Will in the World, Final

If you’ve read my last post on Shakespeare (“Shakespeare Everywhere!”), you’d know I’ve found myself unexpectedly surrounded by the legendary playwright for the past month. He’s been popping up in the strangest places like a hidden element in a “Where’s a Waldo!” picture (“Where’s Will!”). Today, not only is he gracing the cover of my April 2007 Harper’s Magazine (“The Mirror of Life: How Shakespeare Conquered the World” by Jonathan Bate) but he’s also making a surprise appearance - ok, not so much a surprise considering the forum - in my April/May “Bookforum.” In its ‘Pub Dates’ section, “Bookforum” informs readers that Abrams Books is releasing Manga Shakespeare: Hamlet and Manga Shakespeare: Romeo and Juliet in April. Manga Shakespeare...uh, no comment. Actually, I think it might be kind of cool but, alright, no further comment.

I will, however, say that I have finally completed the reason for my recent Shakespeare inundation, Will in the World by Stephen Greenblatt. Will in the World is a massive achievement, not least of all because it is a compelling biography of a man whose known facts of life, according to John Mitchell, “can be written down on one side of a sheet of notepaper." Thus, the nearly four hundred page Will in the World is basically, in the words of Greenblatt himself, “an exercise in speculation,” but it is engrossing speculation nonetheless. Greenblatt uses the only true records left of Shakespeare’s inner life, his plays, to breathe life into not only the man but also the plays (although, conspicuously, Greenblatt fails to mention that authorship of many of the plays he uses to recreate Shakespeare’s life have been called into question by several Bard scholars).

Greenblatt is less concerned with literary conspiracy theories than he is with the life of the man on whom the book is based. He’s more concerned with showing readers how Shakespeare could have lived and developed as a playwright if only we, the audience, are willing to approach the history of Shakespeare in exactly the same way the playwright demanded of his sixteenth century audiences - with suspended belief and the power of our imagination. What we get in return is entertainment of the highest value and, if we are paying attention, an education on and illumination of all those dark, secret places.

I spent three months in a course on Shakespeare and never learned as much as I have in reading Greenblatt’s elegant biography. Granted, there are some glaring omissions of explanation (i.e. just how did an untraveled man with no university training manage to read untranslated Italian plays?), but those holes in his biography only serve to make the playwright more intriguing. Was he bisexual or wasn’t he? Did he hate his wife or didn’t he? Was he a recusant Catholic or wasn’t he? Perhaps we’ll never know and, in the end, none of it really matters because after it’s all said and done “what matters most are the works.” Shakespeare made poetry of the English language and, in his biography of the poet, so does Greenblatt.

Will in the World, pt. 1

by Stephen Greenblatt
pgs. 11-105

Lately, it seems I've been reading several books set in Europe or - as in the case of All Souls' Rising (Haiti) - set in countries which fell under the scope of European rule. Together, with Captain Alatriste (Spain) and now with Will in the World (England), they have reinforced one undeniable fact - my European history sucks. Once upon a time, I knew the names of the kings and the queens, the princes and the princesses. I knew who married whom, what religion started where, who had a revolution, when, how, and why. But that was a long time ago. Now all these books set in sixteenth and seventeenth century Europe has my head spinning. Sadly, I've been spending a lot of time on Wikipedia.

In spite of (or maybe, because of) my crappy knowledge of European history, I've wanted Stephen Greenblatt's Will in the World for a long time. For years, in fact. I've only recently added it to my collection because I don't like hardbacks. (I'll buy a small one but I find the larger hardbacks too heavy, I don't care how good they look on my bookshelf.) So, I bidded my time and waited. When I saw the paperback Will in the World in the bookstore, I snatched it up like it was the last copy.

I fell in love with Shakespeare the day I read my first Bard play, The Tragedy of Macbeth. I won't torture you with talk of how much I love that play ("Out damned spot! Out!") but when I attended university, I bravely took a course in Shakespeare with the hardest professor in the department because I absolutely love the Bard's way with words. Unfortunately, during those four blissful months, I learned much about Shakespeare's plays and very little about the man. Will in the World is intended to rectify that situation.

Yet I'm beginning to doubt that it can. The facts of Shakespeare's life are based on more speculation than I thought. Several of Greenblatt's sentences begin with qualifiers such as: if, could have, it's possible, and maybe. When discussing Shakespeare's (possible) early education, Greenblatt writes,

"No surviving records indicate how often the Stratford teachers during Will's school years had the boys perform plays or which plays they assigned. Perhaps there was a time, a year or so before Will left school, when the teacher - Oxford-educated Thomas Jenkins - decided to have the boys perform Plautus's frenetic farce about identical twins, The Two Menaechmuses. And perhaps on this occasion..."

Thanks to Greenblatt's writing, the scholarly speculation which composes much of Shakespeare's early life, hasn't become annoying. Instead, it just seems honest.