Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare (Anniversary Edition) by Stephen Greenblatt (PDF)

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The Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award finalist, reissued with a new afterword for the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death.A young man from a small provincial town moves to London in the late 1580s and, in a remarkably short time, becomes the greatest playwright not of his age alone but of all time. How is an achievement of this magnitude to be explained? Stephen Greenblatt brings us down to earth to see, hear, and feel how an acutely sensitive and talented boy, surrounded by the rich tapestry of Elizabethan life, could have become the world’s greatest playwright.

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⭐Despite the author’s more than occasional declarative assertions about Shakespeare’s life, Stephen Greenblatt’s Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare is a sustained work of speculative, imaginative scholarship, as any biography of Shakespeare must be. The facts of Shakespeare’s life are few and enigmatic, but his literary output can only elicit wondering questions about the experiences that engendered it. Framing and answering those questions, however, can easily become an exercise in bardolatrous projections of an ideal and potentially anachronistic personality; it may also reduce that personality to simplistic historical causes.As one would expect from the main architect of New Historicist criticism (or his preferred term, “Cultural Poetics”), Greenblatt labors to recover the primary, experiential tensions of Shakespeare’s life as it might have been rather than explain away those tensions with easy conclusions. Amid robust, colorfully detailed descriptions of Stratford and London life–a world that illuminates and is illuminated by frequent attention to the writings of Shakespeare and his contemporaries–Greenblatt preserves the mystery of the man in subtler ways than his subtitle may suggest. He limns out Shakespeare as a man thoroughly in his world and also profoundly alienated from it, a man of exceptional personal and artistic balance in a time of passionate and dangerous extremes embodied by many of his dramatic characters. Greenblatt also presents his readers with a Shakespeare whose deep, sympathetic capacities and great “imaginative generosity” (a frequent refrain) were coupled with a capacity for aesthetic distance that is “not entirely human.” What history can account for such a person?Greenblatt sets out to answer that question with other questions that articulate what he imagines to have been “the central problems [Shakespeare] grappled with as a young man:–What should I do with my life? In what can I have faith? Whom do I love?” These questions make sense as parts of a whole, albeit conflicted, life, and Greenblatt’s most compelling chapters derive their strength from the fact that they sustain a unified narrative by acknowledging the central role that Christianity had in ordering (and disordering) Shakespeare’s world, its members’ relations to each other, and their sense of themselves. Other chapters concerning Shakespeare’s possibly “shotgun” marriage, illicit love affairs he may have had, and the decidedly wild lives of players and poets in London take very little account of the psychological and cultural realities of Elizabethan and Jacobean Christianity.The chapters of the former description render a life and world that ring true in their complexity and liminality, their mixture of alien and familiar aspects, their rich and strange commerce between radically changing boundaries and notions of the sacred and profane. Here Shakespeare appears remote, at least as medieval as he is modern. In the other chapters, one finds a more decisively secularized but religion-haunted skeptic, a lovelorn bisexual who is trapped in an unsatisfying marriage, a man unable to avail himself of a divorce and, consequently, happiness. Here one finds, as it seems at times, the prototype for angst-ridden Woody Allen characters. The chapters of the latter description, which are the least historically analytical and the most anachronistic, suffer from the effects of what C. S. Lewis disdained as “poetolatry”–the treatment of dead authors as saints and their literary remains as relics, the objects of scholarly devotion in an age when art and literature constitute a new, post-religious religion.Will in the World is not covert about its veneration of Shakespeare–it is neither a hidden nor entirely debilitating flaw. And it is only a flaw because it sometimes prevents Greenblatt from dwelling on what may be for him some of the most unsaintly scenes in Shakespeare’s life. Greenblatt in these cases refrains from probing Shakespeare’s wounds, so to speak, as he did with other figures in his earlier books, in favor of minimizing their import to the man by emphasizing how pain, injury, guilt, suffering and moral conflict became