Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare (review)

Every fact in Shakespeare's biography has been worried to death by a succession of commentators who, to quote The Dunciad, "explain a thing till all men doubt it" (iv. 251).¹ Stephen Greenblatt's Will in the World is cautious about explaining, stressing instead the importance of imagination in our approach to this supremely imaginative writer. He thus gives himself permission to circulate, more gracefully than is usually possible in a biography, among facts, legends, and speculations. In a series of beautifully crafted episodes Greenblatt interweaves Shakespeare's country background, his education, his father, his arrival in London, and so on, with moments from his works in which these dead bones live again as something rich and strange.

Greenblatt's Shakespeare (or rather Will—the name suggests the semi-allegorical nature of his afterlife) is not generous in life but is magnificently generous in his imaginative world, for what that's worth. His cautious nature may be partly explained by the rise and fall of his father's fortunes. Greenblatt is also attracted to the idea of Shakespeare as a Catholic, recently popularized by Michael Wood, and he even goes so far as to imagine a meeting in Lancashire between the brilliant Edmund Campion and the equally brilliant teenage Shakespeare. But he takes back the argument as soon as he's written it; his Will is, finally, someone for whom fanaticism and martyrdom are equally antipathetic. As a man from the provinces, he is at first a quiet observer of the London literary scene. Against a background of mindless debauchery and violence (of which religious persecution might be a part), he perhaps finds ordinariness better than being, like Robert Greene and Christopher Marlowe, or like some of the Catholic gentry of Warwickshire, picturesque and dead. But ordinariness is also good in itself—and if the book has a message, this is it. The acknowledgment pages refer to pregnancy and children, establishing Greenblatt as someone in the mainstream of ongoing human life; the final chapter points out that Shakespeare chose, for his last years, nothing more spectacular than retirement in a country town, near his daughter, her husband, and their child. The book's particular achievement is that it celebrates Shakespeare's ordinariness without making him dull, and this is where the allusions to the works come in. When Ben Jonson wrote, "No Poets verses yet did ever move, / Whose Readers did not thinke he was in love,"² he did not make it clear whether these hypothetical readers would be convinced simply by reading the poems or would require biographical evidence that the poems had a foundation in lived experience. Like a more explicit version of Shakespeare in Love, Will in the World recognizes that the works are the life: "no one who responds intensely to Shakespeare's art," Greenblatt insists, "can believe that the plays and poems came exclusively from his reading" (13).

When a book's chief allegiance is to imagination, it is pointless to criticize it by the standards of biographical scholarship. Greenblatt omits a great deal that a full-scale biography ought to include, including detailed footnotes: Walter J. Ong's famous description of learning Latin as a male puberty rite is ascribed only to "a modern scholar" (26). The book avoids subjects that might become boringly complicated, such as which of the constantly metamorphosing theatrical companies, separately or in combination, might have produced which plays, or how much Shakespeare might have collaborated with other playwrights. There is no attempt to "cover" all Shakespeare's works—nothing, for example, on "The Phoenix and Turtle," the dramatist's one surviving commendatory poem, which might cast some light on the nature of his social circle. Like most critics, Greenblatt loves FalstaV, whom he sees as a tribute both to Robert Greene and to Shakespeare's own father, and he is fascinated by what the Cade scenes in 2 Henry VI show about...