If you have even a passing interest in Shakespeare, Will in the World is essential reading. I’ve read a few biographies of the Bard, and as you’d expect for someone so notable the quality has been a bit uneven. Not so here; and I’d go further in saying that no other Shakespeare book I’ve read does such a convincing job of linking the playwright’s life to his work.
It’s often said that Shakespeare disappears in the plays – he is a chameleon, capable of imitating both pauper and king whilst disappearing himself. But Greenblatt’s engaging prose puts the lie to this, showing how closely events elsewhere in Shakespeare’s life inevitably found a way of bleeding onto the page. I found Greenblatt’s analysis of Hamlet – and the way it reflected Shakespeare’s loss of his 11-year old son Hamnet – especially moving. Given the humanity on display in Shakespeare’s work, it would be more remarkable if his bereavement wasn’t reflected somewhere in the plays.
Greenblatt is also excellent at illustrating the wider context of Elizabethan England. The chapter describing Shakespeare’s first visit to London in the late 1580s captures some of the awe and astonishment that young Will must have felt, not least from seeing the decapitated heads of traitors which lined London Bridge. Greenblatt speculates that one of those heads may have belonged to a distant relation of Shakespeare – if so, the impact it would have had on him must have been extraordinary.
Greenblatt also expertly traces Shakespeare’s development as a writer and how the later plays show a much greater degree of ambiguity, reflecting the often tortured (and inexplicable) internal life of his most compelling characters. It’s an object lesson to all writers in the power of withholding of information, and relying on the audience’s intelligence to fill in the gaps. It also reflects Shakespeare’s increasing confidence as a dramatist, something I often do in the classroom when I compare Romeo and Juliet – where the prologue describes the ultimate outcome of the narrative (one already familiar to its audience) – with the more mature tragedy of Othello, which Shakespeare begins mid-conversation and challenges the viewer to catch up.
The book ends with a lengthy exploration of The Tempest, not a play I know particularly well. But Greenblatt’s analysis is especially powerful in describing how the magician Prospero’s giving up of his powers mirrors that of Shakespeare himself stepping away from the theatre: having conjured worlds and raised the dead the performance of a lifetime is over. Real life must return. Will in the World is also a very special kind of performance: required reading for anyone not just interested in the man behind the plays, but also the world that created him.
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