Book Description
"So engrossing, clearheaded, and lucid that its arrival is not just welcome but cause for celebration."—Dan Cryer, Newsday
Stephen Greenblatt, the charismatic Harvard professor who "knows more about Shakespeare than Ben Jonson or the Dark Lady did" (John Leonard, Harper's), has written a biography that enables us to see, hear, and feel how an acutely sensitive and talented boy, surrounded by the rich tapestry of Elizabethan life—full of drama and pageantry, and also cruelty and danger—could have become the world's greatest playwright.
Bringing together little-known historical facts and little-noticed elements of Shakespeare's plays, Greenblatt makes inspired connections between the life and the works and delivers "a dazzling and subtle biography" (Richard Lacayo, Time). Readers will experience Shakespeare's vital plays again as if for the first time, but with greater understanding and appreciation of their extraordinary depth and humanity.
A best book of the year: The New York Times 10 Best Books of 2004 • Time magazine's #1 Best Nonfiction Book • A Washington Post Book World Rave • An Economist Best Book • A San Francisco Chronicle Best Book • A Christian Science Monitor Best Book • A Chicago Tribune Best Book • A Pittsburgh Post-Gazette Best Book • NPR's Maureen Corrigan's Best
Customer Reviews:
What You Will.......2007-06-23
After reading "Will in the World," Stephen Greenblatt's wonderful meditation on the life of William Shakespeare, I did something that I'd previously never done after reading a book purely for pleasure: I turned the volume over and started to re-read it -- almost all the way through. I think that says something about how riveting "Will in the World" is.
Of course, Shakespeare's life remains something of a speculative detective story, and Greenblatt keeps the reader intrigued by layering the large gaps in the playwright's personal record with what is known about his era, and then making plausible, reasonable conjectures about how the missing pieces could fit together.
But more importantly, Greenblatt's writing shares Shakespeare's zestful fascination with the English language, and it demonstrates this in ways both lucid and unpretentious. While his writing is never less than clear, Greenblatt will occasionally, and unexpectedly, thrown in an uncommon word or two that either evokes Elizabethan England or reminds the reader of the infinite treasures of written English. Also, Greenblatt discretely gives into his own way with wordplay. For example, describing the young rustic Shakespeare settling into urban London, Greenblatt writes, "He discovered what it was to pine for open country" -- "pine" not only meaning "yearn" but also evoking the rural sensation of a fresh-scented tree.
As all Shakespeare enthusiasts know, the fact that one of the world's most celebrated authors -- perhaps *the* most celebrated -- left so small a written record, outside his published works, remains one of history's great ironies. Consequently, several cottage industries have sprung up dedicated to the idea that this bumpkin businessman from backwater England, this yokel with little evidence of formal education, could not have written his language's most glorious works. Such searing insights into the human psyche and its political machinations, such a resplendent command of the English language, had to have been written by a nobleman, a university wit, a philosopher-scientist, or even Queen Elizabeth herself, anyone -- just not the land-owner from Stratford who willed his wife the second-best bed. Or so the doubters say.
I disagree. The doubters' arguments sound elitist to me. You might as well say that a boy born to a middle-class widow in Hope, Arkansas, couldn't possibly grow up to become President of the United States. Anyone as intellectually driven and self-motivated as the author of "Hamlet" and "Othello" clearly was could have honed his talents regardless of circumstances. Doubters point to the gaps in Shakespeare's historical record as "proof" that William of Stratford was not the playwright. I think those gaps are adequately explained by Shakespeare being a Catholic in a country where Protestantism was compulsory. Why should he put his innermost thoughts down on precious paper if the authorities could use those thoughts against him? Why write love letters to a wife who couldn't read, and whom he possibly didn't love? Why would Warwickshire regionalisms pop up in the poetry of a playwright born and raised elsewhere? To the Stratfordian school of authorship, the answers are obvious. The doubters respond with grandiose conspiracy theories -- ripping yarns, but about as substantial as ripped yarn.
