Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare

by Stephen Greenblatt

Named One of Esquire 's 50 Best Biographies of All Time

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. 23 illustrations

Genres: Biography, Nonfiction, History, Shakespeare, Literature, Literary Criticism, Biography Memoir

438 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2004

About the author

Stephen Greenblatt (Ph.D. Yale) is Cogan University Professor of English and American Literature and Language at Harvard University. Also General Editor of The Norton Anthology of English Literature, Eighth Edition, he is the author of nine books, including Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare; Hamlet in Purgatory; Practicing New Historicism; Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World; Learning to Curse: Essays in Early Modern Culture; and The Swerve: How the World Became Modern. He has edited six collections of criticism, is the co-author (with Charles Mee) of a play, Cardenio, and is a founding coeditor of the journal Representations. He honors include the MLA's James Russell Lowell Prize, for Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England, the Distinguished Humanist Award from the Mellon Foundation, the Distinguished Teaching Award from the University of California, Berkeley. He is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society. He lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and in Vermont.

Stephen Jay Greenblatt is a Pulitzer Prize winning American literary critic, theorist and scholar.

Greenblatt is regarded by many as one of the founders of New Historicism, a set of critical practices that he often refers to as "cultural poetics"; his works have been influential since the early 1980s when he introduced the term. Greenblatt has written and edited numerous books and articles relevant to new historicism, the study of culture, Renaissance studies and Shakespeare studies and is considered to be an expert in these fields. He is also co-founder of the literary-cultural journal Representations, which often publishes articles by new historicists. His most popular work is Will in the World, a biography of Shakespeare that was on the New York Times Best Seller List for nine weeks.

Reviews

[Jeffrey Keeten · Rating 4 out of 5]

”To understand who Shakespeare was, it is important to follow the verbal traces he left behind back into the life he lived and into the world to which he was so open. And to understand how Shakespeare used his imagination to transform his life into his art, it is important to use our own imagination.”



There is no doubt he is an enigma, a man who quite possibly has had the greatest influence on the English language, and yet, strangely enough left very little personal correspondence behind. It does seem like a man so gifted with words would have left behind mounds of letters, diaries, and journals. If they did exist, they are long gone, burned, or buried, or wrapped around a fish for a servant girl, or used to make bindings for books. It is interesting to think of a Shakespeare letter bound up in a book that is valued at a fraction of what his handwriting, hidden in the binding, would be worth.

It is as if Shakespeare erased himself, leaving only his monumental plays behind.

He married young, too young, to a much older woman. It was not a happy marriage from what we know. Much has been made of him leaving her the second best bed in his will. He had three children: Susanna, Hamnet, and Judith. The later two were twins. Hamnet died at eleven. Hamnet = Hamlet, quite possibly that play is the greatest ode ever written to a lost son. Like all of the various aspects of life that Shakespeare observed or experienced, even the untimely and devastating death of his son, all of it, every scrap of it, contributed and influenced the stories the bard decided to tell.


Would Hamnet have grown up to be as tortured as Hamlet?

”He heard things in the sounds of words that others did not hear; he made connections that others did not make; and he was flooded with a pleasure all his own.”

I can only imagine the frustration that he must have felt being trapped in a marriage with a woman who could not even read the words he wrote. He left his family in Stratford while he went to London to be an actor. Some things can not be denied, and words must have been bubbling up in him like an overheated cauldron. Christopher Marlowe was born in the same year as Shakespeare. He was college educated, though his degree seems to have been obtained with some help from Sir Francis Walsingham. He had everything that Shakespeare wanted, an education, debonair good looks, and a genius for playwriting.

As it turned out, Shakespeare had the most important one of the three.

Marlowe’s influence on Shakespeare was profound. ”Marlowe was the only one of the university wits whose talent Shakespeare might have seriously envied, whose aesthetic judgment he might have feared, whose admiration he might have earnestly wanted to win, and whose achievements he certainly attempted to equal and outdo.”

I do wonder what would have happened if Marlowe had lived another ten to twenty years. Would Shakespeare have become Shakespeare? Would he have conceded the field to Marlowe? Would the competition have made him an even better playwright? I have to believe it was lucky for Shakespeare that Marlowe exited life at the tender age of 29. I certainly wouldn’t like to take a chance with an alternative history.


Christopher Marlowe

Robert Greene, a fellow scribbler, called Shakespeare the ”upstart crow” which gives us an idea of an ambitious young man shouldering his way to the top. He took off like a bolt of lightning writing plays that had his competitors dumbfounded, and had his audiences awestruck.

Stephen Greenblatt did not directly talk about the speculation that has swirled around Shakespeare for several hundred years, but the entire book could be considered an attempt to refutiate any thoughts that Shakespeare was merely a beard for someone else. Societies to support one or another claimant have been created by people who are positive that Francis Bacon, Christopher Marlowe, or Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford were the true authors of Shakespeare’s plays.



Marlowe was a trickster, a spy, a counterfeiter, but it would still be quite the clever prank to become Shakespeare with a dagger protruding from his eye. All three of the leading candidates to be “the true Shakespeare” are brilliant, fascinating men in their own right. They are famous without being Shakespeare. The odor lingering in the air like the dog fart smell that comes from that fat, slobbering pug at Grandmother’s house is the most foul stench of people who can’t believe that an undereducated lad from Stratford could write these plays. He has been weighed, and measured, and found wanting.

They are of course forgetting about one thing.

Exceptional intellectual or creative power or other natural ability.
synonyms:
brilliance, intelligence, intellect, ability, cleverness, brains, erudition,wisdom, fine mind;
artistry, flair
"the world knew of his genius"
talent, gift, flair, aptitude, facility, knack, bent, ability, expertise,capacity, faculty;
strength, forte, brilliance, skill, artistry

Okay, I’m going to name the white elephant in the room. HE WAS A GENIUS. Maybe he didn’t have the most perfect credentials to become SHAKESPEARE, but he had the right brain. He remembered everything he saw and heard and he was able to bring it all together and use it to make his stories more than what anyone had ever experienced before. They were authentic, personal, and incorporated new concepts that made the audience feel like they knew the characters in the same way they knew the pretty girl next door or their own grandfather or the smiling butcher down the street. He placed his audience in the plays.He changed the world and with every new generation he continues to influence, teach, and elevate.

He left his family because “there was something important within him”. What a tragedy it would have been if he had stayed in Stratford due to familial obligations. He might have been a glover like his father. He might have lived on the verge of bankruptcy his whole life like his father. He might have strangled his wife and hanged. :-) He would have been a miserable, unfulfilled man nagged by a voice, a muse unused, who would whisper words of encouragement until the bitter end.

Unlike his generation of writers he was frugal with his money in London and invested wisely in real estate. I too dabble in real estate so I always find it fascinating to read about his purchases and the sometimes convoluted ways the mortgage notes are written. He bought his dream home in Stratford, a house called New Place with room for an expansive garden and a guest cottage. He died in 1616 only a few years after retiring completely from the stage. It was as if he’d strayed too far from what had always sustained him.


New Place, Stratford

Though there is too little known about Shakespeare, Stephen Greenblatt has written a very readable evaluation that examines what we know about the man, and what we know about the times. Greenblatt convinced me that the clues to knowing Shakespeare are all there to be found coming from the lips of his greatest characters.

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[Meredith Holley · Rating 1 out of 5]

I never thought this would happen to me, but while I was reading this book, I actually had a sense of nostalgia for Harold Bloom.

A woman I work with forced this book on me with the guarantee that I would adore it. I later found out that she "hates music like the Velvet Underground." It's always people like that who are forcing book recommendations. Not that there are "people like that" who hate the Velvet Underground. I have a lot of faith that she is an isolated case.

