The Island
Features
Was the Bard
going blind?
William Shakespeare might have left London and
stopped writing three years before he died
because he had lost his sight, a playwright has
suggested.
by Stephen Adams,
Correspondent
R
Arts
ick Thomas said he thought
years of writing by candlelight would have left
Shakespeare struggling to see.
He has just written a play, For All
Time, about why the bard left
London for Stratford-upon-Avon in
1613.
It is question has vexed scholars
for years.
Thomas said he had came to the
conclusion out of personal experience - that writing plays for years on
end had taken its toll on his vision.
With the conditions Shakespeare
was working under, he thought his
sight would have deteriorated much
faster.
Thomas was commissioned to
write For All Time by The Theatre
By the Lake in Kendal for its summer season next year.
He said: “I started off thinking
about how Shakespeare would spend
his working day, He would have been
rehearsing in the morning, he would
have been performing in the afternoon.
“So if he was going to write at all
it would have been in the evening. So
for six months of the year that would
have been in candlelight.
“If you think about it in those
terms it would have been virtually
impossible for him to get to the age
of 48 and still have 20-20 vision,” he
told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme.
He added: “I just can’t see that
Shakespeare could have had that
clear vision.”
After leaving London
Shakespeare did not write any more
plays and died three years later in
1616.
Thomas also came up with an
alternative theory - that Shakespeare
was frightened of staying in London
in case his health failed at the speed
it left his father.
“When William was a teenager,
his father John ‘went through a
strange situation when he lost a lot
of money very quickly’.
“I wonder if one
of the reasons might
be that he was a diabetic, lost a lot of
money and couldn’t
work, and William
was worried about
that happening to
him later on in life,”
he said.
Stanley Wells,
chairman of the
Shakespeare
Birthplace Trust,
said the blindness
theory was an interesting one.
But he thought
the playwright could
have left London
after being traumatised by the Globe
theatre burning
down in 1613.
He also cast
doubt on the assumption that
Shakespeare lived
full-time in London
before moving back
home.
“He didn’t exactly depart from
London. I think
that’s a very simplis-
How Asians are about to take over
the world of literature
O
ne summer a few years ago, I read
six novels. The first was a “tense,
chilling” geopolitical thriller
about a man who uncovers a fiendish plot
to destroy the American way of life.
Toenail-biting stuff.
The second? Well, it was also a
tense, chilling geopolitical thriller
about a man who uncovers a fiendish
plot to destroy the American way of
life. In fact, so was the third. And the
fourth. Actually, all of them were
tense, chilling, geopolitical thrillers
about men who etc, etc.
I felt totally inadequate! I often go
for days without uncovering a single
plot to destroy the American way of
life. What’s wrong with me? I need
medical help.
Seeking more relevant entertainment, I borrowed books from a female
friend known for her literary taste.
Hers were very different. The first
was a “wickedly funny” comedy-drama
about
an
independent
American
woman’s disillusionment with life and
her search for meaning which eventually
leads her to finding fulfilment (ie, a tall
man). The second was also a wickedly
funny comedy-drama about an independent American woman’s disillusionment
and her discovery of a tall man. In fact,
all were wickedly funny comedy-dramas
about independent American women
locating tall men.
Who believes this stuff ? The women I
know invest as much emotional energy
in men as they do in their disposable
razors (ie, half-hearted attention, two
minutes a week).
At about that time, I bumped into
bestselling author Matthew Reilly, an
Australian. I asked him: “Why did you
write a tense, chilling thriller set in
America?”
“Practically every
thriller is set in
America,”
he
replied.
He was right.
Most
books
in
stores and airports
are set in the West - - yet the vast
majority of human
beings on this planet, four billion out
of six and a half
billion, live in the
East.
Our lives are
WAY more interesting than those of
Westerners.
We
have coups, earthquakes, insurgencies, typhoons and
despots coming out
of our trousers.
Sometimes LITERALLY. And in Asia,
that’s a QUIET
news-day.
This autumn,
your humble narrator was involved in
an effort to correct
this anomaly. I was chief judge of a panel
handing out A$110,000 to the best book
set in Asia-Pacific. (This is more cash
than America’s Pulitzer Prize and about
the same as the UK’s Man Booker prize.)
Our prize was called the Australia-Asia
Literary Award, because people in the
Western Australian community organized and financed it.
And you know what happened? We
received fabulous books to read from all
over
Asia-Pacific,
from
Haruki
Murakami, Thomas Keneally, Su Tong
and others. The cash eventually went to a
brilliant Melbourne man called David
Malouf whose book was a collection of 31
stories - - and not one of them was a
tense, chilling geopolitical thriller
about a man who uncovers a
fiendish plot to destroy the
American way of life.
Having said that, none of them
were about a puny, bald Asian guy
who fails to uncover fiendish plots
to destroy anything, but hey, give
him time. Maybe his next book will
be.
In the meantime, do yourself a
favour. Throw out your Danielle
Steel books. Support an Asian
author. And I don’t just mean buy
our books. I mean allow us to move into
your homes and eat everything in your
fridge. You’ll soon discover what “tense
and chilling” really means.
****
Visit our columnist’s website to hear
about good reads: www.vittachi.com
Thursday 4th December, 2008
tic way of putting it,” he said.
“He started spending more and
more time in Stratford, it would
appear, but I think he spent far more
time in Stratford [throughout his
career] than has been acknowledged.”
He stressed: “He never had a
house in London - he only had lodgings there - but he had the secondbiggest house in Stratford.”
Little historical documentation
exists about the last years of
Shakespeare’s life and the reason
why he stopped writing remains a
mystery.
But Mr Wells said Shakespeare
must have been able to see well
enough at the very end of his life to
sign his “elaborate” signature. Five
5
of the six surviving signatures come
from his “last years of his life,” he
said.
“He was able to see well enough
to sign his quite elaborate signature
within two months of dying,” he
argued.
Thomas said his play was not
meant to be a historical account, but
to put forward “lots of reasons why
Shakespeare wanted to leave
London.”
“I plumped for the blindness in
the end as the main reason but the
truth is we just do not know and the
truth is we will probably never
know,” he said.
J
© The Telegraph Group
London 2008