True, Shakespeare's life-story can never be completely told, and on occasion, Greenblatt has to extrapolate enormously upon the documentary record. But his guesses are educated ones. I can imagine a new scrap of evidence complicating the picture he draws, but not erasing it entirely. And maybe new evidence will indeed emerge saying that the plays of Shakespeare are more collaborative than we now think. But "Will in the World" is more about Will's world than about the man himself. As such, the book won't be discredited anytime soon.
"Will in the World" is the kind of book that you don't want to stop reading. For me, its worst moment came when I turned the last page and Greenblatt's revels were ended.
Humble praise for a stunning book.......2007-04-12
I'm not familiar with the bard--
my reading doesn't tend that way.
Here and there I've read a word
of sonnet brief or some long play.
Awhile back, though, a book review
in the New Yorker mentioned that
a biography of sorts was new
and deserved praise for S. Greenblatt.
A Common Reader, I was piqued
with curiosity so the book I bought
and feverish page turning had me hooked
by the picture Greenblatt's pen has wrought.
Will in the World gives us all a feel
for the inner space of the World in Will.
Okay, I'm not a poet either, but this book is amazing and I'm sorry to be done with it!
saucy doubts and fears.......2007-01-08
When an historian treats a great figure of the past or touches upon the canon of literature, his or her speculative choices gain credibility to the degree that he or she controls the data.
Stephen Greenblatt's intensely speculative exploration of William Shakespeare is data-driven and anchored in a stupendous familiarity with the poet's historical moment and the documentary fund that allows us access to the time and place in which the Bard strode large across the land. Or at least across London, where his profession was and his family was not.
This is an intriguing, maddening, and informative work. Yet it's chief virtue is that it is utterly absorbing for anyone who knows Shakespeare's plays or has vowed once again this January 1st to read them.
Greenblatt's methodology is to inform himself of the minutae of Shakespeare's environs and then to canvass his works for evidence of alignment with those details. In this way, the author believes he can ferret out the influences, references, allusions, obligations, and opportunities to which 'Will' was responding with his unequalled artistry.
The result is maddening in those moments where the 'could haves' and 'might have beens' metamorphise into 'must have beens', but profoundly suggestive if one allows for a significant margin of error between Greenblatt's speculative insight and what we can actually *know*.
A lesser scholar would be entombed by the cumulative weight of his guesses. Greenblatt is elevated by them.
One glimpses through his daring and thorough scholarship possibilities for understanding this Moses of the English language that otherwise--alone and novitiate that we are--might never, must never have occurred.
What I Wish to Believe.......2006-11-21
I simply could not put this book down. I wished it would last for 1,000 pages. But, both during and after, I thought to myself, can it be really true? How much of it is fabrication based upon just minimal evidence? Well, it seems that in Shakespeare scholarship, minimal evidence defines the elusive terrain. I accept that there will always be an element of subjectivity.
In this context, to me the first test is the test of reasonable plausability. I had known some of the facts of Shakespeare's life. I knew that his dad was Bailiff of Stratford-on-Avon. But I did not know that it entailed contracting bands of players to perform morality plays...plays which were the media events of their era. To me, it is plausable that the young Will would have been exposed through them to the experience of theater....and plausable also, their effect on a highly attentive young mind.
The aesthetic evolution of Will was a second plausability test. In his plays, he was fully able to poke fun at the common people, while also displaying a kind of duality towards them from the sophisticated perpective of nobility. Greenblatt employs the plays themseves to sift attitudes. The key attitude here, as in "A Mid-Summer Night's Dream", is that Will skillfully finds a way to give a subtle preferential affirmation to the former, even over the latter. He exposes the special charm of the play's whole conceit.
How could this extraordinary ability have evolved? From the rote learning of his schoolboy Latin immersion, to the crude directness of the morality plays, to the traditional nature festivals, Will's exposure to the lively imagination of his commoner culture, in all its joys and foibles, is convincing.
Less provable, was his proposed exposure to higher education and theater, through his mother's noble Arden relatives.....and a sparse written clue of inheritance of the actor's costume, upon which Greenblatt's thesis hangs. All I can say is that, as ablely presented, it seems quite believeable. The fact that Greenblatt is laboring a bit here, did not disturb me, for I fully expected any thesis would have its challenges.