This book pretty much hit on every single thing I ever hate about books. I know other people have said the writing was engaging, but I have to disagree. One sentence was just a list of the types of businesses that existed in London in the late 16th century. The businesses were grouped together in a way that let the author use some semi-colons, and it seemed pretty clear to me that the whole purpose of the sentence was so that he could show he knew how to use semi-colons. If that is not the case, and the editors had to put those semi-colons in, well . . . god help us all.

I think this book should be classified as historical fiction because every sentence is about how "maybe this happened" or "if . . . then Shakespeare could have thought." There is a whole chapter devoted to speculating about whether Shakespeare had a happy marriage based on the marriages in his plays. !!!! That makes me so mad!!

Here's what I would read: a book that compiles the documentary history related to Shakespeare and has a short explanation of what the document is. I would be fine with that. Speculation is so infuriating.

I was dating this guy recently, and he only used the word "film" for "movie," which drives me crazy. And then one day, he asked me if I wanted to go have a "romp in the sack," so I decided we should not go out anymore. This is the book version of the phrase "romp in the sack."

I am judging the soul of both this book and anyone who is passionate about it. As to people who feel pretty neutral about it, you are okay, I will just assume the History of Elizabethan England class you took in college was only a survey.

[Ярослава]

Почалося передзамовлення мого перекладу "Бард і його світ. Як Шекспір став Шекспіром" Стівена Ґрінблатта, прекрасної біографії й тонкого аналізу кількох основних творів Шекспіра пера гарвардського професора, лауреата Пулітцерівської і Національної книжкової премії. Я багато років фанатака Ґрінблатта, тож перебуваю в ейфорії, що вдалося з цим попрацювати.

Що ми достеменно знаємо про Шекспіра (людину, а не автора): коли він не платив податки. Коли купував нерухомість. Де здобув освіту (доволі скромну), коли взяв шлюб (рано навіть за мірками свого часу), коли в нього народилися діти, коли поховав сина. Які були його пенсійні плани. Жменька скупих фактів, дат і цифр, здебільшого з царини майнових стосунків, які не пояснюють найважливішого: як Шекспір став Шекспіром.

Чого ми не знаємо про Шекспіра: у що вірив, і чи вірив хоч у щось - в епоху, коли дрібні питання віри могли звістувати страшну смерть. Кого любив (очевидно, не дружину, якій у заповіті спершу не лишає нічого, а потім, подумавши, додає - лишаю ліжко, тільки не найкраще, а друге за якістю). Чого боявся, що не давало йому спати ночами. Про що думав, дивлячись у безлюдну й нелюдську вічність попереду - англіканська церква, на відміну від католицтва, не визнає Чистилища, яке лишало зв’язок з твоїми померлими. І, врешті, не знаємо, як юнак у світі, що загалом не сприяв соціальній і територіальній мобільності, покинув рідні околиці, де перед тим народжувалися, вікували вік і помирали довгі покоління його предків, відмовився від ремесла, успадкованого від батька (хоча потребував стабільності, адже вже мусив годувати родину), вирушив світ за очі, прибився до театру і став однією з чільних постатей тодішньої дуже конкурентної індустрії розваг - і найвидатнішим драматургом в історії.

Стівен Ґрінблатт, професор Гарвардського університету, фахівець з англійської літератури доби ��енесансу, засновник нового історизму (мега-впливового підходу, за якого текст розглядають як продукт зокрема історичних, владних і культурних сил епохи, а отже, він стає ключем до широкої інтелектуальної історії доби), дуже талановитий оповідач, лауреат Пулітцерівської премії і загалом рок-зірка від літературознавства, бере цю жменю достеменно відомих фактів, а далі дозаповнює картину панорамою тієї драматичної епохи, пов’язуючи “Венеційського купця” зі стратою особистого лікаря королеви Єлизавети, “Гамлета” зі зміною уявлень про потойбіччя при переході з католицтва до англіканства - і таке інше. Тонкий літературознавчий аналіз сонетів і драм поєднується з історією культури й політики того часу. Звичайно, у випадку біографії Шекспіра ми досить швидко впираємося в межі знаного, але гіпотетичні можливі сценарії дають краще зрозуміти світ, з якого він вийшов - і який підкорив.

А що то був за світ!
Темний світ параної й доносів, нічних обшуків і допитів з тортурами, театру жорстокості. Англію потрясала тривога: а що, як неприкаяна молодь радикалізуватиметься, проходитиме вишколи в таборах для бойовиків на континенті й повертатиметься в країну вчиняти теракти - йдеться, звичайно, про англійських католиків, які зазнавали утисків на батьківщині і мали дозвіл папи на вбивство королеви. Ми не знаємо, що було з Шекспіром протягом кількох років між завершенням школи і одруженням, і це відкриває простір для різних гіпотез - зокрема про те, що він міг вчителювати в одному з католицьких кланів, де познайомився і з театром, і зі шпигунськими іграми.

Яскравий світ видовиськ, коли в Лондоні одночасно збирається неймовірна когорта талановитих гульвіс і авантюристів, що назавжди змінять обриси літературних ландшафтів - не тільки Шекспір, а й Крістофер Мало, Джон Донн та інші. Містом котиться не тільки чума, а й літературні моди - зокрема на публічні театри, що тоді починають з’являтися в Лондоні вперше з римських часів. Королі полюють на відьом - але стають щедрими покровителями мистецтва.

Шекспір жив у світі, де старі ритуали, що надавали життю сенс і давали змогу примиритися зі смертністю, опинилися поза законом і перетворилися з підтримки на загрозу, а нові ритуали ще не пустили корені. Тож для нього пояснювальною структурою, яка виправдовує владу, життя і посмертя, стає натомість театр. Це театральні видовиська влади, а не божа воля чи щось подібне, легітимізують суспільний устрій. Це театр, а не церква, дає змогу спілкуватися з мертвими. А що більшість нас, нинішніх глядачів і глядачок, читачів і читачок, живе у світі зруйнованих ритуалів під порожніми небесами, намагаючись сконструювати значення з успадкованих уламків, це робить Шекспіра дуже сучасним.

А щоб не завершувати на такій ноті - хай любов перемагає смерть - скажу, що в “Бард і його світ” страше-е-енно милий розділ про сонети, це тепер мій улюблений історичний любовний роман. Отже, ми не знаємо, хто стоїть за образами вродливого юнака і смаглявої пані з сонетів. Але один з кандидатів на роль юнака - Генрі Райотслі (чи Ризлі, чи Райзлі, чи Рацлі - нема консенсусу, як у ті часи вимовляли прізвище Wriothesley), третій граф Саутгемптон, якого опікун тоді якраз переконував одружитися, а то він його оштрафує. Граф Саутгемптон такий: женитися не хочу, а на гроші начхати, в мене їх кури не клюють, я на культурне дозвілля більше профукаю. Й опікун такий: ...точно, культурне дозвілля. Найму-но поета, щоб той писав пропаганду про користь одруження. Так з’являється вірш про вродливого юнака, який любить тільки себе і через це гине - “Нарцис” Джона Клепгема. А ви вже на Шекспіра подумали?
Так от, Шекспір точно знайомий з Саутгемптоном і присвячує йому поему “Венера й Адоніс”, а ще в той же час пише сонети, в яких переконує невідомого юнака одружитися - тож є певна ймовірність, що адресат сонетів якраз Саутгемптон. Переконує одружитися, замиловано розхвалюючи не потенційну наречену, а вроду самого юнака, «коротких днів окрасу нетривалу», яку той мусить передати нащадкам і лишити у вічності. Але щось іде не так, і ось уже саме ці любовні вірші - а не якесь абстрактне продовження роду - починають поставати як те, що збереже цю вроду для вічності: “В моїх словах ти не підвладний смерті ... В моїх словах ти житимеш, повір”. (Брехав, звісно: дослідницька братія он досі не знає й не дізнається, кому це адресовано, тож яка ж тут вічність.)
(А Саутгемптон потім таки одружиться, а ще вчинить державну зраду й ледь не втратить голову. Ми не знаємо, що відчував Шекспір, коли його театр опинився трошки втягнутим у спробу перевороту - але знаємо, що він писав тоді. Але це вже геть інша історія.)

