Shakespeare's circle

We shouldn't be surprised that Shakespeare's life is still full of surprises, but we are. Surely, we say to ourselves, there can be nothing left to discover. Surely everything has been examined and re-examined – every family document, every word he wrote or maybe didn't write, every artefact with which he was associated, every house or lodging he owned or lived in or may have lived in. And yet, each decade, each year, more is revealed.

This is partly thanks, as these chapters demonstrate, to the ingenious application of new technologies. Dendrochronology, now a comparatively venerable method of investigation, has demonstrated that Shakespeare's granddaughter Elizabeth Hall cannot have been born at the house known as Hall's Croft, and the more recent tools provided by DNA, hopes René Weis, may yet tell us more about her long and interesting afterlife. Searchable online databases have helped scholars to trace documents and references in her father's medical textbooks, and computer-aided stylistic analysis has shed compelling new light on Shakespeare's collaborations with Thomas Middleton – as Emma Smith challenges, in concluding her chapter on this subject, ‘Watch this space.’ Catherine Richardson suggests that research by Alan H. Nelson and William Ingram on the sales of Easter tokens in Southwark may tell us something about the otherwise obscure last year of Shakespeare's youngest actor brother Edmund, who was buried in Southwark ‘with a fore noon knell of the great bell’ on 31 December 1607. We now have searchable access to maps complete with ‘placeography, personography [and] bibliography’. Materials painstakingly gleaned over the years from records of the Ecclesiastical Courts and the Parish Registers can now be made to give up their secrets almost effortlessly, at the click of a mouse, as we perceive new patterns, and add new pieces to the jigsaw.

But the new technologies are only aids to scholarship and imagination, and to receive interesting answers you have to ask interesting questions. In this volume, editors Stanley Wells and Paul Edmondson have gathered together a collection of essays that brilliantly encircles their immensely celebrated yet ever enigmatic central figure, William Shakespeare, and surrounds him with family, friends and colleagues, seen from many different perspectives. As we read through these varied and sometimes conflicting interpretations, we find ourselves engaging with questions that I at least had never thought to ask.