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A review by studeronomy
Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare by Stephen Greenblatt
4.0
Typically I'm not too fond of books written for general audiences by celebrated literary scholars. Usually, the delicate critical apparatuses that make the scholar’s academic work so great just collapse under the weight of their need to appease a broad audience. Instead of interesting analysis, you get platitudes about how literature is important because it makes you more empathetic, or how literature can save the world, or something.
I don’t feel that way about Greenblatt’s “Will in the World,” in part because I’m more sympathetic to his critical framework—new historicism—than I am to the frameworks of many other celebrity critics. As Greenblatt wrote in one of his famous early works, “I began with the desire to speak with the dead.” That pretty much sums up the reason I read classic literature, too.
I also believe that Greenblatt’s critical framework lends itself to a broad audience, especially with Shakespeare, a guy about whom we know virtually nothing. Your typical history nerd (me) wants to read about the political, religious, social, and economic milieu that Shakespeare inhabited. Your typical reader of popular biography (most people) want to know about Shakespeare’s unknowable personal life. Greenblatt does a good job balancing speculation about Shakespeare’s daily life with a concrete account of the wild, wacky, wonderful world of the late 16th century, and early 17th century…a world that, after Shakespeare’s death, would implode into a mass of unprecedented death and warfare across Europe.
Anyone who complains about Greenblatt speculating too much about Shakespeare's personal life is missing the point of this book. Greenblatt is responsibly cautious about filling in the enormous gaps in Shakespeare’s biography, but that shouldn't prevent him (or us) from having fun with them! About Shakespeare's religious convictions, Greenblatt says "what the adolescent Shakespeare believed (if he himself even knew what he believed) is wholly inaccessible." Greenblatt continues: "Out of a tissue of gossip, hints, and obscure clues a shadowy picture can be glimpsed, rather as one can glimpse a figure in the stains on an old wall.” Greenblatt knows that this faint figure, difficult to glimpse, is the most we know about Shakespeare’s faith, his career, his domestic life, his politics, or his sexuality. But Greenblatt has loads of fun tracing the stains on the old wall.
My two favorite aspects of the book are when Greenblatt describes the innovations of 16th/17th-century English drama, to which Shakespeare added so much, and when Greenblatt uses Shakespeare’s corpus to highlight the trajectory of his style.
On the first point: Greenblatt imagines Shakespeare watching Christopher Marlowe's Tamburlaine for the first time, imagining Shakespeare discovering dramatic soliloquy in blank verse ("the dynamic flow of unrhymed five-stress, ten-syllable lines") that predates Shakespeare, but that he perfected. "Shakespeare had never heard anything quite like this before," writes Greenblatt. Earlier, he describes dramatic blank verse as "like the dream of what ordinary speech would be like were human beings something greater than what they were."
That’s the best description of Elizabethan blank verse I’ve ever read.
On the second point: the book’s best chapter, “Speaking with the Dead," traces the changes in Shakespeare’s soliloquies from Richard III to Richard II to Julius Caesar to Hamlet, showing how Shakespeare painstakingly developed his unique insights into human interiority. Part of Shakespeare’s achievement, writes Greenblatt, is due to a unique work ethic. But part of it also comes from the politico-religious environment in which the English regime rendered obsolete centuries-old Catholic beliefs about and rituals for the dead. Before the English Reformation, the living could communicate with the dead. After the Reformation, this comfort was taken away and needed to be replaced with…something. Much of Shakespeare’s meditations on death and ghosts and our duty to the dead emerge from this historical environment. Greenblatt writes:
"The Reformation was in effect offering [Shakespeare] an extraordinary gift—the broken fragments of what had been a rich, complex edifice.... Shakespeare drew upon the pity, confusion, and dread of death in a world of damaged rituals...."
This new process of communing with the dead, with the living, and with ourselves occurred amid the final collapse of Medieval Catholicism, a story that Greenblatt doesn’t entirely flesh out but that is present everywhere in the background of this book. Toward the end, Greenblatt writes: "Shakespeare's theater is the equivocal space where conventional explanations fall away, where one person can enter another person's mind, and where the fantastic and the bodily touch.” Damn straight.