[Darwin8u · Rating 4 out of 5]

“Everyone understood that Latin learning was inseparable from whipping. One educational theorist of the time speculated that the buttocks were created in order to facilitate the learning of Latin.”
― Stephen Greenblatt, Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare



Every historian, critic, author or amateur who starts a book on William Shakespeare knows they are facing tremendous odds. Shakespeare was private, lived 400+ years ago, left very few written records about himself, and those things he did leave are often ambiguous. Writing a book about him is like writing a serious book about Moses, Jesus or Kubla Khan. Separating the myth from the man and the man from his work is a full-time, and nearly quixotic gig.

So, how do you write a book about the most important and imaginative writer EVER? Probably just how Greenblatt did. You use what you have. You speculate when you must. You utilize textual analysis to tease out what Shakespeare might have been like using his plays as peep-stones. You jump to historical analysis to tease out what was going on around him. You build a narrative with all the spare details to try to understand the man and even occasionally try to understand some of his major literary pieces. You compare Shakespeare to his contemporaries. You know his plays like almost nobody else. And then... you just go for it.

Anyway, Greenblatt did an amazing job. He was academic, but wrote for a general audience. He wasn't bombastic, or greedy. He was open, casual and let the Shakespeare's story that was there speak for itself. I'm not sure if I liked this book or The Swerve better. They are both worth the time and Shakespeare is definitely worth the effort.

[Karen· · Rating 5 out of 5]

As any fule kno, 'twas Ben Jonson who famously said of his friend Mr William Shakespeare that he was "not of an age but for all time". Which bon mot is trotted out regularly, not least by yours truly when guiding German high school students through the vagaries of Macbeth: after all, you have to try to persuade them that the fate of an eleventh century Scottish king could, possibly, have some relevance to a twenty first century audience. So what do you do? Well, you emphasise the universal, of course. The Big Themes. Ambition, Fate, Remorse, Nihilism. Self-fulfilling prophecies, irony, how far are we masters of our own fate, and how far are we puppets in the hands of forces beyond our control? The Nature of Evil. Is Lady Macbeth in cahoots with the Weird Sisters? Or does her evil spring from her own foul nature?
What distinguished Harvard Professor Greenblatt does here is to take Mr William Shakespeare out of that bubble, out of that vacuum of universal truth. He draws our national poet down, down from the cloudy heights of universal genius and plants him firmly back on the ground, in his time. Of an age.
This is not to diminish Shakespeare in any way, this New Historicism or whatever fancy label you want to stick on Professor Greenblatt's magnificent work does not reduce Shakespeare's opus, but rather opens up rich new seams of interpretation. Examining the swirling currents that stormed around the restless genius, the paranoia about plots to murder good Queen Bess, the risks of recusancy, the recklessness of his rivals, the innovations in theatrical design, the Scottish King's troubled relationship with witches (to mention but a few) Prof Greenblatt then traces how they are reflected in Shakespeare's work. Under any other circumstances, I would be feeling queasy at the very suggestion that we can, or ever should read the man through the fictional work he produced. But Professor Greenblatt has such a depth of knowledge, both of the age and of Shakespeare's work, and, what's more, such a seductively supple, sinuous style, that any tendency to carp at the many speculative maybes and perhapses and it's possible thats and of course we can't knows was soon banished, lost in the warm flow of seamlessly informative, elegantly phrased argumentation. I was utterly convinced, in particular, for example, by the best reasoning I have ever read as to why Mr WS should have written sonnets urging the Earl of Southampton to fulfil the destiny of his own incredible beauty by passing it on to the next generation.
This was the perfect antidote to the emptiness and melancholy left at the departure of the near and dear, travelling back to their home that is more than 6,000 kilometres and five time zones away. Trouble is, I've finished it. What now? The Swerve: How the World Became Modern, a fortiori now that I have experienced such an engrossing bath of warm light that does not dazzle, but glows.

[Riku Sayuj · Rating 5 out of 5]

Possibly as far away from the reality of Shakespeare's life as any silly fairy tale, but highly readable and a wonderful companion to reading the plays.

Full review (maybe) later.

[Kelly · Rating 3 out of 5]

I think the theory of Shakespeare that he's espousing is a little far fetched. I'm just going to put it out there. The way he gets from argument to argument is 'well, this probably didn't happen... but what if it /did/.... then this would be true...' and then he'll go on to spout some more historical facts that would then fall into place of that was true. So, as an academic argument? I don't find this book particularly strong.

However. There is a lot of information here about the life of Shakespeare, presented in a readable, enjoyable, intriguing format. I am in favor of anything that gets people reading Shakespeare. I got through it in a week, very easily. Logical flaws aside, it does make for interesting reading. Even if it doesn't convince you of the truth. I really enjoyed going through it. It helped me to formulate some of my own ideas about the effect of Shakespeare's life on his writings. There are a few minor ideas presented that I found intriguing as well. If you like 'what if' books, historical fiction, or you're into shakespeare, this book is for you.

[Trevor · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book could have been (perhaps even should have been) so much worse than it turned out. Even stating the premise sends a shiver down my spine. The premise is, “How about we speculate on the life and loves of Shakespeare on the basis of the evidence we can find in his plays, poems and sonnets!” You can feel it can't you? It is like the shiver you get from a wind blowing off snow.

If I’d guessed the book was going to be about such speculations I would never have started it. I mean, I would just as likely start a book called, ‘At Last, the Real Shakespeare Uncovered’.

But this turned out to be much better than it had a right to be. Admittedly, once I started my expectations were pretty low and so maybe it is hardly surprising that my expectations were exceeded. All the same, there were bits of this book that really were quite special and have made me think about Shakespeare’s plays in ways I’ve never considered before.

I’ve always known two facts about early 17th century England, but never really thought about how those facts fit together – and I really should have. Those two facts are these: 1. Shakespeare wrote a play called MacBeth in which a King is murdered at least in part due to the supernatural intervention of a group of three witches and 2. that James the first had around twenty witches killed shortly after his marriage due to the part they played in causing a storm off the coast of Denmark that stopped his bride to be coming over the sea to marry him.

That James the first was a Scottish king, that he was obsessed with witches, and that Shakespeare’s theatre company was known as The King’s Men (because the King was their patron), makes those two little facts rather compelling.

Is it any wonder that he has one of his nice wee female characters of noble birth say to one of his ill-willed busy-body puritans in one of his plays, “There is no slander in an allowed fool, though he do nothing but rail; nor no railing in known discreet man, though he do nothing but reprove.” Clearly, Shakespeare saw himself as a bit of an allowed fool, but even so, thought it best to remind his ‘betters’ of the allowances that needed to be made in their relationship.

There are some lovely insights into life in Elizabethan (or Jacobean for that matter) England. In fact, I was thinking during this that a play based on James I and his life and times would be a fascinating thing. Do you remember the Monty Python episode in the last series with a Louis of France who could never remember his number and who spoke in a broad Glaswegian accent – well, James the first (or was it the sixth?) was a bit like that except he also spent much of his time either feeling up pretty young men or burning witches. I mean, if that isn’t material for a play, I’m not sure what is.

I figured this book was going to do better than three stars when he started talking about marriage in Shakespeare’s plays. He speculates that Anne Hathaway and William Shakespeare might not have had the most delightful of marriages. This is a fairly standard speculation, although Germaine Greer reaches nearly the exact opposite conclusion, I believe, on nearly exactly the same evidence. I’m not sure this is something we can do more than speculate on. All the same, the fact that there is hardly a single happy marriage depicted in any of the plays is interesting indeed. In fact, the fact that one of the few ‘successful’ marriages in the plays seems to be the one between the MacBeths does much to support his point. Not that successful marriages make for good drama. Well, not that I would know, of course (although I can personally attest to the rather striking relationship between an unsuccessful marriage and melodrama).

