he join a playing company? You know, when we think back again to his grammar school education, quite a bit of that training in rhetoric was in putting on Latin plays, right? And so perhaps he proved real adept as an actor in school, came to the attention of a traveling company, joined a group of actors wandering the provinces, and then found his way to London in that respect.

I think that’s the most likely path that he would have taken to get to London, and he eventually comes into the orbit of Richard Burbage. It was a small world.

BOGAEV: One thing in these early chapters struck me: you call his early plays “laddish,” as in written like a lad, like a bro, and you speculate, right, that they reflect the company that Shakespeare might have kept at this time in London.

MENZER: Yeah. Shakespeare’s life in Stratford, you know, he was in a small house with a big family. He was around a lot of women: his mother, his sister, and then eventually his daughters. When he was in London, at least initially, he was working with an all-male playing company.

BOGAEV: Lads.

MENZER: That was likely his, you know, his sort of daily recreation. He was writing history plays, which are notably short on wonderful large parts for women, with a couple of exceptions here or there, so, he’s writing plays for men about men early in his life.

Now, what is so interesting is at the tail end of his career, in those later plays that he writes—The Winter’s Tale, Pericles, The Tempest, Cymbeline—these are plays about fathers and daughters more so than they are about fathers and sons.

And of course, history plays are all about fathers and sons. They’re all about succession of, you know, one Henry to the next, right? So, that’s another interesting kind of curve of binding energy from the beginning to the end of his career.

BOGAEV: Okay. Well, we know that the plague struck London in 1592–93, and it closed the theaters for a few years, and Shakespeare turned to writing poetry: Venus and Adonis and the Sonnets and Rape of Lucrece. I like that you call most of this light smut. Fair.

Is there scholarly consensus on who the Dark Lady is? Let’s just jump right to it.

MENZER: The short answer is “no.” And the harder question is how to read those sonnets. And again, because this is becoming a theme, how do we reinterpret that story about the Dark Lady if Anne Shakespeare is in London for a large part of this—

BOGAEV: And you go to throuples. Maybe it was a throuple. [Laughs.]

MENZER: That’s right. Well, you know, I even speculated idly, maybe Anne Shakespeare read a draft of the Sonnets and thought, “I better get to London to look after him.”

But you know, the Sonnets are a real cipher because it’s difficult to know how to read them. How autobiographically do we read the Sonnets?

I think we can read them somewhat autobiographically. We don’t know who the Dark Lady is. He did get himself involved in a triangle with a Dark Lady and another man that seems to have left him disappointed, let us say.

BOGAEV: To say the least.

MENZER: And, you know, perhaps even heartbroken.

How we date and time when or how this might be happening, and the extent to which it impacted his turn from writing juvenile comedies and romances to a more melancholy stage of his writing career when he moves into the tragedies, that’s another question.

And as always, we’re trying to figure out how does the impact of the personal life find its way into the fictional life, right? That’s what we want to know. That’s why we’re writing biographies of Shakespeare.

BOGAEV: Right. Venus and Adonis. You write the poem’s a proto version of He’s Just Not That Into You.

MENZER: Venus and Adonis was Shakespeare’s first smash hit. I mean, there are very few copies of it left today. It was almost literally read to death, right?

BOGAEV: And probably literally kept them going through the plague.

MENZER: May well have, right? Because it seems to have opened the pockets of a rich patron who helped subsidize his writing career and living means during this early time when the plague had closed the theaters down as a commercial venture.

But it’s a wonderful poem. It’s beautifully written, it’s casual, it’s companionable, it’s erotic, it’s funny. And, you know, it is the work that really made his name.

And I think it’s interesting that at the tail end of his career, right after he dies, and entered another kind of lost years period, it’s Venus and Adonis that gets republished. And so, his contemporaries thought as much of his poetry as his plays, and the first praise we have of him as a writer mentions Venus and Adonis.