And finally, the wonderful chapter on the "Dream of Resotration", a key theme in many of Will's plays, has very clear parallels to the precipitous decline of his father's fortunes.....a documented truth, that must have had signficant impact on Will's life view. Will's dad, a Greenblatt elicited Fallstaffian character, falls from grace; falls from prominence in real life, with real consequences for the young Shakespeare.
Throughout, Greenblatt employs the scant facts we know, and the expressions Will artfully presented, with his own kind of mature humanist imagination, to precipitate the emotions that plausably might have driven the actions and decisions of Shakespeare and the real people in his life. That Shakespeare of all people, would have been keeenly rooted to these, to me, is absolutely beyond doubt.
Greenblatt's assumption of this vision is certainly not flawless, as it is subject to its own contemporary set of values and assumptions, but as a comprehensive logical construction, it's the most compelling vision of the person of Shakespeare, that I have so far read.
Where's a will...........2006-11-10
This is an excellent book, well written and full of facts. Not facts about the plays, but about Shakespeare's England. It follows the course of Shakespeare's life, what was going on around him and the plays he wrote at the time.
Amazon.com
There's no shortage of good Shakespearean biographies. But Stephen Greenblatt, brilliant scholar and author of Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare, reminds us that the "surviving traces" are "abundant but thin" as to known facts. He acknowledges the paradox of the many biographies spun out of conjecture but then produces a book so persuasive and breathtakingly enjoyable that one wonders what he could have done if the usual stuff of biographical inquiry--memoirs, interviews, manuscripts, and drafts--had been at his disposal. Greenblatt uses the "verbal traces" in Shakespeare's work to take us "back into the life he lived and into the world to which he was so open." Whenever possible, he also ushers us from the extraordinary life into the luminous work. The result is a marvelous blend of scholarship, insight, observation, and, yes, conjecture--but conjecture always based on the most convincing and inspired reasoning and evidence. Particularly compelling are Greenblatt's discussions of the playwright's relationship with the university wit Robert Greene (discussed as a chief source for the character of Falstaff) and of Hamlet in relation to the death of Shakespeare's son Hamnet, his aging father, and the "world of damaged rituals" that England's Catholics were forced to endure. Will in the World is not just the life story of the world's most revered writer. It is the story, too, of 16th- and 17th-century England writ large, the story of religious upheaval and political intrigue, of country festivals and brutal public executions, of the court and the theater, of Stratford and London, of martyrdom and recusancy, of witchcraft and magic, of love and death: in short, of the private but engaged William Shakespeare in his remarkable world. Throughout the book, Greenblatt's style is breezy and familiar. He often refers to the poet simply as Will. Yet for all his alacrity of style and the book's accessibility, Will in the World is profoundly erudite, an enormous contribution to the world of Shakespearean letters. --Silvana Tropea
Interview with Stephen Greenblatt
Stephen Greenblatt shares his thoughts about what make Shakespeare Shakespeare and why the Bard continues to fascinate us endlessly.
Book Description
A brilliant reading of Shakespeare's world yields a new understanding of the man and his genius.
A young man from the provinces—a man without wealth, connections, or university education—moves to London. In a remarkably short time he becomes the greatest playwright not just of his age but of all time. His works appeal to urban sophisticates and first-time theatergoers; he turns politics into poetry; he recklessly mingles vulgar clowning and philosophical subtlety. How is such an achievement to be explained?
Will in the World interweaves a searching account of Elizabethan England with a vivid narrative of the playwright's life. We see Shakespeare learning his craft, starting a family, and forging a career for himself in the wildly competitive London theater world, while at the same time grappling with dangerous religious and political forces that took less-agile figures to the scaffold. Above all, we never lose sight of the great works—A Midsummer Night's Dream, Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, Macbeth, and more—that continue after four hundred years to delight and haunt audiences everywhere. The basic biographical facts of Shakespeare's life have been known for over a century, but now Stephen Greenblatt shows how this particular life history gave rise to the world's greatest writer. 16 pages of color illustrations.