Greenblatt, to use a fairly common phrase, does cover his arse in his speculations. All the same, there is little doubt, for example, that he thinks the Sonnets were written for Southampton – and admittedly, he does build a fairly compelling case. He also builds an interesting case to suggest William's father was an alcoholic. But like everything else, it is important to have in the back of your mind a little voice saying, “we just don't know, we just don’t know” repeatedly, even during the most interesting of these speculations.

So, overall I did enjoy this book. There is lots of stuff in it I simply had never really heard before – the section on Jews in England (there were none), I did know, but there is lots of detail here I knew nothing about. I also had no idea that people used to kill cats and dogs at the first sign of plague and thereby unconsciously helped to spread it.

The best of this book are the parts where he talks about the grand themes that run through his plays and why Shakespeare might have had some of the preferences he demonstrates in his plays. This is a game I enjoy playing and love watching an expert at it. There is lots of interesting material here and Greenblatt does know his stuff. I quite enjoyed this book – which is much more than I expected from it. A pleasant surprise.

[Rhonda · Rating 1 out of 5]

"If Shakespeare wore shoes--and we have reason to suppose he did--he might have worn some like the ones in this picture."

I'm paraphrasing, but not by much. This is Greenblatt's own special brand of persiflage that drove Germaine Greer to write her excellent Shakespeare's Wife, so I guess this book was good for something.

Read Greer instead. On her way to responsible speculation about the character of Anne Hathaway, traditionally assumed to have been a millstone around her husband's neck--on no evidence whatsoever except the unremarkable (Greer explains why; so does Bill Bryson) bequest of his second-best bed--Greer creates a plausible phantom that might have been the poet--or not--and is a pleasure to contemplate.

[Sasha · Rating 5 out of 5]

I studied a lot of Shakespeare in college. I just like that guy. No one else can explore such huge themes so concisely and so beautifully, and I think he's the real deal.

And he's hard to biographize, partly because we famously don't know a ton about him, but also I think partly because he was just something special. Someone who wrote outside himself.

So, for example, in this terrific biography, Greenblatt points out that it's kinda weird that Shakespeare's son died and he appeared not to deal with it at all; he was writing some of his funniest comedies at the time. WTF, say people who would like there to be neat connections between things. And the answer isn't (I argue) that there's a big mystery that you should write your graduate thesis about. It's just that Shakespeare was a tremendous literary power and he wrote what he wrote.

Biographically speaking, there isn't much new in this book. If you knew that Shakespeare was sortof a dick, that he left his wife "the second-best bed," and that a lot of his sonnets were pretty gay, you won't get your world rocked here. But Greenblatt presents what we do know in a fun way. If you've read The Pulitzer-winning Swerve, you know what an engaging writer he is.

(Note: Greenblatt subscribes to the boring and unimportant conspiracy theory that Shakespeare was a "secret Catholic." He wasn't and no one cares.)

It's around chapter 9 for me that Will in the World moves from good to great, as Greenblatt gets into the serious analysis of Shakespeare's best works. His comparison in this chapter between Merchant of Venice and Marlowe's terrific, savage Jew of Malta is the best I've seen. The essays that follow on Othello, Hamlet and Lear are brilliant, and they elevate this whole book from fun to indispensable.

If you're looking to know more about Shakespeare, you are now considering the correct book.

[Bakunin · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a speculative biography of William Shakespeare which was quite enjoyable to read (especially since the Greenblatts sketch of the Shakespeares contemporary world is quite detailed and rich). Shakespeare found himself in a very volatile environment which had only recently been turned protestant and where many still practiced Catholicism in secret. London was perpetually ravaged by various diseases and plagues. There was no police force and the citys administration had a tough time keeping up with the pace at which the city was growing. Greenblatt paints quite a colorful picture of the period and one can see how a mind as fertile as Shakespeare managed to find material for his plays.

But what was riveting was how Greenblatt hypothesized Shakespeares writing process. One of Greenblatts main thesis is that Shakespeare perfected a certain style of writing which enabled him to explore the inner life of his characters. Shakespeare, in his later plays, to cut out the generic explanation for a characters actions. Why does Iago betray Othello? Why does Hamlet wait to so long to avenge his father? Shakespeare often found a story which he then turned into an interesting play by changing the motivation of the main characters.

All in a all an interesting book but a bit too tendentious to really be believable.

[Elizabeth · Rating 5 out of 5]

Brilliant! I have a feeling this will be in my top books of 2024. I knew very little about Shakespeare's life and a lot of what there is to know about Shakespeare is pieced together with slim historical evidence. However, there is enough to form a picture of Shakespeare and his family and there is certainly much context from Shakespeare's times that can help us understand him in his own world. Stephen Greenblatt does an amazing job of using Shakespeare's immediate world, the broader times he lived in, and his plays to form a robust and yet mysterious sense of Shakespeare the man and Shakespeare the genius artist. From the very first chapter about the world of Stratford with its agricultural and church rhythms to the final chapter with Shakespeare's contemplations about aging and retirement in plays like King Lear and The Tempest, I was enthralled.

In the chapters after Shakespeare's early years and early marriage, Greenblatt examines one or two plays in more detail in each chapter as a way to explore the delicate interchange between an artist's life and his work. In one particularly memorable chapter, Greenblatt discusses the death of both Shakespeare's father (quite a character on his own) and his son Hamnet and thinks about how grief surfaced in later plays, especially in Hamlet. There was also a fascinating chapter on the religious climate of Shakespeare's young life with the bitter struggle between Catholic and Protestant. There seems to be evidence that John Shakespeare, William's father, was Catholic and remained so even after Elizabeth I put stringent measures in place to ensure Protestant supremacy in England. Greenblatt suggests that Shakespeare wrestled with the brutal removal of Catholic ritual all his life, including when it came to mourning his father and son. So thought provoking.

I'm so grateful for the many ah-ha moments I had while reading this, both about Shakespeare's plays and about the history at the time. For example, one of my huge ah-ha moments was learning about the trial of Rodrigo Lopez, Elizabeth I's personal physician, who was tried for treason and killed. He was thought to be a Portuguese Jew who converted to Protestantism when he moved to England. Anthony Trollope has a character in The Prime Minister whose last name is Lopez and has a shady origin, though he is thought to be from the Iberian peninsula and possibly to be a Jew. !! My friend Susan told me that Trollope was a fan of Tudor history!

I could go on and on. This is without a doubt a book I'll be returning to in the future. So well written, so engaging, so accessible. Highly recommend!

[Jessica · Rating 3 out of 5]

Hmmmmmm.

I am not sure what to do with this book. On the one hand, I enjoyed the little tidbits about Shakespeare's family life and some of the context of how politics shaped his plays. Which is, really, what I thought I was getting with this book. I wanted to know how the culture of the time and his own life had come through in his writing.

But on the other hand, and I'm not sure here if it's just the way the author chose to write about it, or if this is the absolute truth, it seems that very little is known about Shakespeare and what he actually knew and thought and what was going on with his family life. So it really did remind me of how they conduct press interviews in the Disney film Zootopia, mixed with some of Seinfeld's "Not that there's anything wrong with that."

"Did John Shakespeare get in trouble for illegal wool trading? Who wasn't in trouble for illegal wool trading back then, am I right? But yes, yes he probably was. Probably. Not that we weren't all doing it."

"Was he a secret Catholic? Do you think he was a secret Catholic? Was anyone a secret Catholic? Not that there's anything wrong with that."

I actually came out of this with a much muddier understanding of Shakespeare and the inspiration for his plays. I had taken it as a given that he had written Hamlet in honor of his son, but Greenblatt made me wonder if he ever even thought of Hamnet at all. Or his wife. Or anyone but his daughter Susanna.

