Shakespeare's Insomnia, and the Causes Thereof — Edition Insights

A Pastiche of Elizabethan Voice

The letters attributed to Shakespeare's contemporaries are the book's chief entertainment. Head mimics the cadence and vocabulary of early modern English with deliberate, often comic, exaggeration. William Kempe's letter, for instance, reports that actors demand shorter plays and threaten to strike unless they receive extra groats for sack. The language is peppered with period-appropriate terms like "hath," "doth," and "fie upon thee," but the grievances are anachronistically modern in their labor-union flavor. Nicholas Bottom's dictated letter, written by a clerk who "useth not the pen," further heightens the parody by having the character from A Midsummer Night's Dream complain about being locked out of the Globe and remind Shakespeare of their boyhood production of "Pyramus and Thisbe." The voice is consistently that of a disgruntled employee, not a literary figure.

Structure as a Mock-Academic Frame

The book is divided into three periods of letters, each separated by seven years, creating a pseudo-chronological structure that mimics a scholarly edition of correspondence. The first period (1602) focuses on labor disputes; the third (1609) introduces domestic complaints, as when Rev. Walter Blaise reports that Shakespeare's wife Anne has interrogated a messenger about her husband's London life. Head does not attempt to fill the gaps between periods, leaving the reader to infer that the causes of insomnia accumulate over time. The framing essay at the start, with its medical and literary references, establishes a serious tone that the letters then undercut, creating a deliberate dissonance between the scholarly apparatus and the farcical content.

Recurring Motifs of Petty Annoyance

Throughout the letters, specific recurring details build a portrait of Shakespeare's troubles. Money is a constant theme: actors demand higher wages, a publican expects payment for Bottom's tab, and the playwright is reminded of the paltry £10 he received for a "beggarly play." The physical demands of performance also surface—actors want shorter plays and fewer tragedies, and a letter recalls a stage accident where horses broke through the floor, nearly killing Shakespeare. These details are not grand tragedies but mundane irritations, and Head uses them to suggest that insomnia arises not from profound melancholy but from the cumulative weight of small, ridiculous problems. The effect is both humorous and oddly plausible within the hoax's logic.

Readers should approach this text as a playful artifact of late-nineteenth-century literary humor, not as a serious biographical claim. The pleasure lies in watching Head sustain the impersonation of a scholarly editor while letting the forged letters grow increasingly absurd. Pay attention to the way the mock-academic frame and the comic voices interact—the contrast between the essay's gravity and the letters' pettiness is the book's central joke, and it rewards a slow reading that savors the period diction and the invented grievances.

Sometimes the cleverest diversions hide the real ache beneath. Those invented letters to Shakespeare, cataloguing his sleeplessness from other people’s noise, made me long for the unsorted, honest clutter of a life actually lived in ink. I found myself reaching instead for Charles Lever, His Life in His Letters, Vol. II — Edition Insights, where the worries are real, gently worn, and quietly familiar.