Shakespeare, the mystery
Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare
By Stephen Greenblatt
Norton, 430 pp., illustrated, $26.95
Vividly written, richly detailed, and insightful from first chapter to last, Stephen Greenblatt's fascinating biography of Shakespeare is certain to secure a place among the essential studies of the greatest of all writers. But ''Will in the World" is also a disquieting book, because ultimately it is based less on hard fact than on conjecture and speculation, much of it credible and convincing, much of it not.
The materials for a Shakespeare biography are extremely limited. We have some documents, records, property transactions, and brief references to Shakespeare by his contemporaries, but not a great deal beyond that. Except for his last will and testament, there are no personal papers, no diary or letters, no manuscript of a play or poem in the author's hand. So little is concretely known that a few scholars, amateur historians, sleuths, and skeptics have even made the giddy but unjustified claim that someone else -- Francis Bacon, the earl of Oxford, and Queen Elizabeth are among the nominees -- is the real author of Shakespeare's plays.
A professor of English at Harvard and an authority on Renaissance literature, Greenblatt possesses a deep and extensive knowledge of the period, and every reader will benefit from his re-creation of the Elizabethan and Jacobean contexts. He adroitly sketches the schooling in Stratford that Shakespeare likely received, keenly describes the sights and sounds of the town of Stratford itself, takes graphic note of the suspicion and persecution that Catholics faced (Shakespeare's father and mother came from Catholic families), and compellingly depicts the lurid, thrilling, and in many respects frightening city of London, with its ''all-purpose entertainment zone" of theaters, musical performances, dances, bloody sports, and public executions.
Greenblatt also provides an illuminating account of the theatrical scene, the actor's trade, and the challenge faced by playwrights of the era, who labored for companies that required a large and constantly changing repertoire of ''approximately twenty new plays per year in addition to some twenty plays carried over from previous seasons." And he expertly fills in the literary and cultural backgrounds -- the medieval morality plays and mystery cycles, the seasonal festivals and pageants, the folk customs, the rustic shows and entertainments, the impact and influence of Christopher Marlowe (author of ''Tamburlaine" and ''Doctor Faustus"), and the splendor of Elizabeth's and James I's courts.
Just as rewarding are Greenblatt's scrutinies of a number of Shakespeare's most memorable characters, including Malvolio, Falstaff, Shylock, Hamlet, Macbeth, and Prospero. He examines Shakespeare's language with sensitivity and subtlety, and in each instance connects the character to a major issue, incident, or controversy in society and culture. He links Malvolio, for example, to the nature of the Renaissance ''gentleman," Shylock to Elizabethan attitudes toward Jews, and Hamlet to the Catholic conception of purgatory, the horrid place between heaven and hell from which the ghost who is Hamlet's father emerges.
Shakespeare himself, however, proves harder for Greenblatt to lay hold of, and that's because nearly everything that a biographer needs is, in Shakespeare's case, missing. In 1569, ''for the first time in his life," Greenblatt states, ''William Shakespeare watched a play," standing with his father as the two viewed a touring troupe of actors who had come to Stratford. This makes for an enthralling story. But there is no evidence that Shakespeare was present, just as there is no evidence for Greenblatt's supposition that Shakespeare witnessed the queen's ''royal progress" to the Midlands in 1575; no evidence that Shakespeare's father suffered from alcoholism; and no evidence that Shakespeare began his dramatic career as a hired man to a playing company.
It is possible that the young Shakespeare was a schoolmaster in the household of Catholic families in the north of England, and that as a result he was drawn into the world of Tudor religious conflict, intrigue, conspiracy, arrest, trial, torture, and capital punishment, especially the grim episode involving the Jesuit scholar Edmund Campion, executed in 1581. But Greenblatt cannot prove this, so even as he brings the scenes and settings marvelously alive, he finally has to rest his claims on sentences like this one: ''Let us imagine the two of them sitting together then, the sixteen-year-old fledgling poet and actor and the forty-year-old Jesuit."
Similarly, it is indeed possible that Shakespeare's marriage to Anne Hathaway was as disturbed and painful as Greenblatt contends. After all, until his retirement and return to Stratford in his early 40s, Shakespeare spent most of his married life in London, away from his wife and children. But, as Greenblatt concedes, between Shakespeare's wedding license and his last will and testament there is nothing that reveals or implies anything about his feelings toward Anne.
From time to time Greenblatt makes clear that he knows he is coming close to giving a local habitation and a name to airy nothings, as when he considers the story that Shakespeare fled Stratford and made his way to London because he was in trouble for deer poaching. ''The question," says Greenblatt, ''is not the degree of evidence but rather the imaginative life that the incident has." Later, as he identifies the possible real-life figures to whom Shakespeare may be referring in the sonnets, he concedes he is ''groping in the darkness of biographical speculation."
So why even attempt a biography of Shakespeare? Because we crave contact with the person whose powers of perception, representations of consciousness, and uses of language exceed those of which any mortal seems capable. But, as a person, Shakespeare is beyond our grasp. ''Will in the World" is thus a wonderful work of the imagination, an engaging and risk-taking evocation of a Shakespeare who may have been the man whom Stephen Greenblatt describes but who, quite simply, may not have been that man at all.
William E. Cain teaches in the English Department at Wellesley College.
