Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare

by Stephen Greenblatt

Book Overview

Stephen Greenblatt, the charismatic Harvard professor who "knows more about Shakespeare than Ben Jonson or the Dark Lady did" (John Leonard, Harper's), has written a biography that enables us to see, hear, and feel how an acutely sensitive and talented boy, surrounded by the rich tapestry of Elizabethan life; full of drama and pageantry, and also cruelty and danger; could have become the world's greatest playwright. A young man from the provinces--a...

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0393050572
• ISBN13: 9780393050578
• Release Date: September 2004
• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
• Length: 448 Pages
• Weight: 1.72 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.4" x 6.5" x 9.5"

Customer Reviews

What I Wish to Believe

I simply could not put this book down. I wished it would last for 1,000 pages. But, both during and after, I thought to myself, can it be really true? How much of it is fabrication based upon just minimal evidence? Well, it seems that in Shakespeare scholarship, minimal evidence defines the elusive terrain. I accept that there will always be an element of subjectivity. In this context, to me the first test is the test of reasonable plausability. I had known some of the facts of Shakespeare's life. I knew that his dad was Bailiff of Stratford-on-Avon. But I did not know that it entailed contracting bands of players to perform morality plays...plays which were the media events of their era. To me, it is plausable that the young Will would have been exposed through them to the experience of theater....and plausable also, their effect on a highly attentive young mind. The aesthetic evolution of Will was a second plausability test. In his plays, he was fully able to poke fun at the common people, while also displaying a kind of duality towards them from the sophisticated perpective of nobility. Greenblatt employs the plays themseves to sift attitudes. The key attitude here, as in "A Mid-Summer Night's Dream", is that Will skillfully finds a way to give a subtle preferential affirmation to the former, even over the latter. He exposes the special charm of the play's whole conceit. How could this extraordinary ability have evolved? From the rote learning of his schoolboy Latin immersion, to the crude directness of the morality plays, to the traditional nature festivals, Will's exposure to the lively imagination of his commoner culture, in all its joys and foibles, is convincing. Less provable, was his proposed exposure to higher education and theater, through his mother's noble Arden relatives.....and a sparse written clue of inheritance of the actor's costume, upon which Greenblatt's thesis hangs. All I can say is that, as ablely presented, it seems quite believeable. The fact that Greenblatt is laboring a bit here, did not disturb me, for I fully expected any thesis would have its challenges. And finally, the wonderful chapter on the "Dream of Resotration", a key theme in many of Will's plays, has very clear parallels to the precipitous decline of his father's fortunes.....a documented truth, that must have had signficant impact on Will's life view. Will's dad, a Greenblatt elicited Fallstaffian character, falls from grace; falls from prominence in real life, with real consequences for the young Shakespeare. Throughout, Greenblatt employs the scant facts we know, and the expressions Will artfully presented, with his own kind of mature humanist imagination, to precipitate the emotions that plausably might have driven the actions and decisions of Shakespeare and the real people in his life. That Shakespeare of all people, would have been keeenly rooted to these, to me, is absolutely beyond doubt. Greenblatt's assumption of this vision is certai

Greenblatt illuminates Shakespeare's "walking shadow"

Reknowned civil war historian Shelby Foote has been eloquent in bemoaning the diffulties of the "lock picks" of biography. So much more so for William Shakespeare who, though he wrote so voluminously on the human condition managed to conceal so much about himself personally. Using basically tax and legal records relating to Shakespeare, his father John and mother Mary and Shakespeare's own considerable catalogue of writing, Greenblatt essentially tried to let Shakespeare tell his own story. In this way, Greenblatt's choice was a couregeous one on so many levels. As a writer, interspersing quotes from perhaps the pre eminent writer of all time is couregeous for the natural comparisons it invites between the prose of the bard and that of the writer quoting him. In this way, quoting Shakespeare demonstrates the same enviable chutzpah as entering a painting contest with Van Gogh or a sculpting competition with Michelangelo. And therein lies the rub, because Greenblatt's next measure of couregeousness is attempting to harness Shakespeare's loftly words that illuminate the human condition generally to illuminate but one human's condition...that of the bard himself. And what does the art in the end reveal of the artist himself? Certainly one need not look far from his printed words to see the horror and loss of Edgar Allen Poe, but what of Stephen King? Aren't his demons in the end more the product of his imagination than his biography. Perhaps it's even couregeous to think that biography itself even can explain genius. Perhaps in the end, our "lock picks" are frustrated by the implied method they employ. Maybe after all, the wonder of the artist, his ultimate biography (or at least the only one that matters) is to be found in the treasures he has bequeathed to us. In this way, mere mortals we can simply best enjoy by untethering ourselves from the unanswerable why.