I really was fascinated by the tidbits about the theater, and that the first of his sonnets were written as a freelance effort to convince a young man to get married(!). Which really makes you look at them from a different angle. I think perhaps I was looking for a more conventional, or perhaps just more in depth, biography. Which isn't what this is. And really, 400 years later, how in depth can we get?

[Lauren · Rating 4 out of 5]

Greenblatt's Shakespeare 'biography' is fascinating and readable, filling in so many shades of "Will in the World" with 360* views of Stratford, London, Elizabethan societal stratification, religion, public health, law, labor, education, fashion, domestic life, language.... the list goes on.

Where the book flounders is in Greenblatt's rampant speculation of what Shakespeare knew and his lived experience where no records remain. Is it possible that Will heard of a situation and somehow re-imagined it into an elaborate play? Sure, it is possible, and maybe even probable - but again, speculation. Did the death of Shakespeare's young son lead him to write Hamlet? Well, the timing makes sense, as well as the larger theme of death and melancholia... but how can we know his headspace? Greenblatt builds the infrastructure of this book around "maybe", "perhaps", and "quite possibly". It's shaky to even call this one a biography (although listed as such in the Library of Congress Subject Headings), but more of a contextual overview of this time and this place where this gifted aspirational playwright was churning out notable content for the stage.

So, a gripe about the "biography"-ness, but still a great look at the time and the [possible] links that lead to some of the most well-known works in the English language.

3.75/5*

[Hakan · Rating 4 out of 5]

bir shakespeare biyografisi, biyografi kurallarını ihlal etmekle mümkün ancak. çok az tartışmasız bilgi, çok az belge üzerinden çıkarım, varsayımlar, yorumlar kaçınılmaz. üstüne bir de bu bilgi yoksunluğundan doğan efsanaler varken bir shakespeare biyografisini değerlendirme ölçütü ne olabilir? bizde çok azı çevrilse de yüzyıllardır aralıksız shakespeare biyografisi yazılıyor, yayımlanıyor yeni bir bilgi, belge neredeyse hiç yokken. bu anlamda en önemli kriter bu tuhaf durumun bilincinde olmak belki. shakespeare'nin zamanını iyi okuyacak, yazdıklarının arka planını ölçülü biçimde verecek, sanatı ile kişiliği arasında dengeli bağlar kuracaksınız. ne kadar iddiasız o kadar iyi, ne kadar saygılı o kadar saygıdeğer. shakespeare, zamanının koşulları bir tarafa, biraz da kendini bile isteye tarihten silmiş bir isim çünkü.

bu biyografinin seçimini alt başlığı özetliyor zaten: shakespeare nasıl shakespeare oldu. türkçede yky'nin yayınladığı park honan'ın biyografisi bilinen gerçeğe daha bağlı, daha sağlam temeller üzerinden detaylarla ilerliyor inceleyebildiğim kadarıyla. bu biyografi varsayıma, yoruma açık ama bir ölçü de gözetiyor. başlıktaki sorusunun cevaplarını, farklı ihtimalleri de göz ardı etmeden vermeye çalışıyor. akademik amacı olmayan sıradan okur için bu biyografi daha cazip bu haliyle, daha keyifli. detaylara boğmadığı tarihi bilgiler, aydınlatıcı bir arka plan, oyunları yazarının hayatıyla birlikte okunmadaki çok yönlülük...okunmalı mı denirse, bu anlamda evet. öte yanda, shakespeare nasıl shakespare oldu sorusu, bu biyografiyi okuduktan sonra anlaşılıyor ki, gerçekten zor soru.

[Anna · Rating 5 out of 5]

My immediate response upon finishing this book?

Every Shakespeare play I read from now on will be funnier, deeper, more moving and generally more of a joy because I read this.

What we know of Shakespeare's biography is notoriously fragmented, but Greenblatt fuses an extraordinarily depth of knowledge with the facts we do have, along with the extensive context of the strange, bloody and beautiful world of Elizabethan England. To that potent mix, he adds a passionate and lucid understanding of Shakespeare plays and his poetry.

I haven't read all that much in the world of Shakespeare investigators and biographers and all that, but it strikes me as uncommon for someone to bear such knowledge of the shocking range and depth of research into Shakespeare's life while also bearing a writer's sensibility to Shakespeare's writing.

I found myself zipping through a chapter on how Shakespeare interacted with the Protestant-Catholic intrigues that devastated his country. Likewise with the section on King James' weird relationship with witchcraft, and how it might've influenced the shaping of the Macbeth witches. In these chapters, I was hungry for the true story.

But at other points in the book, I was taking lessons on becoming a better writer myself. I found myself taking notes on Greenblatt's evaluation of how Shakespeare's later plays--beginning with Hamlet--achieve their power by the author's "radical excision of motive." That is, the lead character--be he Hamlet, Macbeth, Lear, or Prospero, for example--might've been fitted with a motive as crystal sharp as Romeo's, or as the source material used by Shakespeare explicitly provided him in their fable-like tellings.

As Greenblatt shows, however, Shakespeare occluded such obvious intentions with enough skill to keep the play from sinking into confusion. Rather, the effect was to open interpretation tomany possible motives, or many at once. The uncertainty and multiplicity of motives translates into nuance: mutable modes of meaning. This harnesses the power of the plays. It brings movement. It brings uneasinesss. It invites contradiction. It is like life.

"Good idea," I was thinking as I scribbled notes to myself on how I might revise a story of mine. "'Radical excision of motive.' I should try that out."

There's a lot of power in Greenblatt's own book, and I'm hardly the first to discover it. Will in the World was a finalist for both the Pulitizer Prize and National Book Critics Circle award when it was published in 2004. It was named to just about every Best Books of the Year list (if not named the best book--as it was by at least five major publications).

It's an eminently persuasive book, certainly with a lot of open speculation, but Greenblatt is both honest in his conjectures and so well-informed that it's nothing to bristle at. I did find myself pulling away from Greenblatt's view of Shakespeare when he portrayed the playwright as grieving for his son when he died at age ten. In fact, Shakespeare barely knew the kid; he left him and his family behind in Stratford while he made his life in London. I believe the news probably hurt him. But I'm unconvinced, as Greenblatt is, that the death devastated Shakespeare. It rather seemed like Greenblatt hesitated to attribute unhappy characteristics to the guy who's understood to be the greatest talent of our age.

In all, though, this is a brilliant, wonderfully entertaining and engrossing book. I'm grateful to it for permanently enhanching my experience with Shakespeare's plays and poetry.

[Andrew · Rating 4 out of 5]

Stephen Greenblatt is just wonderful. This book makes blood flow between the sonnets, plays and legal records that comprise the slim documentary record of Shakespeare's career.

His analysis is contextual. As you read the book, your attention is driven through a route that wends alternatingly through the terrains of Shakespeare's world, life and work. Greenblatt is a spectacular writer with amazing structural control.

Some bullet points will give you a sense of what I loved about this book:

• Shakespeare's father, John, was not only a glove-maker, but also Stratford's town chamberlain, who was called upon to enforce anti-Catholic doctrine following the ascension of Elizabeth in 1558. In 1563, he instructed men to whitewash the medieval paintings in Stratford's Guild Chapel. But the man was secretly a devout Catholic - a "secret testament" of his faith was found hidden in the ceiling of his home in the 18th century, in which he declared his Catholic faith and did so in spite of anything that he might find it necessary to do in order to remain an acceptable citizen of Elizabeth's England.

• Christopher Marlowe was not only a great playwright, but also perhaps a spy for the Queen. His late night through-the-eye death might have been an assassination.

• The sonnets were written during the plague years, when Shakespeare could draw no income from playwriting (the theaters were all shut down), and found it necessary to draw an income from a noble patron. His patron became the third Earl of Southampton. Remarkably, the most famous sonnets ("Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?") were written by Shakespeare to Southampton, and not to his wife or any other female.

