For centuries, the forces of “bardolatry” have raised William Shakespeare to an unsurpassed plateau of literary genius. The man who never blotted a line, whose characters plumbed the depths of the human condition, and whose stagecraft made the Renaissance English stage the locus of fervent national pride was granted such an impenetrable nimbus of laurel that explaining the “bad bits” of his plays—his staging of letter-reading, for example—became something of an arcane art in itself. Entire passages were excised from his plays by editors and playwrights driven by the logic that “The Bard” could not intentionally have penned a bad word or a shaky scene. The point to which this hagiography could be indulged was, of course, inversely proportional to the extant biographical record: without sufficient documentary evidence, Shakespeare could be molded in any image, and his plays manipulated to support it. It is with one fascinating episode in the history of “bardophilia” that Alan Stewart begins Shakespeare's Letters: the infamous case of the Ireland papers.

Briefly, in 1795, Samuel Ireland attempted to pass off as original a plethora of forged Shakespearean documents, including a previously unknown play, Vortigern, lost drafts of King Lear, and a series of legal papers and personal correspondence. So hungry were Shakespeareans for such materials that subscriptions for a print copy of the papers were immediately snapped up, and, infamously, the Drury Lane Theatre began work on a production of Vortigern. Two days before the first scheduled performance, however, Edmund Malone, the leading Shakespearean of the time, published a devastating exposé of the fraud, and the case of Shakespeare's letters was settled. As a rhetorical device, this anecdote is a useful one; the search for Shakespeare's letters is not only a “wild goose chase,” since they do not exist in the sense that Ireland claimed—documents penned by Shakespeare himself—but also a redundant exercise: we already have plenty of Shakespeare's letters, “one hundred and eleven letters appear on stage in the course of Shakespeare's plays” (4). It is from this observation that Stewart embarks upon his scholarly project, interspersing meticulously researched chapters on early modern letter-writing culture—its humanist prescriptions, the types of materials involved, the role of carriers and other means of transportation—with subtle readings of some of Shakespeare's most epistolary works: Antony and Cleopatra, The Merchant of Venice, King Lear, and Hamlet. Stewart's analyses are persuasive and often genuinely enlightening. We learn that Hamlet and Ophelia must have been betrothed before her suicide, for instance, that a letter's bearer is often more important than its content or sender, and that the carrier system operating between London and the English countryside sustained communities of newly arrived provincials around London's inns, this latter fact provoking a nuanced reading of the tavern scenes of 1 Henry IV, no longer to be misunderstood as mere comedic subplot.

Stewart's central claim in Shakespeare's Letters is that a thorough understanding of the material conditions of epistolary culture in early modern England is essential if we want to recover the meaning of several key scenes and in order to recuperate Shakespeare's stagecraft from charges of occasional shoddiness, as is the case with King Lear. Shakespeare's letters, claims Stewart, operate anachronistically in a number of plays, and, in others, exploit or deviate from early modern epistolary practices to the extent that they constitute an essential part of his dramatic art. Curiously, despite its materialist bent, Stewart's book inadvertently moves in the direction of reidealizing Shakespeare's genius. But rather than excise “impure” passages, as editors once did, Stewart wants us to restore the plays to their material conditions of production, granting us an understanding of Shakespeare's “‘grammar of letters’: a vocabulary and a set of images that originate in the letter-writing practices of early modern England” (5). Reconstructing these conditions then permits us to see where the playwright chooses to rework specific material practices, and in turn, this knowledge directs us to reframe what once was considered unnecessary, excessive, and even bad as logical, intentional, and aesthetically accomplished.

Despite some fascinating readings of the plays and a detailed analysis of the culture of early modern letter writing, Stewart is forced to remain in the speculative mode in many instances when it comes to applying his research to the stage. Even his masterly unraveling of epistolary communication in King Lear, that most letter-ridden of plays, finally comes up short: “There is, I must admit, one moment which still eludes a rational explanation … it may simply be an error” (226). This is not to slight Stewart's careful readings, a number of which are entirely compelling. Rather, as he acknowledges himself, there are limits to the kind of knowledge produced by historicist criticism. Since Shakespeare does not create strictly mimetic art, any amount of knowledge about, say, the carrier system between London and the provinces, cannot crystallize entirely our understanding of his method, nor can it circumscribe the multivalent nature of his work; instead, we get a clearer picture of the frequency with which Shakespeare employs or departs from specific cultural practices for dramatic purposes. In a sense, then, what painstaking scholarly works like Shakespeare's Letters offer us, besides an awareness of the pitfalls of critical anachronism, is a paradoxical reinforcement of two major concerns of contemporary Shakespeare studies. The first is that we are still in search of a satisfactory hermeneutic connecting the craft of writing for the Shakespearean stage to the broader material conditions of early modern England: this is the object of current theoretically aware historicist criticism. The second is that such a project is doomed by our epistemological distance from Shakespeare's milieu. Can we really ever reconstruct what an Elizabethan audience thought and felt? Those who call themselves “presentists” would say no. Alan Stewart might put it this way: If Shakespeare's plays were letters, how were they composed? Who delivered them? Were they written to us? Shakespeare's Letters certainly helps answer the first of these questions, and we know a good deal about the second. The third is still unresolved, and it is likely to remain so.