BOGAEV: Well, okay. Then why switch from poems to plays? And you asked the question very bluntly: was he just following the money?

MENZER: When we think about turning points in Shakespeare’s career, coming out of—

BOGAEV: He invests in the Lord Chamberlain’s company.

MENZER: Yeah, he clearly made some sort of decision that writing narrative poetry for patrons versus writing commercial plays for the public, that he turned from one to the other. How deliberate that decision was, we can’t know.

BOGAEV: Where’d he get the money?

MENZER: Where’d he get the money?

BOGAEV: From the poetry?

MENZER: Folks would say that the Earl of Southampton basically stood him the money to put up for a share in the Lord Chamberlain’s Men. Early biographers said that Southampton gave him as much as 1,000 pounds, which would be an extraordinary amount of money. I very seriously doubt that.

But he may well have gotten money from the Earl of Southampton, to who he dedicated these early poems, and bought himself a share in the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, and this is really the signal moment. This is why we’re celebrating Shakespeare the playwright.

His contemporaries thought of him as a poet first and a playwright second. Now, that changed over his career. But he made some sort of decision to transition from the one to the other at that point in 1593, 1594, when he joined the Lord Chamberlain’s Men. And the rest is history.

BOGAEV: Well, that was the mid-1590s, as you say, and he just turns out an amazing string of plays at this point. You have Romeo and Juliet, Midsummer, the history plays. So, what conditions made this kind of winning streak possible for him to go from the laddish early plays, as you say, to the poetry? Now he has a sponsor, a patron, or he did have a patron. It just seems as if—I don’t know, I don’t want to say—it’s hard to piece together, isn’t it?

MENZER: It is. I mean, what we see from those early plays where he’s writing in the history genre—there are some early experiments in tragedy, Titus Andronicus, which is a collaborative play of which he was a part—but he really begins to expand his range generically as we move into the mid-1590s and up to 1600. We get some of those marvelous romantic comedies: Much Ado About Nothing, Midsummer Night’s Dream, the extraordinarily beautiful Romeo and Juliet and Richard II, which is a history play, but it’s a poetic one. I think what we’re beginning to see is form and artistry come together with a maturation as he begins to expand his range.

I also think that he’s writing for a company of extremely talented, trusted colleagues. He had brilliant clowns, he had brilliantly flexible and versatile tragedians to work with, and so, I think that his plays bear the form and the pressure not just of his historical moment but of the people he was working with, right? That company with whom he had an extremely unusual, durable relationship for almost the entirety of his working career from about 1594 when he joins the Lord Chamberlain’s Men up to his quasi-retirement in 1610, 1611, by which point they’d become the King’s Men. But again, that’s 15 years of working with the same people, trusted coworkers. There’s turnover, but he’s writing for extremely talented people whose voices he knew very well.

BOGAEV: Okay, we’ve dwelt a lot in speculation. Let’s go back to facts. Fact: in 1597, Shakespeare bought New Place, a great big house in Stratford. So, apart from signaling that Shakespeare was growing wealthy, what’s the significance of the purchase?

MENZER: If we think about where New Place is, it’s between the house on Henley Street, where he was born and grew up; it’s right across the street from the school he attended; and it’s about halfway to the church in which he’s buried.

So, if we think about young Shakespeare going to church, going to school, he’s walking past this house, the biggest one in Stratford. As we very quickly pivot from fact to fancy, we think about Shakespeare thinking, “That house is going to be mine someday.”

And it becomes his. It becomes his home. It is the house to which he returns. It is probably the house in which he died, though we can’t know that for sure.

But I think, again, this is why this romance story is so irresistible: the small boy from a provincial town who makes it big in the city and comes home and buys the biggest house in town that he used to eye with envy as he made his way to school every day.

BOGAEV: He makes good.

MENZER: It’s irresistible, right? And it seemed almost predestined that he was going to come back to Stratford at the end of his life.