material for literary triumphs.For instance, in a long and colorful chapter, Greenblatt presents Shakespeare’s Prince Hal (subsequently Henry V) as a type for Shakespeare himself and Falstaff as a type for Robert Greene, a brilliant but dangerously dissolute writer who died in sickness and poverty, perhaps rejected by Shakespeare when he requested aid. The sharpness and necessity of Hal’s ultimate rejection of Falstaff, his former friend, resonates with Shakespeare’s own sense of self-interest: here is a man who will revel in the hardscrabble and ebullient world of players and playwrights, but his true loyalty is always to his own private financial and social advancement. Greenblatt rightly finds this image of Shakespeare distressing; it is “utterly unsentimental and […] not entirely human.” Yet Greenblatt then elevates Shakespeare’s substitution of “pecuniary generosity” with “aesthetic generosity”–“the gift of transforming [Greene] into Falstaff”–to the status of “an incalculable gift.” That conclusion sounds a facile and utterly sentimental note.In an early chapter, Shakespeare’s failed and evidently bitter marriage to a woman he all but abandoned (perhaps eventually taking male and female lovers, in Greenblatt’s view) is presented as a tragedy in which Shakespeare was the chief victim. (The wife’s perspective is not the subject for equal, or any, consideration.) Shakespeare, Greenblatt indicates, was particularly the victim of unenlightened divorce laws and retrograde beliefs about sex and marriage that would begin to be swept away once progressives like John Milton realized that marriage is really “about the dream of long-term love,” and “deep emotional satisfaction […] turned out to depend heavily upon the possibility of divorce.” While Greenblatt admits “it is not clear how much of this dream could have been envisaged” by anyone when Will married Anne Hathaway in 1582, he suggests it was indeed possible and probable. He does not mention the undoubtedly significant (and very different) dominant view of marriage as represented in the Book of Common Prayer and other relevant sources.As one of Greenblatt’s colleagues, Debora Shuger, has noted, for people in Shakespeare’s time, “Sin [was] secularization, the attempt to avoid the drastic personal confrontation between absolute power and one’s own guilty, wormlike selfhood by refusing to hear the constraints such power imposes.” Yet Greenblatt excludes consideration of how Shakespeare might have experienced some measure of sin, guilt, or moral conflict regarding his actions and how that experience might be pertinent to his literary representations of marriage. For Greenblatt, the upshot is essentially that Shakespeare had a bad marriage, and that is why there are no truly happy, sustained examples of marital intimacy in his plays.For Greenblatt to press further into Shakespeare’s troubled soul would be, ironically, to remedy one Lewisian vice (that of “poetolatry”) with another, which Lewis called the “personal heresy,” which he defined as the idea that an author’s work can be taken as a representation of his personality and character. Lewis himself was not all of one mind concerning the nature and avoidability of the heresy. By granting, quite rightly, that one cannot separate an author from his work, Lewis left the door open for precisely the kind of hard-edged moral and political analysis of early modern personae for which Greenblatt is best known.Reading for Lewis meant “sharing [an author’s] consciousness.” For Greenblatt it is an act of “speaking with the dead,” as he has frequently described the end and impulse of his scholarly vocation. Lewis expressed a desire to spare the act of sharing an author’s mind from the act of studying it, lest the latter profane the former with its judgments, but inevitably this is impossible.Paving the way for scholars like Greenblatt who attend closely to the typically unseemly role that the human will has in shaping what individuals and institutions conceive and do, Lewis pointed out in The Allegory of Love that there are some parts in The Faerie Queene where Edmund Spenser “becomes a bad poet because he is, in certain respects, a bad man.” Lewis believed that “the wickedness [Spenser] had shared” as “an instrument of a detestable policy in Ireland” could be seen as having “corrupt[ed] his imagination” in these passages. Similarly, in a chapter in Will in the World that concerns Elizabethan anti-Semitism and The Merchant of Venice, Greenblatt contends that Shakespeare was both implicated in moral wrongs and resistant to them. Greater balance of this sort would have benefited his discussion of Shakespeare’s relationship with his literary peers and his wife.Elsewhere in Will in the World, evidently due to his rejection of the ideal of an “impersonal” critic, Greenblatt accomplishes that balance quite well and resists oversimplification in his account of what the Reformation meant for Shakespeare, his family, and their contemporaries. This material hearkens back