I don’t feel that way about Greenblatt’s “Will in the World,” in part because I’m more sympathetic to his critical framework—new historicism—than I am to the frameworks of many other celebrity critics. As Greenblatt wrote in one of his famous early works, “I began with the desire to speak with the dead.” That pretty much sums up the reason I read classic literature, too.
I also believe that Greenblatt’s critical framework lends itself to a broad audience, especially with Shakespeare, a guy about whom we know virtually nothing. Your typical history nerd (me) wants to read about the political, religious, social, and economic milieu that Shakespeare inhabited. Your typical reader of popular biography (most people) want to know about Shakespeare’s unknowable personal life. Greenblatt does a good job balancing speculation about Shakespeare’s daily life with a concrete account of the wild, wacky, wonderful world of the late 16th century, and early 17th century…a world that, after Shakespeare’s death, would implode into a mass of unprecedented death and warfare across Europe.
Anyone who complains about Greenblatt speculating too much about Shakespeare's personal life is missing the point of this book. Greenblatt is responsibly cautious about filling in the enormous gaps in Shakespeare’s biography, but that shouldn't prevent him (or us) from having fun with them! About Shakespeare's religious convictions, Greenblatt says "what the adolescent Shakespeare believed (if he himself even knew what he believed) is wholly inaccessible." Greenblatt continues: "Out of a tissue of gossip, hints, and obscure clues a shadowy picture can be glimpsed, rather as one can glimpse a figure in the stains on an old wall.” Greenblatt knows that this faint figure, difficult to glimpse, is the most we know about Shakespeare’s faith, his career, his domestic life, his politics, or his sexuality. But Greenblatt has loads of fun tracing the stains on the old wall.
My two favorite aspects of the book are when Greenblatt describes the innovations of 16th/17th-century English drama, to which Shakespeare added so much, and when Greenblatt uses Shakespeare’s corpus to highlight the trajectory of his style.
On the first point: Greenblatt imagines Shakespeare watching Christopher Marlowe's Tamburlaine for the first time, imagining Shakespeare discovering dramatic soliloquy in blank verse ("the dynamic flow of unrhymed five-stress, ten-syllable lines") that predates Shakespeare, but that he perfected. "Shakespeare had never heard anything quite like this before," writes Greenblatt. Earlier, he describes dramatic blank verse as "like the dream of what ordinary speech would be like were human beings something greater than what they were."
That’s the best description of Elizabethan blank verse I’ve ever read.
On the second point: the book’s best chapter, “Speaking with the Dead," traces the changes in Shakespeare’s soliloquies from Richard III to Richard II to Julius Caesar to Hamlet, showing how Shakespeare painstakingly developed his unique insights into human interiority. Part of Shakespeare’s achievement, writes Greenblatt, is due to a unique work ethic. But part of it also comes from the politico-religious environment in which the English regime rendered obsolete centuries-old Catholic beliefs about and rituals for the dead. Before the English Reformation, the living could communicate with the dead. After the Reformation, this comfort was taken away and needed to be replaced with…something. Much of Shakespeare’s meditations on death and ghosts and our duty to the dead emerge from this historical environment. Greenblatt writes:
"The Reformation was in effect offering [Shakespeare] an extraordinary gift—the broken fragments of what had been a rich, complex edifice.... Shakespeare drew upon the pity, confusion, and dread of death in a world of damaged rituals...."
This new process of communing with the dead, with the living, and with ourselves occurred amid the final collapse of Medieval Catholicism, a story that Greenblatt doesn’t entirely flesh out but that is present everywhere in the background of this book. Toward the end, Greenblatt writes: "Shakespeare's theater is the equivocal space where conventional explanations fall away, where one person can enter another person's mind, and where the fantastic and the bodily touch.” Damn straight.