In the epilogue to Stanley Wells’s slim, engaging book, in which he attempts to shed light on Shakespeare’s personality, the eminent academic describes himself as being like Puck to a former colleague’s Oberon. And it’s true that there is something essentially puckish, something creatively mischievous for a man of Wells’s considerable scholarship to claim anything about Shakespeare’s inner life.
His book comprises four online lectures that were delivered during lockdown in 2020 and closes with a summary of his eight-decade relationship with Shakespeare and the many garlands it has brought him. Compared with the detail of Wells’s own autobiography, what precedes it might seem a little thin. The facts of Shakespeare’s life are sparse, and any attempt to fill in the considerable blanks is fraught with risk. This might be the point: Wells knows enough to know how much remains unknown. And after a lifetime of wrapping himself in Shakespeare’s words, he is prepared, at 93, to share with us the impression of Shakespeare he has been left with.