to his last book, which examined Hamlet and other plays as parts of the afterlife of formerly orthodox beliefs and rituals concerning Purgatory. There Greenblatt described his experience of praying the Kaddish for his own father who had left provisions for it to be said by others after his death, as he did not expect his secular son to do it for him. For Greenblatt, the conflicting emotions and loyalties entailed in this experience poignantly illuminate sixteenth and seventeenth century England, where a long process of religious change was imposed from above (really a series of reformations for some and reversals for others), dividing families and creating perhaps the first and most profound “generation gap.”Along the lines of Charles Taylor’s recent reprise of Max Weber, Greenblatt sees the Protestant Reformation as a “great disembedding” of European society from Latin Christendom. Far more a “cultural revolution” than a popular reform movement, the Protestantization of England was a painful and drawn-out, disenchanting, and often disenfranchising process inflicted by a minority of elites on an unwilling and mostly powerless populace. In line with this view of the Reformation–one that has come to be widely accepted among literary scholars and historians since Eamon Duffy’s seminal work on the period –Greenblatt sees Shakespeare, his father, and other family members as “part of a very large group, probably the bulk of the population, who found themselves still grappling with longings and fears that the old resources of the Catholic Church had served to address.”In this milieu, William Shakespeare learned the value and cost of survival. His father, John, whom Greenblatt opines fell into financial ruin due to alcoholism, left a secret spiritual testament with provisions for masses to be said for his soul’s repose. Other members of Shakespeare’s extended family and family friends appear to have been recusant Catholics as well, some perhaps housing and supporting members of the Catholic resistance, including radicals like the Jesuit Edmund Campion. (Going out on the book’s farthest limb, Greenblatt imagines a meeting between Campion and the young Shakespeare.)While holding small political offices in Stratford during such troubled times, John Shakespeare had to keep the peace and balance intractably conflicted obligations and loyalties. At one time he was compelled to oversee the “reparation” of the parish church–that is, the defacement and removal of its murals and rood screen. Events like these marked William’s formative years, and Greenblatt convincingly surmises that they led him to become, like his father, “both Catholic and Protestant,” a Christian whose faith “was not […] securely bound either by the Catholic Church or by the Church of England.”In his most compelling argument, to which I can scarcely do justice here, Greenblatt conjectures that the death of Shakespeare’s young son, Hamnet, while Shakespeare was absent in London, resurfaced in the playwright’s mind a few years later to inspire Hamlet’s uniquely “tormented inwardness” and “spiritual crisis.” That crisis is of course precipitated by the unsettled ghost of Hamlet’s father, in whom he may have glimpsed the spectral images of his father and son.At the time of Hamlet’s writing, John Shakespeare was close to his death and may have been seriously ill. He may have raised his grandson in his own son’s absence, and for Hamnet’s and now his own soul’s peace he would have needed to know that he would be remembered and properly cared for when he died. Though the official form in the prayerbook for the burial of the dead had erased from the language of orthodoxy the old religion’s recognition of the continuity and community that exists between the living and the dead, that bond was still intensely felt, as it may still be felt in Hamlet’s many pleas for remembrance.How father and son experienced and responded to these needs in a society where centuries of belief and practice regarding purgatory had been criminalized, we cannot know. Undoubtedly their actions felt inadequate, and the traces of their lack of closure may linger in Shakespeare’s greatest tragedy, which, as Greenblatt contends, “drew upon the pity, confusion, and dread of death in a world of damaged rituals (the world in which most of us continue to live) because [Shakespeare] himself experienced those same emotions at the core of his being.”When the ghost of Hamlet’s father speaks–lines that Shakespeare delivered on stage himself in his best performance, according to one observer–Greenblatt remarks that “Shakespeare must have conjured up within himself the voice of his dead son, the voice of his dying father, and perhaps too his own voice, as it would sound when it came from the grave. Small wonder that it would have been his best role.” Again Greenblatt sees the fragments and dispersed energies of alienated religious belief reconstituted in Shakespeare’s art, but this time he lets that inadequate recompense resonate into silence.

