Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare

Author - Stephen Greenblatt ... [Goo?] [Posters]

This Hardcover Book item from W. W. Norton & Company was reviewed on 1-Sep-2008.

Search ISBN:0393050572 offer from Abebooks or used books from Alibris. Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare Reference Book. Classifications : Authors Arts & Literature Biographies & Memoirs Subjects Books General Biographies & Memoirs Subjects Books General Classics Literature & Fiction Subjects Books General Criticism & Theory History & Cr . Click the following link to view the cover of Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare.

Related topics: Authors. Arts & Literature. Subjects. Books. General. Subjects. Books. General. Classics. Subjects.

1) Hardcover Book Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare by W. W. Norton & Company. I think a lot of Shakespeare fans are grateful when a new bio comes out. It seems to revive the strength of the usual authorship assumption. The book gives evidence that the Shakespeares might have been covertly Catholic and on that basis mainly to suggest that William may have got his deep and spectacularly undocumented formal education in Greek, the classics, and other subjects in a clandestine Catholic stronghold where drama was performed. It sounds exciting to suggest that there was something special and secretive going on along these lines in Shakespeare´s parental home family; but a lot of English still leaned Catholic back then, naturally enough, since even the previous queen, Elizabeth´s sister, was "bloodily" Catholic Mary. I was given Greenblatt´s book as a birthday present and did read it carefully, but didn´t feel further enlightened by it or even convinced it contained any additional information about his life that bore very certainly or tellingly on Shakespeare as author. The best Shakespeare biographies are the short ones, I think. Three or four pages. Of course, beyond that there´s lots to read interestedly about the times and Elizabethan/Jacobean theater. Like other Shakespeare book-length bios, this one isn´t likely to much increase your understanding of or appreciation for the brilliant Shakespeare plays.¤

2) Hardcover Book Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare by W. W. Norton & Company. This is one of the most interesting books that I read last year.

While it is highly speculative it can be entertaining and even in portions insightful. Even though that there is no specific evidence that the Bard was a secret Catholic the events that unfolded around the area where he grew up could indicate this at least circumstantially. Where the book does take liberates I don´t think Stephen Greenblatt is being deliberately sloppy he just knows that in terms of subject mater old Will has been done to death and no one is really going to add anything. So why not write something a little more speculative?

Overall-It probably didn´t happen but it MIGHT have happened "all the world´s a stage and men in their time play many parts"
¤

3) Hardcover Book Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare by W. W. Norton & Company. 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!
¤

4) Hardcover Book Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare by W. W. Norton & Company. 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.¤

5) Hardcover Book Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare by W. W. Norton & Company. 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.¤

6) Hardcover Book Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare by W. W. Norton & Company. 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.¤

7) Hardcover Book Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare by W. W. Norton & Company. 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.

Interview with Stephen Greenblatt
Stephen Greenblatt shares his thoughts about what make Shakespeare Shakespeare and why the Bard continues to fascinate us endlessly.¤

Page Updated: Robert N. Goolsby, 29-Sep-2008, 03930505729780393050578, 930-410-720-1X1-Q4B-G4B-8

Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare, Book, Image © W. W. Norton & Company

Search: W. W. Norton & Company, Book Posters, Book Art