BOGAEV: Well, you also work in some very to-the-point economic information into buying this house, which is that the plays must be producing a torrent of cash that Shakespeare’s share can foot the bill for a house like this.

And you also write that it shows, when you take the long view of Shakespeare’s life, he never sat on money long. He was a really savvy investor, and he didn’t take risks. It seems a contradiction to me that a poet would be a good businessman, but you disagree.

MENZER: It has seemed a contradiction to many. I would make the argument that plotting a play and plotting a business transaction have a lot in common. You have to know how people are going to respond. You have to be able to plot the moves out, one by one.

BOGAEV: You got to have the long view.

MENZER: That’s right. I don’t think there’s any tension in the marriage of art and commerce in Shakespeare’s life.

What I do think is interesting, as you pointed out, is that he doesn’t hold money for long, and he doesn’t seem to speculate it on long shots. He buys real estate.

And I say that because he’s living in a time where, you know, there is a new class of investor, venture capitalists, merchant ventures, who are subsidizing trips to the Indies to bring back spices or taking gambles on innovations.

Shakespeare in some ways is quite conservative with the way that he invests his money. And not just new plays. He bought tithes and land, always around Stratford, right? So, he was really laying up a significant estate: a kind of winter harvest where he seems to have been planning from early in his career that he’s going to go back to Stratford and tend his home, and his hearth, and his land.

BOGAEV: Well, we’re up to his later years. How did James’ ascension to the throne affect Shakespeare? Was he comfortable with the new hotness, the new monarch? Or was he out of step with the time?

MENZER: I think Shakespeare was probably slightly out of step with the Jacobean period, which favored satire and masques. He doesn’t seem to have gone in for the sort of bitter satirical court politics of the early Jacobean years, so, he may have in fact found himself slightly out of step. I mean, he was an Elizabethan playwright, and the coming of a new monarchy, a new regime, may have left him a little bit wrong-footed.

You know, the other thing that happens, of course, is early in James’ career, it’s back to the plague. The playhouses were closed for many, many months during the first decade of the 17th century. And so, Shakespeare and his company really become court players and playwrights during that first decade of the 17th century because the playhouses were closed so often.

BOGAEV: Right. It’s often overlooked really. We think of Shakespeare as the groundling, writing for the groundlings, but he really spent a lot of time writing for court.

MENZER: By necessity. I mean, first of all, officially, of course, the Lord Chamberlain’s Servants and then the King’s Servants, the King’s Men, they were officially—when they were performing in the public—they were actually rehearsing so that they were in readiness to perform for the queen or the king, right? They always had to be ready at a moment’s notice to be called up on Christmas Eve and put on a play.

But I think the closure of the playhouses had a big effect on Shakespeare’s writing. I also do think something about the satirical quality of the time we see in some plays like Troilus and Cressida, potentially Timon of Athens, these plays that do have characters who are a bit more misanthropic than we see in the earlier years of his writing.

BOGAEV: They’re tough, you call them, tough and sinewy plays.

MENZER: Yeah.

BOGAEV: “The plays got weirder,” is what you say. “Things got weird.” And also, Shakespeare hitched up with John Fletcher, a younger playwright around this time. Is that another sign that you’re looking at that he thought maybe, “Oh no, maybe I’m losing my edge”?

MENZER: I think as likely, he was urged to do so by the actors he worked with, who knew that, you know, John Fletcher was actually the hotter playwright in the 1610s, particularly with Fletcher’s adroitness at tragicomedy, these plays that were neither exactly one or the other, but “both and.”

Fletcher potentially introduces Shakespeare to tragicomedy, and they worked together on some of these plays. But again, John Fletcher was a generation younger, and so, what we can think a little bit about is Shakespeare moving into his mid and later 40s, being coupled with a younger playwright who may have his finger a little bit more firmly on the pulse of theatrical taste at the time.

