Larry Lockridge at The Hedgehog Review:
It is unlikely the dark conjecture would have occurred to me were I not offspring of one, but my prejudicial lens has no bearing on whether Shakespeare died a suicide. I have scoured biographies old and new and find that nobody over four centuries has entertained the idea in print. Hardly an exception is Edward Bond’s 1973 play Bingo—the character Shakespeare, guilt-ridden for failing to thwart land enclosures near Stratford, takes sugar-coated poison tablets left behind for him by Ben Jonson. Is our myriad-minded Shakespeare, the suicide taboo silently at work, above the degradations of Dante’s seventh circle, reserved for suicides, who must keep company with usurers and sodomites? Or is there no evidence?
Shakespeare’s suicide is plausible as a speculation consistent with what we tend to believe about the connection between creativity and depression. My father, Ross Lockridge, Jr., with a loving wife and four young children, died a suicide at thirty-three, just as his unagented, 1,060-page debut novel, Raintree County, topped the nation’s best-seller lists in early 1948.
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