⭐Not much is known about the life of William Shakespeare. Even though by the seventeenth century England was a record keeping nation, gaps remain in even the most basic reconstructions of Shakespeare’s life. The surviving traces of his life are abundant but thin. The decade or more after he presumably finished school, and before he left Stratford for London, are known as the “lost years” because we know virtually nothing about this period of his life. We have no surviving account of the details of his last days, final illness and passing. All points in between, too, are matters of hypothesis and speculation. We have none of his personal letters, none of the books he surely owned. The author, Stephen Greenblatt, a Harvard professor and Shakespeare historian, thus asks us to imagine certain aspects of Shakespeare’s life. The book is thus more assumptions about Shakespeare’s life than a true biography.The author succeeds in taking the reader back into the Elizabethan world in which Shakespeare lived. One needed to obtain a coat of arms from inheritance or university education (Oxford or Cambridge) to become a gentleman, which was almost impossible without money. It was a world where the Queen was ex-communicated by the roman Pope, where the Jews were unjustly kicked out of England (by the end of the 13th Century all Jews had been deported from England), where Catholics were publicly and brutally executed, where people died of the bubonic plague, and where women were burnt for the crime of witchcraft and magic. It is a great introduction to that era for those not familiar with it.There were some amusing parts I really enjoyed. For example, I found myself laughing at the playwright’s relationship with Robert Greene (discussed as a chief source for the character of Falstaff). Those passages were really entertaining.For a man who succeeded in writing such beautiful love prose, it seemed that his life was lacking of love. Shakespeare (1564-1616) was 18 and his wife, Anne Hathaway, 26 when they got married in November of 1582. By the time he was twenty-one he had three children. He married her because she was pregnant. For the times, he was considered to be underage. In most likelihood Shakespeare did not love his wife. He bequeathed her only his “second best bed” in his will, after more than thirty years of marriage!Were his sonnets written to a male lover? Homosexuality was accepted at the time. Since man was considered superior to women it was not surprising to anyone if men fell in love with each other. It was also the custom at the time that no writer ever wrote love sonnets to his wife. Most writers wrote of the hellish enterprise of marriage. Some, like Francis Bacon, refused to marry.We learn much about his father. The author analyzes Shakespeare’s father’s rise and fall as a public figure in Stratford. At one point his father went bankrupt, and his dreams of ever getting the `coat of arms’ vanished. However, with Shakespeare’s success and fortune, the `coat of arms’ was bought.We learn about Christopher Marlowe, the most prominent playwright of the time, who died in a bar fight at age 30. Some say he might have been a spy. Shakespeare was inspired by his play Tamberlane, and wanted to equal or surpass him. Marlowe was thus an inspiration to Shakespeare.Surprisingly, actors were seen as whores and vagabonds. Shakespeare wanted to be a gentleman. He paid later for the coat of arms with money earned from his theatre in order to gain the status of gentleman. Costumes were very important and very expensive, and the playwright’s most important assets. Actors were allowed to wear them only on stage else be arrested for impersonating gentlemen.After roughly twenty years in London, Shakespeare finally returned to Stratford and the family he had left behind. His wish was to live with his daughter and her husband, and his grandchild.Shakespeare was a master at the ability to use words to question power, authority and evil. He had a rich vocabulary and had invented many words. He borrowed a lot from real life and other sources, but his words were unique. He went to court and witnessed executions, held a skull in his hand in a cemetery and wondered who this man could have been and what clothes he wore.Some suspect that all the works attributed to Shakespeare weren’t really by him. However this was not addressed by the author. Greenblatts seems confident of the authenticity of Shakespeare’s authorship. (Shakespeare wrote 39 plays that scholars know of between 1590 and 1613 including a play that was lost and 154 sonnets.)Until his death at the age of 52, Shakespeare wrote The Merchant of Venice, Romeo and Juliet, All’s Well That Ends Well, Othello, Coriolanus, Julius Caesar, The Two Gentlemen of Verona, The Taming of the Shrew, Titus Andronicus, Much Ado About Nothing, and The Winter’s Tale. Some of the plays were actually co-authored by other writers.One reviewer writes the following very enlightening comment I thought I must include: “In the jungles of Yucatan, our mystical guide, Pepe, opined that most, if not all, very successful individuals were visitors from outer space who rose above the strivings of ordinary earthlings because of their extraterrestrial powers. Pepe’s explanation is most tempting when one seeks to comprehend how an Elizabethan playwright and poet, Will Shakespeare, so far eclipsed every mere earthling before or since the time he visited our planet. But if one isn’t satisfied with Pepe’s facile philosophy of greatness, read Stephen Greenblatt’s masterful biography, Will in the World. He comes closer than the thousands of previous biographers and commentators to a recreation of Shakespeare in the Elizabethan setting, and his outstanding accomplishment may lead some of us to believe that he, too, is an extraterrestrial.”For Shakespeare, all the world did become a stage!