Customer Reviews:
I loved it!.......2007-07-25
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 controversy and curiosity never end.......2007-01-18
William Shakespeare (1564-1616) was the greatest playwright ever to grace the stage and page in the English language; he also remains the most elusive of biographical figures. Biographers who tackle the Bard undertake an exercise in conjecture, for even though by the seventeenth century England was a record-keeping society--the better to busy subsequent scholars--huge gaps remain in even the most basic reconstructions of Shakespeare's life. Greenblatt's subtitle, then, is a misnomer, for we really do not know how Shakespeare became Shakespeare, how a person from a provincial town, a modest family, and no wealth or personal connections, chose his vocation and "wrote the most important body of imaginative literature of the last thousand years" (p. 12).
The exact date of Shakespeare's birth (April 23 or 26?) is debated, and as for his death, 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 think we know the name of his Stratford school teacher. 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. Was he apprenticed to be a butcher? Did he follow in his father's footsteps as a glove maker? Perhaps he did a stint as a private tutor? Ambiguity qualifies all suggestions. We do know that at age eighteen (November 1582) he married Anne Hathaway, age twenty-six, and by the time he was twenty-one he had three children. Some time after that he left his wife and children and moved to London, although exactly how, when or why we do not know. Similar ignorance clouds our knowledge about his written work. We have, for example, only one manuscript autograph that was written by Shakespeare. Were his 154 sonnets written to a certain gay lover, or to a wider audience of men and women? "There is no way of achieving any certainty," writes Greenblatt, for "no one has been able to offer more than guesses, careful or wild." We have none of his personal letters, none of the books he surely owned, and nothing that is overtly self-revealing in his writings that otherwise revealed more about the complexities of human interiority than any other texts. After roughly twenty years in London, Shakespeare returned to Stratford and the family he had left behind, but even the date of this return is a matter of speculation.
How can we explain the breadth and depth of obscurity that hides even the basics of Shakespeare's life? It might simply be the result of historical accident and chance. Four hundred years is a long time. Perhaps more practical considerations, like avoiding trouble with political and ecclesial authorities, caused him to keep a low profile; to the former playwrights were subversive and to the latter immoral. Still, Greenblatt suggests that in Shakespeare's life and writings there is a deliberate "act of erasure" (p. 255) that prevents us from knowing him.
What Greenblatt does in his book is "to tread the shadowy paths that lead from the life Shakespeare lived into the literature he created" (p. 12). His views on anti-semitism, for example, emerge from consideration of his relationship with Christopher Marlow (who wrote The Jew of Malta) and his own play The Merchant of Venice. The death of his son Hamnet at age eleven and his father elucidate Hamlet and Shakespeare's genius at portraying human interiority and especially "tormented inwardness." King Lear connects with his return to Stratford from London's limelight and the last five years or so when he returned to Stratford and embraced the inevitability of old age, loss of power and identity, and family tensions. Greenblatt also shines in explaining the socio-cultural essentials of the day, such as the emergence of sixteenth century theater in London, the horrible violence that engulfed England as it alternated between Catholic and Protestant royalty, the literary nature of a sonnet to both hide and reveal, and so on. As the founder and leader of the New Historicist movement in literary studies, some have criticized Greenblatt for the notion that literature and art emerge mainly as a construct from society and less from a single individual's effort, the result being that readers learn more about Shakespeare's context than about the writer himself.
Greenblatt, professor of humanities at Harvard and one of the leading Shakespeare scholars today, has written an elegant book about a fascinating figure. Twenty or so color and black and white plates compliment the text.
This really tells it like it was.......2007-01-10
I have been a Shakespeare scholar since college, and I am 68 Years old. This was the best book about the Bard that I have ever read. The writing is clear, he relates the times to the plays, and his criticisms are cogent.
Beyond (way beyond) Biography.......2006-12-17
This book illuminates the underpinnings of coded language and its place in American literature and contemporary culture. If the reader takes away only that, one will be open to better understanding the artistry of so many writers, musicians and painters. The extreme violence of daily English life in the 16th and 17th centruries is also well told - again offering greater insight into not just the motivations, but the personalities of the people who would begin the European settlement of America. By creating an accessible story about the western world's celebrity author, Stephen Greenblatt exposes the ferocity of the historical entaglement of religion and political power to many outside academia, and explains some of the historical context of the religious and political conflicts of our own century.
