How Shakespeare became Shakespeare
Carl Muller
BIOGRAPHY: 'Oh no!' "not another biography of Shakespeare!" But, in
picking up "Will in the World: How Shakespeare became Shakespeare" by
Stephen Greenblatt (Jonathan Cape, London and New York), I found it to
be one of the best one-volume works on the life of Shakespeare, even if,
on the surface, it seems to be rather old-fashioned and feeble-witted,
for it stands for a testimony of good old-fashioned and scholarship.
Undoubtedly, Greenblatt, an American academic, has entered a very
crowded field, but he has trawled far and wide for biographical clues.
The author is the father of "New Historicism" - a school of literary
criticism - and he had earned high praise on both sides of the Atlantic
for his meticulous research and digging deeper into little-known facts.
He has even searched Tudor nursery rhymes (which Shakespeare would have
heard at his mother's knee) and which are later echoed in "King Lear."
We are told of an entertainment put on for queen Elizabeth I at
Kenilworth, not far from stratford, in 1575, that is explicitly referred
to in "A Midsummer Night's Dream", while the death of Shakespeare's son,
Hamnet, is fed into "Hamlet" three years after Hamnet died.
As a textual analyst, Greenblatt is shrewd and perceptive, and he
gives us a full and convincing portrait of Shakespeare. The work
reflects the author's desire to give a story that is both extraordinary
and uplifting and this makes the reading of it more enjoyable than any
other Shakespeare biography I have read.
There is Anne Hathaway... and Greenblatt plausibly sees evidence in
Shakespeare's plays that this marriage was not a happy one; and also
points out that in Shakespeare's "Complete Works", there is a marked
scarcity of happily married couples.
Shakespeare lived most of his life apart from his wife, and,
famously, left her his second-best bed in his will. The author also
points out that the only couple who seemed really devoted to one another
were the Macbeths! All this may be looked upon as biographical
speculation, but it is rooted in close textual analysis.
It is true that every chapter holds much hyperbole, but the work
moves on seamlessly between details in the plays and the many nuggets of
information about Shakespeare's experiences and environment, that throws
up some wonderful stuff that both intrigues and excites.
If you wish to know how Shakespeare's experiences transformed his
writing, this is the book you must read, for it is a treat, not to be
missed, while Greenblatt, like another Prospero, remains a true conjuror
of words and imaginative illusions.
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