Joy in connecting the dots

As a lover of Shakespeare's work but a newcomer to Shakespeare biography, I savored every word of this deeply felt exploration. Will's world, both external and interior, was brought vividly to life. From gloves to Jews, from real estate to life after death, the tiny details and larger than life themes in the plays and sonnets now, for me, emerge from the life of a real human being. No, if you don't believe that Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare, don't bother. The rest of us will believe, after reading this book, that no one BUT Shakespeare could have written Shakespeare.

A Perfect Joy

Stephen Greenblatt has written one of the best books on William Shakespeare to come out in awhile (and it is truly a cottage industry). Will in the World is a book to be savoured slowly but when that proves impossible, it is best then to simply devour with delight. The author is best at setting a context for the both the man and his works. A great example among many is his examination of the tension between Prostentants and secret (sometimes less than secret) Catholics which is brilliant without getting bogged down in conspiracy theories stranger than the actual conspiracies around. Greenblatt realizes that Shakespeare and his time are interesting enough in the telling. Even simple domestic life becomes intriguing and charming in this wide-ranging book. This a history and a biography that will be treasured by readers for a long while to come.

A Work of Impressive Scholarship & Readability

I very much enjoyed Stephen Greenblatt's previous work on Shakespeare, Hamlet in Purgatory; therefore, I was very excited to see Mr. Greenblatt had decided to write a complete biography of Shakespeare. Fortunately, Mr. Greenblatt did not disappoint. Will in the World is one of the best Shakespeare biographies I have read. The problem for any biographer of Shakespeare is, of course, the minimal records left behind. Apart from some information left in church and financial records, there is almost nothing of certainty known about Shakespeare. A Shakespearean biographer, then, is forced to make a certain number of guesses and speculations if he is going to come up with any kind of complete story for a reader. Historically, these speculations have ranged from the mundane to the outrageous but they always must rely on the reader's trust of the author's scholarship and how it relates to our own understanding of Shakespeare. I find Mr. Greenblatt to be a very believable biographer. The main reason I find Mr. Greenblatt's work to be so compelling is the correlations he finds between well-recorded historical events, what is known of Shakespeare and, ultimately, how this finds its way into Shakespeare's work. For example, in the first chapter Greenblatt describes a visit Queen Elizabeth made to Kenilworth where Leicester puts on a grand display for her. Now, was Shakespeare present at these festivities, perhaps even as a young country player? There is no way to know for sure but Greenblatt quotes Robert Langham's letter describing the event and takes us to lines from Midsummer Nights Dream. Shakespeare's recreation of the event is striking. Perhaps he was there. The other reason I like Greenblatt's work on Shakespeare is that he makes him human. Unlike Harold Bloom, for example (whose work I also greatly admire), who has a distracting tendency to deify Shakespeare, Mr. Greenblatt keeps Shakespeare deeply rooted in the real world. No less a genius for that, Greenblatt's Shakespeare is a man whose work was influenced by his life and experiences and not pulled wholesale from the Muse. Again and again Greenblatt impresses with his extensive knowledge of history and Shakespeare's work. In doing so, he takes us through Shakespeare's life and time from beginning to end. In the end, he leaves us with a picture of a man and his times--if not a sharp as a photograph then at least as beautiful as an impressionist painting.