Will of the World also gives insight into American social and cultural history and I found that it deepened my understanding of jazz and hip hop - two musical forms that evolved from as a response to violence and cultural supression by a majority in political power.
Reading Will of the World only as a literary biography is limiting. Greenblatt created a story that has the power to enlighten as much as Shakespeare's own work does. Living in New England where so many English settled, I inherited a culture with traditions and rituals that have held power because they are rooted in the needs of humanity - our need to see on a stage the range of human emotion, the complexity of feelings and behavior that we all live with every day.
I enjoyed Greenblatt's suppositions about Shakespeare's life, but I found myself caring less about who the man was, and more about not just his own cultural legacy, but the legacy that Americans inherited from him in a broader sense: our ability to use words to question power, authority and evil; to use theatrical expositions as a starting point for politcal and social discussion; and especially American's ability to create art from a multiplicity of sources so that the weaving of pagan rituals, religious spiritualism, cultural and economic realities, and social and political conditions combine in an effort to help humans to progress toward a more fair, just and pleasurable life. Greenblatt wrote an important book. I hope it is read and discussed widely.
You WILL.... love it!.......2006-12-10
A TERRIFIC book!
The author has succeeded in sifting through a wealth of incidental knowledge and historically-based inference to provide any attentive reader with a coherent, chronological life of the Bard that reads like an epic novel.
Is every shred of it factual and unable to be presented in a different light?
No.
No biography is.
But such is perhaps especially the case with Shakespeare, extant documentation being as fragmentary as it is. In uncountable details he will forever be a mystery, but what a blasted good interpretation Greenblatt has given us here.
Everywhere, and by that I mean on practically every page of these 390, the author employs phrases such as "it seems likely that," or "this being the case, Shakespeare would have," or "Then, sometime in the mid 1580's," or "it is possible that hints may lie..." in order to get the point across. In this sense, there is nothing positively dishonest in these pages, but rather, we see an almost constant reference to the author's need to be speculative.
His method is to begin each chapter with some bare-bones or otherwise undisputed sort of "fact" [if you will] and then proceed onward, enfleshing this skeleton with the sinew and muscle of corroborating evidence.
Is some of it hearsay?
Indeed, yes!
But for me, [someone who is convinced that being any sort of Shakespearean purist is a waste of time], I just merrily flip the pages, reading like a voracious tiger. And tiger-like, blissfully oblivious of what I do not know. When it comes to Will-ology, if someone like Harold Bloom is frustrated "not because we do not know enough, but because there is not enough to know..." then, surely I myself am not going to lose any sleep over the issue of Bard-bio accuracy!
Greenblatt's Shakespeare emerges as a man capable of forming the most passionate love stories and poems, while he himself endures an unhappy marriage, and enjoys few amorous adventures. Here is a man who creates the raucous Falstaff, and is himself not necessarily the life of the party. A man who associates with the greatest revelers of his day, and yet does not seem to succumb to the same depths of debauchery and criminal low-dealings as did they. A man who rose from ignoble beginnings to the heights of fame, success, and riches. An enigma in so many ways, from start to finish. The glovemaker's son, destined to command entire sections of modern-day bookstores, four centuries on. That is who you meet here.
I could go on and on about specifics of the book, but I won't. There are many synopses you can find that would be better than mine. Perhaps the most useful thing I can say is that reading literary biography can be about as exciting as eating a bowl of dust. This book was not like that at all. It was exciting, and engaging, from page one to 390. And fun.
Not that I've read very many, but for now I am going to conclude that this is the best book about Will.
In the world!
Book Description
"So engrossing, clearheaded, and lucid that its arrival is not just welcome but cause for celebration."—Dan Cryer, Newsday
Stephen Greenblatt, the charismatic Harvard professor who "knows more about Shakespeare than Ben Jonson or the Dark Lady did" (John Leonard, Harper's), has written a biography that enables us to see, hear, and feel how an acutely sensitive and talented boy, surrounded by the rich tapestry of Elizabethan life—full of drama and pageantry, and also cruelty and danger—could have become the world's greatest playwright.
