Shakespeare's Shattered Youth: Laming or Elixir? from a Close Reading of the Sonnets

Why another book on Shakespeare, you may ask? Have not his works been analysed countless times before? Well, yes, but there is always room for a fresh approach and new interpretation and that's what Dr Lucy Sullivan's book gives us. The accepted view of Shakespeare's childhood has been a picture of happy, domestic stability; later of a young man, perhaps a bit boisterous, but nonetheless a happily married, family man. This idealism is far from Dr Sullivan's interpretation of what Shakespeare's early years were like. Stressful adolescence: She argues that, far from the happy, carefree life so often pictured, Shakespeare experienced a stressful childhood and adolescence, resulting from his father's financial misfortunes and his mother's suggested infidelity. With two self-absorbed parents who had no time to support and nurture their adolescent son, Shakespeare embarked on a forced marriage with a pregnant Anne Hathaway eight years his senior, rather than his preferred love, Anne Whateley, and became a father of three by the time he was 20. Elsewhere, Dr Sullivan has written on the failures of modern parents being a determining factor in the crises suffered by their children, arguing that a dysfunctional family leads to a perpetuating cycle of instability in the next generation. Multiple partners, divorce and drugs are no role models for children in our time; in the same way, the turmoil of Shakespeare's fractured home life led to youthful instability and his precipitate and calamitous marriage. But she asks, as this produced great literature, was it laming or elixir?

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