⭐The focus of this biography of Shakespeare is to show what experiences – personal, literary, social, political, religious – have gone into the making of Shakespeare’s plays, and with what brilliance he transformed such raw material with his own genius.Greenblatt provides is an immense bibliography, and I cannot tell how original this work is. Many of the facts in the book will be well-known to Shakespeare enthusiasts. But I can say that Greenblatt’s arguments and analyses are stimulating, though, in my opinion, they rest far too much on “may be”s. At any rate, we learn a lot about the political and social background of Elizabethan England.In the first chapter, in the absence of enough hard information about his childhood and adolescence, there is much about the morality and mystery plays that “he would have” or “must have” seen during that period of his life, interesting though Greenblatt’s description of such occasions is. He “may have seen” or “may have heard of” the lavish entertainment the Earl of Leicester laid on for Queen Elizabeth at Kenilworth, not far from Stratford, in 1575 when Shakespeare was eleven; but the link Greenblatt makes between that entertainment and the analysis of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”, twenty years later, is quite superb.The second chapter deals with Shakespeare’s “lost years” after he left school at the age of 14 or 15. During this time his father, John, who had become bailiff (mayor) of Stratford in 1568, sank into penury, partly due, “possibly”, to alcoholism – and Greenblatt links this to references to alcohol (especially in a father-figure like Falstaff) in his plays. (Later in the book, Greenblatt shows convincingly the extent to which Falstaff was modelled on Robert Greene, that larger-than- life, gross, sleazy and low-living poet who had looked down on Shakespeare when he first won success as a playwright, and who had left that scathing description of Shakespeare as an “upstart crow” beautified with the feathers of the circle of poets known as the university wits. That whole passage on Falstaff is quite brilliant.)There is more speculation about those “lost years”. As bailiff (mayor) of Stratford, John Shakespeare had given orders, following government policy, to destroy Catholic images in the local churches; but in the 18th century a “spiritual testament” was discovered hidden in the rafters of his house, in which affirmed his belief in Catholicism. Was his son aware of this? Did William also have a secret connection with Catholicism? There is a story that during the “lost years” he was tutor in a Lancashire Catholic family which also was patron to a group of actors – was this how William came to become an actor himself? Greenblatt tells us at length of Shakespeare’ possible stay in Lancashire and of his “possible” meeting there with the charismatic Jesuit Edmund Campion – only to conclude that there is no evidence in his plays of any such influence.Shakespeare hastily married the already pregnant Anne Hathaway in 1582, and there are reflections in his plays both of impatient courtships and of loveless marriages. Greenblatt brings arguments to show that the latter may was true of this one: Shakespeare left Anne behind in Stratford when he moved to London; no love letters to her have ever been found, nor does he portray trusting and happy marriages in his plays. The only exceptions of genuine love – and grim they are – are those between Claudius and Gertrude in Hamlet and between Macbeth and Lady Macbeth.More speculations follow on why Shakespeare left for London in the mid-1580s, probably already part of a group of travelling actors he had joined in the provinces. Greenblatt dismisses the story (but only after telling it at length) that he had got into trouble for poaching deer from the estate of the local Sir Thomas Lucy. Lucy was also a ruthless persecutor of Catholic plotters, and had been instrumental in the execution of a relative of Shakespeare’s mother. Perhaps the Shakespeare family might be within his sight, and perhaps that is why William left Stratford for London.. When he arrived in that huge city, what “must have” struck him most was the terrifying and lawless mob, which figures in so many of his plays – in London itself in 2 Henry VI (Jack Cade’s rebellion), but also in Rome (Julius Caesar) and in other cities.Shakespeare’s sonnets are both the most personal and intimate verses he ever wrote and also deliberately evasive in yielding the identity of the persons to whom they refer. Greenblatt guides us through them in what I found the most difficult chapter of the book.On what experience might Shakespeare have drawn in his portrait of Shylock in The Merchant of Venice, first performed in 1605? One would have been the popularity of the Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta, first