John Stubbs
BILL & BESS
Shakespeare and Elizabeth: The Meeting of Two Myths
By Helen Hackett (Princeton University Press 295pp £19.95)

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History remembers a few figures from diverse spheres of activity. Perhaps as a memory aid, we like to think of all those in a given period as being chums, members of a sort of canonic club. So although there is no historical evidence of Elizabeth I meeting Shakespeare, the idea of such a meeting, indeed on a relaxed and regular basis, proved over time integral to common conceptions of both. The 'age of Elizabeth' is that of Shakespeare, and vice versa, so it is vital that they should have known each other. This assumption of a personal link, or the eagerness to find one, has compensated for the infinitesimal part Shakespeare constitutes in Elizabeth's biography - she almost certainly saw him perform; she may have liked what she saw - while obscuring the very major role the queen played, at a distance, in Shakespeare's life. As a writer, he could not be immune to the force with which her image and projected personality defined his political world, and her influence on the artistic licence allowed to his theatre. Personally, he could not escape the impact of her favour on 'persons of honour' known to have been his patrons. But this is not enough: as Helen Hackett shows, the Virgin Queen has been variously regarded as Shakespeare's secret admirer, his negligent patron and even his mother. Alongside her, Shakespeare has featured as laureate, lover and, latterly, as an opposing voice, a man of the people.

There are books about Shakespeare and his work, and books about the ways in which Shakespeare has been treated by history. Hackett's Shakespeare and Elizabeth is one of the latter, meriting a space on the shelf close to Margreta de Grazia's Shakespeare Verbatim (Clarendon Press, 1991). In production and presentation, however, the book is presented as if it belonged in the former category. Its pleasant format and ample illustration may trick some bookshop browsers into thinking that it does, in the end, uncover a biographical connection between the Bard and the Monarch. It does not: instead Hackett's study provides a narrative of how Shakespeare and Elizabeth have travelled together through time, appropriately concluding with their appearance in an episode of Doctor Who. Along the way we learn how Shakespeare's reputation profited substantially at the expense of Elizabeth's. As scholars began casting doubt on stories of Shakespeare and Elizabeth bantering at court, they forged another myth of Shakespeare's genius flowering in spite of the queen's failure to rescue him from a player's poverty. Elizabeth was later seen as parsimonious and perversely masculine, in contrast with the Victorians' own fair queen. In America he was taken as a universal, a people's poet, a visionary whose true home was in the New World, as opposed to Elizabeth, an imaginatively and politically bankrupt symbol of the old.

The book is about 'the meeting of two myths' and one of its graces is the author's sympathy with cultural myth-making itself. She begins by discussing a Ladybird picture book she read as a child, in which Shakespeare and Elizabeth appear as cordial acquaintances. As Hackett anticipates, many of her readers will have dim memories of the same cardboard-covered volume. The attention she gives the book reveals it as both a learning device and a small example of folk art. It shows how, as we carry on learning history and move from Tales from Shakespeare to the plays themselves, we continue in part to read and learn at the Ladybird level. The picture-book view of Shakespeare and Elizabeth over the centuries not only discloses a great deal about the culture of a given time, its sexual politics in particular, but has resulted in further considerable art, literature and drama, from Walter Scott's Elizabethan novels to Mark Twain's closet parody of Elizabethiana; from John Aubrey's fanciful miniature 'life' of the poet to huge and earnest twentieth-century theatricals incorporating Shakespeare into the American national myth.

There has been exhaustive discussion on how Shakespeare's works are products of Elizabethan culture, and also on the critique of that culture, if any, to be found in them. For her part Hackett offers some sensitive readings of Shakespearean passages that may offer allegorical glimpses of the monarch. These let some air into the myth, and allow us to get beyond debating Elizabeth's role in commissioning The Merry Wives of Windsor, and whether or not she really did compare herself to Shakespeare's Richard II before the Essex rebellion. Hackett is reluctant to engage with the question of what it is about these twinned figures that has proved so consistently fascinating: she prefers to leave that to her sources.

Some answer seems to lie in the frankness of fantasy in recent fictions that put them together, often graphically. In the twentieth century Shakespeare and Elizabeth emerge as androgynous mirror-images, archetypes of woman-man and man-woman. Yet despite this hidden parity, in the tradition in which this relationship has evolved, Shakespeare enjoys all the liberty and magnitude denied to Elizabeth. While he emerges as universal, all-comprehending and 'for all time', Elizabeth is not only confined to history but of it, inescapably temporal. While she is imagined ageing, regretting and dwindling, Shakespeare remains essentially timeless, indefinable though far from indefinite. Hackett's analysis of a drawing of the pair by David Hockney captures this opposition very well indeed. Yet in their dual mythology, it is still Shakespeare who needs Elizabeth, for basis and background. Without her he dissolves.

A surprising absence from this very readable study is the BBC comedy Blackadder II, surely the outstanding popular take on things Elizabethan in the last twenty years. Despite all expectations, Shakespeare is not portrayed in the original series. Instead Blackadder himself takes on the Shakespearean role, exploiting his contemporaries like an amateur Iago while seeing ironies they miss, like a less highly strung Hamlet. Only once did the programme bring Shakespeare himself into the picture, when 'Queenie' mentions that he helped her with the ending to one of her poems. The light touch brought to that moment both resists and acknowledges the power and vitality of the tradition this book surveys: despite all signs to the contrary, we need Elizabeth and William to have met.

JOHN STUBBS is the author of a biography of John Donne, 'The Reformed Soul'. He is currently writing a book on wit, wandering and war in the seventeenth century.