Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare
Stephen Greenblatt
W.W. Norton (2004)

An “amzing success story that has resisted explanation”…until now

Thus far, I have read and reviewed several dozen biographies of William Shakespeare (1564-1616) and this is by far the most entertaining as well as the most enlightening of them all.

Stephen Greenblatt poses a question in the Preface that has intrigued me since I read my first Shakespeare play, Romeo and Juliet, in high school: “How did Shakespeare become Shakespeare?” That is, how did he gain the personal experience, knowledge, and skills that enabled him to create “the most important body of imaginative literature of the last thousand years.” His is indeed “an amazing success story that has re”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 in 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 your own imagination.”

Greenblatt combines the highly developed skills of a historian with  those of a raconteur and a cultural anthropologist. He brings Shakespeare to life by transporting you to Elizabethan England, first to Stratford and then to London. We accompany Greenblatt throughout a lively and eloquent narrative as Shakespeare widens and deepens his immersion within one of the most turbulent periods of British history.

In or near the central business district in most major cities, there is a farmer’s market at which some of the merchants (at least pre-COVID) have offered slices of fresh fruit as samples of their wares. In that same spirit, I now offer a few excerpts from Will in the World to suggest the thrust and flavor of Greenblatt’s key insights:

o Folk customs, all firmly rooted in the Midlands, had a significant impact on Shakespeare’s imagination, fashioning his sense of theater even more than the morality plays that the touring companies brought to the provinces. Folk culture is everywhere in his work, in the web of allusions and in the underlying structures.” (Page 40)

o With Hamlet, the crucial breakthrough “did not involve developing new themes or learning how to construct a shapelier, tighter plot; it had to do rather with an intense representation of inwardness called forth by a new technique of radical excision. He had rethought how to put a tragedy together — specifically, he had rethought  the amount of casual explanation a tragic plot needed to function effectively and the amount of specific rationale a character needed to be compelling.” (323)

o Perhaps Shakespeare was drawn home by “a motive that — unlike all the others in his private life — seems to lie in plain sight…The woman who most intensely appealed to Shakespeare in his life was twenty years younger than he: his daughter Susanna. It cannot be an accident that three of his last plays — Pericles, The Winter’s Tale, and The Winter’s Tale — are centered on the father-daughter relationship and are so deeply anxious about incestuous desires.  What Shakespeare wanted was only what he could have in the most ordinary and natural way: living near his daughter and her husband and their child.  He understood that this pleasure had a strange, slightly melancholy dimension, a joy intimately braided together with renunciation — that is the burden of those last plays. But it is a strangeness that hides within the boundaries of everyday. And that was where he was determined to end his days.” (390)

As I worked my way through Greenblatt’s lively and eloquent narrative, I was again reminded of an assertion by Ralph Waldo Emerson: “Shakespeare is the only biographer of Shakespeare.” There is little (if any) documentation such as copies of letters sent and received; others’ comments in letters or legal documents in reference to his youth, education, marriage, parenthood, involvement in the Stratford community, key relationships with patrons, playwrights, business partners in London; and diaries, or portions thereof.

Will in the World is a masterpiece.  Bravo!