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Celebrity Culture and the Problem of Biography

Art is long, life is short, especially Shakespeare’s. In acknowledgement of that self-evident truth, one solution to the problem of biography—the notoriously thin record of the contemporary documentary record as measured against the ever-expanding magnitude of his celebrity—is to accept the production history of Shakespeare’s plays as the proper content of his “life. Like the light from stars emitted centuries ago but reaching us only now, the plays deliver the past into the present, bringing us as close to the source as we are ever likely to get. The historical moment of the establishment of Shakespeare biography in this sense (that is, the works as the life of the poet) dates from the emergence of celebrity culture in the eighteenth century. Looking at the contemporary impact of performances by David Garrick and Sarah Siddons through some previously neglected sources (the Hanbury-Williams family correspondence and drawings by Romney and Flaxman) dramatizes the salient contrast of the relative “Black Hole” of the documentary life against the starry firmament of production and performance.