performed in 1592, which portrays Barabas as one-dimensionally malevolent Jew. But Shylock is not one-dimensional: for all the comedy of his distress at losing his daughter and his ducats, Shakespeare manages to endow Shylock with feelings that should evoke from the audience some of the compassion he himself must have felt for the character.Greenblatt’s discussion of Hamlet – a turning point in Shakespeare’s plays – is full of interesting ideas. I would single out Shakespeare’s continuing belief in Purgatory from which the ghost of old Hamlet appears to his son – this although the Protestants had dismissed all ideas of purgatory or ghosts as Catholic superstitions. We are reminded of the “spiritual testament” (see above) in which Shakespeare’s father John besought his family to help shorten his time in Purgatory. Both John, who was now seriously ill, and William Shakespeare’s son Hamnet, who had had just died would need such help; and John “may well have urged” William to pay for masses for the child; if so, Greenblatt has no idea of William’s response.There are illuminating comments on Othello and King Lear, but, apart from saying that earlier versions of these plays by other authors were transformed by Shakespeare’s genius, there is no indication of what personal experiences might have contributed to the se plays. Elements of Macbeth (1606), however, seem to be transformed from a pageant staged for Janes I on his visit to Oxford in 1605, which Shakespeare “must have seen or heard about”. In this pageant James I had been shown as descended from Banquo, and Shakespeare also plays on James’ published belief in witchcraft.Finally, in the figure of the magician Prospero in The Tempest, who gives up “his “potent art”, we get something like a self-portrait of Shakespeare on the brink of retirement. Greenblatt has a fine analysis of the meaning of Prospero/Shakespeare’s renunciation. It is an irony that “the great globe itself” – the Globe Theatre – was “dissolved” – burnt to the ground – in 1613, soon after Shakespeare had returned to Stratford. The “insubstantial pageant” had faded.

⭐Biographies of Shakespeare that are both enthralling and (relatively) fiction-free are understandably rare. When done well, however, they add exhilarating new dimensions. Greenblatt’s Will in the World joins Bate’s Soul of the Age as a scholarly and inspiring contender for the ‘definitive’ biography for our times prize. Readers looking for a biography that does more than simply retread the familiar documentary path and which tries to find some compelling connection between the life and work should take note.This biography is particularly valuable for the light it sheds on the ‘university wits’ that Shakespeare would have encountered in London at the end of the 1580s, and for the possible influence upon his work that such a dangerous, talented, élitist and arrogant coterie may have had. Chief amongst these writers were Nashe, Peele, Watson, Marlowe and, above all, Robert Greene. Ever sensitive to slights Shakespeare, as a non-university man and a ‘base’ actor, may well have felt excluded from such company. In any case, Greenblatt speculates that Greene’s slighting reference to Shakespeare (as an ‘upstart crow beautified with our feathers’) may have been the result of a death-bed request for money from the Stratford man. Such a request, he conjectures, was declined, hence the barbed comment in his posthumously published pamphlet. More interestingly still, Greenblatt than goes on to suggest that Shakespeare’s ultimate revenge on Greene was not so much Polonius’ jibe in Hamlet (‘beautified is a vile phrase’) as the character creation of Falstaff which, based primarily on the larger-than-life Greene himself, helped cement Shakespeare’s reputation as the pre-eminent playwright of his day, eclipsing all of the university wits – most of whom had met violent or squalidly impovershed ends by 1595 anyway.Greenblatt extends Jonathan Bate’s idea (outlined in The Genius of Shakespeare, 1998) that Shakespeare deliberately diluted the motivation of characters he took from his sources in order to make his characters more enigmatic and kaleidoscopic. This ‘excision of motive’ and the creation of the ‘dark hole’ within the core of protagonists like Othello and Hamlet and within the action of King Lear, he thinks, led to the emergence of a new kind of character and a new kind of theatre. The great tragedies expressed Shakespeare’s understanding of what should be said and what should be left unsaid. Shakespeare’s preference was for opacity and untidiness, not neatness or resolution.More objective biographies – like those of Park Honan and Samuel Schoenbaum – are worthy enough, but this one convincingly puts flesh on those all too bare bones in the crypt at Holy Trinity.