BOGAEV: Okay. Finally, we’ve arrived at King Lear. Shakespeare’s old, and it’s a play about an old man. As you said earlier, he’s been writing about fathers and daughters for the most part. Winter’s Tale, you call Leontes a deadbeat dad. Prospero, a single father. They’re all older men looking back and taking stock.

MENZER: That’s right.

BOGAEV: Which is a natural generational shift. It makes sense for a man of Shakespeare’s age. But what I find interesting is, you point out that also his actors in his company, they’re graying and sagging too.

MENZER: It’s funny, right? I mean, when we think about, we think about King Lear, it is a play of old age. And Henry IV, Part II, is also a beautiful play about old age. At the same time, you know, when Shakespeare writes King Lear, he’s in his forties which, you know—

BOGAEV: Kind of old for that time, isn’t it? A little bit?

MENZER: I mean, that’s so interesting, isn’t it, right? King Lear, the character King Lear, says he’s four score years and upwards, not a day more or less, which basically says, “I’m 80 or something,” right? I mean, that is really old for the time. That’s really old.

BOGAEV: That’s old. That’s ancient.

MENZER: To what extent was Shakespeare old when he wrote King Lear? He was older, and I’ve meditated on the way that Shakespeare has seemed like an old soul all his life. Early in the Sonnets, written in his twenties, he’s talking about looking in the mirror and seeing life trenching deep into his face, about losing his hair, you know.

BOGAEV: He got married very early.

MENZER: Very early, right? He married early at 18.

So, Lear as a play about old age, certainly, but you know, there’s a big difference between being in your mid-40s and being upwards of 80, as Lear is.

Certainly, in King Lear, Shakespeare is thinking about an aging father and his daughters, right? And as you say, this is a transition from his early work, which is about young love and about the relationship primarily between fathers and sons, to later plays where the center of gravity is with the father negotiating the life and times of their daughters, right? And so, we see that in King Lear.

One of the reasons I’m thinking about Shakespeare’s age a lot is trying to come to terms with the fact that he died at the age of 52. I think it is easy from our perspective to say, like, “Well, people were shorter back then, and so were their lives, and so that 52 was old.”

One of the arguments I make in the book, which has not really been talked about very much, is that in some of the preliminary poems to the Folio, commendatory poems in the First Folio, they talk about Shakespeare leaving too soon, so that his death apparently struck at least a couple of his contemporaries as being slightly premature.

Lear is now on my mind since you mentioned it, but, you know, one of Shakespeare’s greatest villains, Edmund in King Lear, near his death says, and I paraphrase, “The wheel has come full circle. I am here.” I think about that cyclicality of Shakespeare’s life: the orbit of his life that seems to have formed a perfect circle and came back to where it started, just like he did.

BOGAEV: As you’re talking, I’m thinking of, say, Oxfordians and others who dispute that Shakespeare wrote these plays. And they often make the case that one person without a formal education could never have produced such a quantity of quality work. That’s one of the big arguments. But you write, and this is a quote, “When one thinks of all the writers, then and now, who were not Shakespeare, the wonder is not that there was one Shakespeare, but that there were not more.” So, spin that out for us. What are you thinking?

MENZER: Well, yeah, you know, to start with, I think authorship skepticism is driven by, to some extent, the same thing I am driven by, which is the mystery of the accomplishment. It is unbelievable to me that anybody wrote these plays, you know? They are just that good. The cognitive reach. The humanity of them, most of them, many of them, is really almost literally incomprehensible, so it takes an act of faith to believe that anybody wrote them.

Now, the preponderance of evidence to me is very, very clear that William Shakespeare of Stratford-upon-Avon wrote these plays.

At the same time though, in talking about, “Well, why aren’t there more Shakespeares? What, what made him so singular?” To some extent, you know, he lived at the crosshatch of history in that the occasion and the context and the time were exactly right for his talent to flourish.

If you consider that the year he was born, 1564, the profession in which he really made his name did not exist. The commercial industry that allowed him to find those players who enabled and gave first flesh to his work, they didn’t really exist yet either.