• King James was fascinated by witches, and even wrote a treatise on the subject. Greenblatt's chapter on the writing of Macbeth (written to be performed for the King) is an exhilarating example of the beauty of his contextual approach to the world-turning phenomenon of William Shakespeare.

[Charles Matthews · Rating 4 out of 5]

Perhaps. Probably. Maybe. These words hiccup through any biography of Shakespeare, and Stephen Greenblatt's is no exception. For the facts about Shakespeare's life are, as Greenblatt puts it, ''abundant but thin.'' We know all sorts of stuff about the property he bought and sold, the taxes he paid, the theatrical companies he worked for. We have his baptismal record, his marriage license and his last will and testament.

What we don't have are letters, diaries, manuscripts or anything that would give us, in Greenblatt's words, ''direct access to his thoughts about politics or religion or art.'' We want the People magazine profile, the Terry Gross interview, the ''E! True Elizabethan Story.''

But we're not going to get them, so let's be happy with the perhapses supplied by Greenblatt, a professor of humanities at Harvard. His new book, Will in the World, manages to be what a popular biography written by a noted scholar should be: readable but learned, speculative but carefully documented.

As his title suggests, Greenblatt draws his probabilities not only from the documents and the poems and plays, but also from the world Shakespeare lived in. Greenblatt imagines an 11-year-old dazzled by the pageantry surrounding the queen, who stayed at Kenilworth, 12 miles from Stratford, in 1575 -- awakening a fascination with English history and the glamour of royalty. He posits that Shakespeare was obsessed by his father's business failure, which happened when the poet was 13, and that it echoes in the theme of banishment and loss of status found in plays like As You Like It, King Lear and The Tempest.

He sees 18-year-old Will marrying 26-year-old Anne Hathaway six months before their first child was born, and speculates that the marriage was an unhappy one, reflected in the exhortations against premarital sex and skepticism about marriage found in the plays. The only married couples in the plays who have ''a relationship of sustained intimacy,'' Greenblatt notes, ''are unnervingly strange: Gertrude and Claudius in Hamlet and the Macbeths. These marriages are powerful, in their distinct ways, but they are also upsetting, even terrifying, in their glimpses of genuine intimacy.''

But we don't really know if an unhappy marriage prompted Shakespeare to seek his fortune in London, which was two days' ride from Stratford, where his wife and three children remained. He probably did them a favor by not taking them with him: The London in which he spent much of his adult life was a city of 200,000 people -- in Europe, only Naples and Paris were larger -- but even in years when the city was spared from the plague, the death rate was higher than the birth rate.

And when disease wasn't killing people, Queen Elizabeth was. The heads of traitors were stuck on poles on the Great Stone Gate leading to London Bridge. ''A foreign visitor to London in 1592 counted thirty-four of them,'' Greenblatt writes. Many of those convicted of treason were Roman Catholics, which may have made Shakespeare uneasy, since there's evidence that his own father covertly adhered to the faith that Elizabeth was determined to wipe out.

Greenblatt believes that the political and religious tensions of the age taught Shakespeare some ''powerful lessons about danger and the need for discretion, concealment, and fiction.'' The heads on the bridge, Greenblatt writes, ''may have spoken to him on the day he entered London -- and he may well have heeded their warning'' -- a warning to be cautious and sly. And this may explain not only why we have so little documentation of Shakespeare's own beliefs, but also why his plays -- and even the sonnets, his most apparently personal work -- are so complex, so subtle, so ambiguous.

Unlike some biographers, Greenblatt doesn't rely too heavily on the sonnets for clues. He accepts that the Earl of Southampton is the ''likeliest candidate by far'' as the young man addressed in the poems, but he calls the efforts to name the other figures -- the Dark Lady, the Rival Poet -- ''beyond rashness.'' He's also cautious about speculating whether the intimate way the poet addresses the young man indicates that Shakespeare was gay. Sonnet-writing, Greenblatt says, was a kind of game, the point of which ''was to sound as intimate, self-revealing, and emotionally vulnerable as possible, without actually disclosing anything compromising to anyone outside the innermost circle.'' And Shakespeare played that game better than anyone.

Most of all, Greenblatt gives us what he calls ''an amazing success story,'' that of a bright young man from the provinces who took on the challenge of working amid playwrights better-educated than he was -- and won. There was the brilliant but unstable Christopher Marlowe, whose Tamburlaine inspired Shakespeare to his first success, the Henry VI trilogy. There were the university-educated playwrights who gathered around the corpulent and dissolute Robert Greene, who attacked Shakespeare in print as an ''upstart Crow, beautified with our feathers.''

Shakespeare far outdid these rivals, even transforming the unsavory Greene into one of his most beloved characters, Falstaff. ''What Falstaff helps to reveal is that for Shakespeare, Greene was a sleazy parasite, but he was also a grotesque titan,'' Greenblatt says.

By the time we reach the mature works, the biographical mysteries recede, as Greenblatt explores Hamlet, Macbeth, King Lear, The Tempest and other plays not only for what they tell us about Shakespeare, but also for what Shakespeare and his world tell us about the plays.

Which is as it should be. The biographical mysteries are really less interesting than the artistic mysteries: the melancholy wit of Twelfth Night, the erotic entanglements of Antony and Cleopatra, the power maneuvers of the history plays, the bittersweet magic of the late romances, the rootless malevolence of Iago, the airy dazzle of Rosalind, the stubborn humanity of Bottom, and so on -- not forgetting all those well-shaped words.

Fortunately, Greenblatt never forgets that the works are uppermost. He has given us a clever and alive book, one that makes us makes us return to Shakespeare's work with a fresh vision, and one that finds a living person in the mass of dry documents and the heaps of conjecture. Scholars may quibble about the way Greenblatt reads the facts -- it's their job to do so -- but I felt a little closer to knowing the unknowable Shakespeare than I did before I read the book.

[Traci Thomas · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a really good history book on Shakespeare. Greenblatt has done to much research and scoured the texts of Shakespeare to connect his life to his work and the time. It is a wow on that front. The writing is a little boring and stilted and if you're not super into Shakespeare you might not really care about this book at all. However, I enjoyed it and was impressed.

[Ken · Rating 4 out of 5]

The title of this book is well-chosen as the book tries to be equal parts Will and his World. Fact is, though, historians have way more information about Will's world than they do about Will. Thus, you'll learn a lot about England at the turn of the 17th century and a little less than a lot about Will, who knew how to erase his personal trail because he valued this little thing called his life.

There's a reason for that. Elizabethan England, thanks to Henry VIII going rogue on the Roman Catholic Church because he wanted a divorce, was one hot mess. Really. The Protestant vs. Catholic thing was out of control and murder-most-foul was about the land. As Will came from Catholic stock, he had to lie low and keep a low religious profile. Catholic heads wound up on pikes. That's after bodies were hung, taken down before dying, de-entrailed, and quartered. All this after days and days of torture to ferret out other Catholics' names.

Conspiracies against QE I's life were commonplace, and when randy King James came to power, there was the infamous Guy Fawkes incident, which almost gave Parliament a jump start like it had never seen. So, yeah. Extra...extra...read all about it.

As for details about Will's life, Greenblatt is forced to go over what little material we have. Mostly legal stuff like his will and his property investments and his lawsuits (Elizabethan England, like present-day USA, was a litigious society). Greenblatt takes pains to link Will's life as a motivator for some of his greatest plays, too. Chiefly that means Hamlet, Macbeth, King Lear, and The Tempest, but there's an entire chapter dedicated to The Merchant of Venice, too, and the unfortunate treatment of Jews in Shakespeare's day.

Will you learn anything? Lots, I'd say. Will lived apart from his family, for the most part. He was a working man in London while his kids were brought up by his poor wife (who got the second-best bed in Will's will) and his parents. Almost everything was left to Will's favorite daughter, Susannah, and her husband Dr. John Hall and his granddaughter. He also had twins, Hamnet and Judith, but Hamnet (the title of a new book, it so happens) died at age 11 and Judith had poor tastes in men and brought public embarrassment to her dad.