⭐I would agree with the reviews above. This is a very fine book that would serve anyone apporoaching a serious engagement with Shakespeare’s play for the first time very well indeed.Greenblatt is a major figure in late 20th century criticism, with his ‘Renaissance Self-Fashioning’ being a foundation text of the much vaunted (and to my mind highly necessary) New Historicist perspective.It’s good to see that the chapter of this book that focuses on Hamlet draws deeply on Greenblatt’s book ‘Hamlet in Purgatory’ which shows the depth of Greenblatt’s perception of the 16th century mind.This is a very refreshingly unsentimental biography of Shakespeare. Sound textual evidence and common sense readings illuminate the probable reality of the greatest writer Western civilization has ever produced: a lovless marriage, a cheery father seeking refuge in drink as his business collapsed; a homoerotic relationship with a young arisotcrat; a sound businessman with an eye to his retirement; a retired writer seeking refuge in the complexities and disappointments of his daughter’s marriage.I do have a real love for Michael Wood’s command of detail and his boundless enthusiasm – (Grenblatt’s spare but superb bibliography gives Wood a distinct nod) but this is the work of a critic at the pinnacle of his skill, and is a masterly act of synthesis. Given to a receptive reader, this book could trigger a lifetime enthusiasm for the ‘real’ Shakespeare.

⭐Greenblatt’s approach is to take the life of Shakespeare, about which we know so much less than we’d like to, and allow himself to speculate, based on his knowledge of the times and Shakespeare’s works, in order to flesh out the bare-bones story.In some cases this works, in others it doesn’t. For me the most exciting chapters dealt with Shakespeare’s being involved in the pellmell world of Elizabethan playwriting. When Shakespeare arrived in London to begin his career as a writer, he found himself caught up in a revolution in stage-craft, led by a group of Oxford wits, foremost among them being Marlowe, the inventor of the “mighty line”. Greenblatt speculates on how Shakespeare, not university educated, would have fit in with this crowd first as an interesting newcomer, then as something of an upstart whose talent offended those (like Robert Greene) who were so obviously inferior to him.A chapter that didn’t work for me, on the other hand, was the one on Shakespeare’s marriage. Greenblatt concludes, from evidence in the plays, that Shakespeare’s marriage was an unhappy one. The trouble is, to make his point, Greenblatt has to ignore any alternative interpretations, and so although he admits he is speculating, there is no real feel that he is covering all the options. For instance, Greenblatt damns Shakespeare’s infamous final will (in which he leaves his wife his second-best bed), without considering the alternative interpretation that this was a common occurrence for the time, the second-best bed being the one they had shared throughout their married life, as the best one was left for guests.This is certainly not an exhaustive survey of Shakespeare’s life. It stands back and considers Shakespeare the man, focusing only on those details which throw light on certain aspects of his character. This makes it a good read to add to other readings about Shakespeare, but certainly not “the best one-volume life of Shakespeare yet”, as quoted on the cover.

⭐This isn’t really a straight-forward biography of Shakespeare – it’s more an attempt to tease out biographical details from the plays themselves, more what the plays tell us about the man than what details we know about the man himself. This is very much one author’s personal interpretation, as more Shakespearean scholarship is, despite what many academics might claim. But it’s engaging and very readable, even if there is a lot of ‘Shakespeare must have’ and ‘almost certainly Shakespeare…’ but that’s par for the course in this field. I can’t say you know a huge amount more about Shakespeare at the end of this, but one thing it does do well is bring to light the various themes in his plays that Shakespeare came back to again and again – father-daughter relationships, questions of identity, rebellion. Definitely worth reading, and it’s not often I read non-fiction more than once!

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