Bringing together little-known historical facts and little-noticed elements of Shakespeare's plays, Greenblatt makes inspired connections between the life and the works and delivers "a dazzling and subtle biography" (Richard Lacayo, Time). Readers will experience Shakespeare's vital plays again as if for the first time, but with greater understanding and appreciation of their extraordinary depth and humanity. This college edition includes 12 color plates.
A best book of the year: The New York Times 10 Best Books of 2004 • Time magazine's #1 Best Nonfiction Book • A Washington Post Book World Rave • An Economist Best Book • A San Francisco Chronicle Best Book • A Christian Science Monitor Best Book • A Chicago Tribune Best Book • A Pittsburgh Post-Gazette Best Book • NPR's Maureen Corrigan's Best
Customer Reviews:
Greenblatt illuminates Shakespeare's "walking shadow".......2006-06-28
Reknowned civil war historian Shelby Foote has been eloquent in bemoaning the diffulties of the "lock picks" of biography.
So much more so for William Shakespeare who, though he wrote so voluminously on the human condition managed to conceal so much about himself personally. Using basically tax and legal records relating to Shakespeare, his father John and mother Mary and Shakespeare's own considerable catalogue of writing, Greenblatt essentially tried to let Shakespeare tell his own story.
In this way, Greenblatt's choice was a couregeous one on so many levels. As a writer, interspersing quotes from perhaps the pre eminent writer of all time is couregeous for the natural comparisons it invites between the prose of the bard and that of the writer quoting him. In this way, quoting Shakespeare demonstrates the same enviable chutzpah as entering a painting contest with Van Gogh or a sculpting competition with Michelangelo.
And therein lies the rub, because Greenblatt's next measure of couregeousness is attempting to harness Shakespeare's loftly words that illuminate the human condition generally to illuminate but one human's condition...that of the bard himself.
And what does the art in the end reveal of the artist himself? Certainly one need not look far from his printed words to see the horror and loss of Edgar Allen Poe, but what of Stephen King? Aren't his demons in the end more the product of his imagination than his biography.
Perhaps it's even couregeous to think that biography itself even can explain genius. Perhaps in the end, our "lock picks" are frustrated by the implied method they employ.
Maybe after all, the wonder of the artist, his ultimate biography (or at least the only one that matters) is to be found in the treasures he has bequeathed to us. In this way, mere mortals we can simply best enjoy by untethering ourselves from the unanswerable why.
Excellent service and product.......2005-09-20
The book arrived safely and in good time. Excellent condition.
Average customer rating:
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Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare
Stephen J. Greenblatt
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ASIN: 1419307584 |
Book Description
This digital document is an article from National Catholic Reporter, published by National Catholic Reporter on February 11, 2005. The length of the article is 868 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.
Citation Details
Title: Spying on Shakespeare: an imaginative look at a playwright who remains mysterious.(Book Review)
Author: Michael Allen Mikolajczak
Publication:
National Catholic Reporter (Magazine/Journal)
Date: February 11, 2005
Publisher: National Catholic Reporter
Volume: 41
Issue: 15
Page: 1a(2)
Article Type: Book Review
Distributed by Thomson Gale
Book Description
This digital document is an article from Reviewer's Bookwatch, published by Midwest Book Review on February 1, 2005. The length of the article is 1048 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.
Citation Details
Title: Will in the World How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare.(Book Review)
Author: Jim Sullivan
Publication:
Reviewer's Bookwatch (Newsletter)
Date: February 1, 2005
Publisher: Midwest Book Review
Page: NA
Article Type: Book Review
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Citation Details
Title: Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare.(Book Review)
Author: David Dooley
Publication:
Catholic Insight (Magazine/Journal)
Date: December 1, 2005
Publisher: Thomson Gale
Volume: 13
Issue: 11
Page: 39(2)
Article Type: Book Review
Distributed by Thomson Gale
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