In the end, Shakespeare died way too young. Two of his brothers died around age 50, too, young by even Elizabethan standards. This means, per usual with great writers, we're left to wonder what could have been in the way of additional writings. Still, it would be selfish to complain. This playwright churned out an amazing quantity of high-quality plays in his short lifetime.

But you knew that.

[Jonathan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Not just a bio of Will, but also a great look into what made him tick, and how he may have come to write his plays. The book is an interesting look into the history of the late 16th and early 17th century, and how the events of the times shaped Shakespeare's life. Unfortunately, many of the details of Shakespeare's life are lost, but Greenblatt uses what is available to make educated guesses as what influences and experiences Shakespeare used to create his masterworks. An altogether fascinating and entertaining read.

[Anne · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a thrilling read; even at its most speculative (and sometimes it goes a bit far), WILL IN THE WORLD is a feat of scholarship, an example of how a lively but discriminating imagination can engage with historical evidence. Greenblatt makes me feel that Shakesepare was human...which should be a given (after all, he wasn't a wookie), but I've always pictured him as a magical marble bust of himself from which lightning crackled and astounding language (in blank verse) emanated. Or as Joseph Fiennes. Back to the book...I especially loved reading about the entertainment/cultural scene in London in the late 1500s / early 1600s, though it's horrifying to think that bear baiting and public executions were enjoyed in much the same way as a production of 1 Henry IV. (I only hope we can soon look back with as much horror at our current use of the death penalty.) "Laughter at the Scaffod," which focused on The Merchant of Venice and antisemitism in an England without Jews was actually one of my favorite chapters; in it, Greenblatt does a wonderful job of showing how Shakespeare differed from the other writers of his day, particularly Marlowe, in his empathy and curiosity:

"Above all, without mitigating Shylock's vicious nature, without denying the need to thwart his murderous intentions, the play has given us too much insight into his inner life, too much of a stake in his identity and fate, to enable us to laugh freely and without pain. For Shakespeare did something that Marlowe never chose to do and that the mocking crowd at Lopez's execution could not do; he wrote out what he imagined such a man, about to be destroyed, would inwardly say" (p. 286).

[Ensiform · Rating 4 out of 5]

Greenblatt sketches out what is known about the life of Shakespeare, interspersing the meager details with background information about Elizabethan England. He tells of, for example, the tension between Catholics and Protestants, the vilification of the Jews, the myriad ways in which the society was brutal and bloody, and King James’ beliefs on witches and prophecy. The result is a very intriguing book with many interesting and extremely debatable propositions.

That some of the sonnets seem to be written to a man seems undeniable (see for example Sonnet XX); that Shakespeare was hired by nobles to write the sonnets in order to convince another young noble to marry a certain woman seems highly unlikely, especially since as Greenblatt himself notes, the sonnets hardly argue the merits of marriage. Or to take another case, Robert Greene’s obvious attack on Shakespeare is immediately denounced by the people involved in it; but Greenblatt inadequately investigates why a mysterious and very powerful protector should concern himself with a player and playwright. Or again, Greenblatt’s juxtaposition of “hamlet” with the death of Shakespeare’s son Hamnet and the deterioration of his own father is a very tenuous argument at best, but his connection of the writing of “Macbeth” with James’ paranoid obsession with witches and scrying makes perfect sense. It is true that nearly every single statement about Shakespeare made in the book contains a qualifier like “probably,” or “it can never be certain that,” or “highly likely,” or “if;” but in the end, all these hypotheses don’t detract from the book’s purpose: to place Will Shakespeare in his world.

[Cynda · Rating 5 out of 5]

New 2022 Review.

I have just reread the book with a general nonfiction group. I was just going to highlight some passages I found particularly interesting and bring those into discussion. But I ended up rereading the book.

I still think this book brings Shakespeare alive. I still feel as though if I could just walk fast enough that I might catch him by his coat tails.

I just am tired of hearing the arguments academicians and scholars make about

* How did Shakespeare view the Jews, negatively or positively as seen in The Merchant of Venice. My answer: Every answer is ambivalent because Shakespeare or the narrator were ambivalent.

* How did Hamlet's death affect his father William's writing of Hamlet. My answer: That is approaching sacred heart space, so I am leaving it alone.

So I am having some ambivalence myself. Yet the rating will remain at 5 stars. I did reread and R-eengage and I will again. So good enough interaction to justify 5 stars.

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Old 2016 Review.

I have discovered a new favorite writer: Stephen Greenblatt. When I was in school, I wrote papers using this literary criticism theory. I am sure I heard of and read the name of Stephen Greenblatt.
I just had never read of his books. I will be reading more soon.
I feel as though I have a nodding acquaintance with Shakes. Greenblatt has taken the historical context and the few records and some honest probabilities and has written a book that sheds light all over and around Shakespeare. I find I do not overly much like the man.
I do understand his plays differently and perhaps better now. And the plays I love.

[Alan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Greenblatt I have heard many times over my thirty years in the Shakespeare Association of America and in RSA; I found him better, and wittier, as a comparatist in Renaissance Self-Fashioning, where he wrote with more wit. His Swerve has a great account of the MS discovery in the first sixty pages, but declines into misdirected polemic. I've read Lucretius's Latin, and he is NOT behind the modern cosmos. Giordano Bruno (and of course Lawyer-Physician Copernicus) is.
This book falls way behind Shapiro's 1599, so well written and filled with intriguing minutiae. And of course, far behind Schoenbaum's classic Shakespeare's Lives. Shapiro spent three years revising this book, writing better. The effort paid off. Would that Greenblatt had the humility to revise this one, and reignite his early wit.

[Christine · Rating 3 out of 5]

Some parts of this book raise very good points about the plays and sonnets (though a little over heavy on guesswork). I did like some of his comments on the later plays in relation to Shakespeare's daughter. Some parts of this book caused me to raise eyebrows. Greenblatt's reading of Shylock seems to be too modern, too "what iffy".

But I have to ask, what the he** did Anne Hathaway do to Greenblatt? He seems to hate her even more than Anthony Holden does.

Read the remarks about the plays, skip the stuff about Shakespeare's marriage and go read Shakespeare's Wife instead.

[Bige · Rating 5 out of 5]

Shakespeare'in yaşadığı dünyanın nasıl bir yer olduğu ve yazarın dönemin koşullarıyla etkileşiminin eserlerini nasıl etkilemiş olabileceği üzerine, çok geniş kapsamlı, derin bir inceleme.
Özellikle "Venedik taciri"yle alakalı bölüme bayıldım. Seyirciye istediğini verir gibi yaparken, onları öteki ile, yabancı düşmanlığı ile yüzleştirmiş.
İngiliz edebiyatıyla, tiyatroyla ya da İngiliz tarihi ile ilgilenen herkese tavsiye ederim.
Greenblatt'ın "The Swerve" kitabını da çok beğenmiştim. Artık favori yazarlarım arasında. Umarım diğer eserleri de dilimize çevrilir.

[Vicky Hunt · Rating 5 out of 5]

Shakespeare: First in his family to sign his own name
Stephen Greenblatt's work is a compelling exploration of the life and times of William Shakespeare. As a prominent scholar in Renaissance literature and a co-founder of the New Historicism movement, Greenblatt brings academic rigor and a vivid narrative style to his writing and speaking. The book is an examination of Shakespeare's influences, experiences, and the sociopolitical landscape of Elizabethan England.

Greenblatt sketches Shakespeare as a complex individual in a tumultuous society. He discusses the Catholic/Protestant conflict the playwright would have experienced firsthand, from the evidence of family members who had been Catholics publicly before it became illegal. He described the clandestine world of illegal religious ceremonies that ultimately resulted in severed heads mounted over London Bridge, men with whom Shakespeare would have been personally acquainted, and whose heads he would have walked past in crossing the bridge into London. He brought out real life characters that became reflected in the plays. And, most interesting to me, he shed much light on the subject of how the hatred of foreigners and previous expulsion of the Jews led to Shakespeare's creation of Shylock the Jew in 'The Merchant of Venice' as a reaction to the more negative image of Barabas, in Marlowe's 'The Jew of Malta.'