He was among the second wave of English playwrights, which is the best wave to be part of because it was still new, but some of the cement was hardening around the commercial theater industry that allowed him to sustain a career.

And so, Shakespeare was extraordinarily lucky. Almost biblically lucky, I say, you know, a) that he didn’t die of the plague; b) that his particular genius, his particular talent, dropped into a soil that allowed it to flourish, and that was the theatrical and commercial culture of early modern London. He got there just at the right time.

So, when we think about why haven’t there been more, you know, it’s the meeting of talent and occasion that gave birth to this extraordinary corpus of work.

BOGAEV: I could talk about your book forever, but I have to leave some time to congratulate you on being the inaugural Chair in Shakespeare Studies for the Folger.

MENZER: Thank you.

BOGAEV: And while you’re here at the Folger, you’re researching a book about Shakespeare’s enemies—

MENZER: Yeah.

BOGAEV: Which is pertinent to this whole issue that we’re talking about perennially of the bardification of Shakespeare, I imagine, because part of your argument is that anger and dislike of Shakespeare’s work fueled his rise. What are you basing that on?

MENZER: Well, I mean, first of all, thank you for that, those kind words. I’m very grateful and privileged to be the inaugural Folger Chair of Shakespeare Studies. And all credit to Dr. Farah Karim-Cooper, who’s the director of the Folger, and Dr. Patricia Akhimie, who’s director of the Folger Institute, for coming up with this idea.

You know, for scholars who are, let’s just say, at a particular season of life, we often end up working in university administration. I’ve been provost and a dean, and so forth, and that’s tremendously creative and interesting work. What you end up doing is creating research ecosystems for other people and backburnering your own work.

Being able to have a year to be at the Folger, which is just an extraordinary institution, to dedicate to your own research is a huge gift. So, I’m grateful.

And the project that I am working on is called Shakespeare’s Enemies, which is my next book, and to some extent, you know, you spend five or six years writing a Shakespeare biography, it’s almost an act of penance to write a book called Shakespeare’s Enemies because even if you’re skeptical of your subject, writing a biography you’re still part of a kind of hagiographic tradition, right?

And so, I think about Shakespeare’s Enemies as trying to give equal time to some of those other individuals for whom Shakespeare just gets right up their noses. I think about figures all the way from Robert Greene to Ira Glass, since we’re on a podcast, who have really taken issue.

BOGAEV: You’ve really did bring it right up to the moment. You’ve skipped over Ben Jonson, and Voltaire, and Leo Tolstoy, and Wittgenstein.

MENZER: Well, there’s Greene, Jonson, and Voltaire, and Tolstoy, and Shaw.

BOGAEV: J.R.R. Tolkien.

MENZER: And Tolkien, who didn’t like Shakespeare’s elves at all.

BOGAEV: James Baldwin.

MENZER: James Baldwin. I mean, James Baldwin has such an interesting reaction to Shakespeare and writes quite movingly in the ’60s about his ambivalence with Shakespeare and how he ultimately had a kind of “Road to Damascus” moment of finding his way to Shakespeare but it was tough love, right?

And so, I am interested particularly in those writers. What is it that was enabling or energizing about the animus they feel for Shakespeare as a creative spark?

BOGAEV: Well, such a pleasure to talk with you. And I’m so glad you’re with us for a year.

MENZER: Barbara, it’s been my pleasure. What a gift this time has been.

————

KARIM-COOPER: That was Paul Menzer interviewed by Barbara Bogaev.

The Complete Life of William Shakespeare comes out September 29th as an e-book and October 29th in hardcover from the Arden Shakespeare.

This episode was produced by Matt Frassica. Garland Scott is the executive producer. It was edited by Gail Kern Paster.

We had technical help from Voice Trax West in Studio City, California.

Our web producer is Megan Fraedrich. Leonor Fernandez edits our transcripts. Final mixing services provided by Clean Cuts at Three Seas, Inc.

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