Shakespeare left behind no letters, books, or papers about his own life, and seemed to have lived an intensely private personal life. But, England of his day was a city of record-keeping. Much has been pieced together from a few public documents about that time. One of Greenblatt's primary strengths is his ability to weave together biography and literary criticism. Using public documents and known facts about Shakespeare's England, he reconstructs the world that shaped the man. This contextual approach to 'connecting the dots' allows the reader to appreciate many personal details that would have certainly affected the life of the playwright. Shakespeare was not just a literary genius, but a product of cultural, religious, and political currents of the late 16th and early 17th centuries.

The author's writing is engaging and accessible. He makes complex ideas understandable without sacrificing depth. The book is rich with anecdotes and historical details, providing a backdrop of the environment that influenced him; including the religious persecution, the political threats, and the cultural expectations that constrained his work. And, he pulled apart public documents of Shakespeare's private life and business, and their reflection in his plays and poetry. I took awhile to read this, to absorb all the facts.

The only real weakness with a work such as this is its reliance on conjecture to make the connections. But, that's the nature of piecing together a life long past. The speculative approach does enrich the narrative, and Greenblatt's arguments do shed a lot of light on the circumstances of the plays. Within the facts, there is much to build a solid background on the life of the bard, his contemporaries, and his world.

Greenblatt himself is a well-respected figure in literary circles, known for his expertise in Renaissance literature. He is a professor of English at Harvard University and has received numerous accolades, including the Pulitzer Prize for his work writing The Swerve: How the World Became Modern, which I have read previously. I have also audited several of his online Shakespeare courses through Harvard Online.

This is an engaging biography that enriches our understanding of Shakespeare as both an artist and a man of his time, in as much as it is possible given the limited sources outside the plays and sonnets themselves. Despite the limitations, Greenblatt's insights and narrative style make this work a valuable perspective on one of literature's most enduring figures.

[Oleksandr Zholud · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a non-fic based around the biography of William Shakespeare, but the “around” part I found the most interesting. I read it as a part of monthly reading for July-August 2022 at Non Fiction Book Club group. There were a lot of very interesting comments in the group, which allowed for a better understanding of the text.

There is a lot that historians know about Shakespeare – his birth and death, his parents, his wife and children, and, of course, his literary works. However, the first attempts to collect info for his biography were made years later, so facts were often mixed with legends. Legends began to emerge about seventy-five years after his death, that is, when those who could possibly have known him personally had all died off but people were still alive who could, in their younger years, have encountered his contemporaries and sought out information about him. To these legends (which the author mostly disproves), he adds his own hypotheses based on the literary works of Shakespeare, which ought to be connected to his internal feelings, knowledge and wits. While such hypotheses are interesting and the approach has its merits, sometimes the author is carried away. Say, x Shakespeare’s father John initially had a successful career – his own ship, marriage on lesser nobility, becoming an alderman, in 1565; bailiff, in 1568–69; and chief alderman, in 1571. However, later he got a long streak of bad luck, accumulating debts and missing most aldermen meetings. The author assumes that alcoholism can be a reason behind the fall, quoting from many instances in Shakespeare’s texts of drunkards. However, irrespectively whether his father had such a problem or not, drunkards are too common characters in plays for the public across the globe, easily recognizable by watchers and therefore widely used.

One of the more interesting facts, about which I had no knowledge previously, is that possibly a lot of Shakespeare’s sonnets were written to a man, not a woman, namely young Lord Southampton, a rich beautiful noble for whom a marriage was arranged, but he refused and in order not to pay an enormous fine, he declares that he was averse not to this particular girl but to marriage itself. When it became clear that this was not a passing mood but a fixed resolution, the alarmed kin, foreseeing very clearly the blow to the family fortune, began to increase the pressure. One of the ways was to swing him with poetry and Shakespeare was hired to do the job.

As I said at the beginning, the most interesting parts of the book are not about Shakespeare himself but about his surroundings and his (and preceding) times. From how troops traveled around (there were no theaters as buildings), and what kind of plays they performed, to early playwrights, usually educated men, who considered players below them, the lowest of the low. There is a lot on religious issues, succession of monarchs, executions and main shows for masses, and so on. Overall a very interesting account of how people lived their lives.

[Nick · Rating 4 out of 5]

The library shelves groan under the weight of the tomes about Shakespeare, but, oddly enough, the writer himself was not much concerned with books. Certainly he read, that we know from his liberal borrowings from old Teutonic and Italian stories. But he never saw what we see in the bookstore, the sonnets were handed around among friends without prior thought for publication (at least in Stephen Greenblatt's reconstruction) and the various theater companies for which he wrote (and in which he invested) could not afford books and instead handed the actors scraps of paper with just their own lines. It is a difficult thing to write about Shakespeare and make the work fresh (as opposed to seeing great actors and actresses present judiciously edited plays); surely we have heard enough about whether Hamlet is mad or what happens to the Fool in Lear. Instead, Greenblatt returns to a close reading of the life and times for the purpose of linking them with the plays. This goes far beyond the notion that he was pondering age in Lear or that Prospero's last speech is his goodbye to the theater and its public. This books is one of those rare works of exhaustive research that does not itself exhaust, but is instead written in a fluid, readable style, the one flat note of which is the too-frequent recurrence of that historian's nemesis, the perhaps. Even a casual acquaintance with the plays reveals what a wide mind Shakespeare had, but Greenblatt is able to link Shakespeare's experience as in his father's glove shop or as a landlord with that incredible breadth of metaphor. The playwright's interest in power is evident in the histories and tragedies, but Greenblatt reminds us in terrible detail how perilous the world of Elizabeth's England was, with Catholics burnt at the stake and heads displayed on London Bridge. (Shakespeare came from a Catholic family, but he was an actor in life as on the stage). Greenblatt traces out the artistry of the ghost of Hamlet's father (which could not suggest the Catholic idea of purgatory) or the way Shakespeare, ever the opportuniist, exploited James I's interest in the occult through the weird sisters in MacBeth. Greenblatt is excellent in showing how the young Shakespeare survived the nasty, self-destructive theater world he found on arrival in London, his rivalry with Marlowe, and how he outpaced and survived a crew of better educated but lesser writers. Greenblatt makes a case for Shakespeare's theatric innovation -- not just the way Hamlet became the first modern hero but how he made the soliloquy more lifelike by leaving behind the formal poetry and making the lines seem more lifelike -- more confused, less logical, more like actual thought. Some of this analysis works better than others. Iago's lack of motive -- especially when contrasted with the sources -- has always puzzled me; Greenblatt makes that case that it is a great innovation. Perhaps. I am yet to be convinced of the homoerotic overtones of the sonnets as well, although one must admit that the fulsome admiration of male beauty is there and the plays are certainly full of cross-dressing and people falling in love with someone of the same gender. Greenblatt argues that "The Merchant of Venice" is less anti-Semitic than other pieces at the time, but I think that is faint praise -- although, again, it must be admitted that he is more powerful in the theatric sense than any of the faint Italians who surround him, and his eloquent defense of what it means to be a Jew are powerful. But he does grieve the loss of money more than the loss of daughter. There is entirely too much written about Shakespeare; it takes a rare sensibility to remind us how original he is. There are, I suppose, two kinds of great truly great writers: singular ones like Dante and Cervantes, who sum up their traditions with such power and beauty that it becomes impossible to move forward in the same vein with a straight face; and then are those like Shakespeare and the great nineteenth century novelists, who take a creative industry (Greenblatt is very clear that Shakespeare was very interested in money), and transmute it in such a way that others can explore further, if not surpass the original.