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    Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare
    Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare
    Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare
    Audiobook15 hours

    Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare

    Written by Stephen Greenblatt

    Narrated by Peter Jay Fernandez

    4.5/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    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. 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.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherRecorded Books, Inc.
    Release dateMar 10, 2008
    ISBN9781449802851
    Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare
    Author

    Stephen Greenblatt

    Stephen Greenblatt is The Class of 1932 Professor of English Literature at the University of California, Berkeley. Two of his publications, Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England and Representing the English Renaissance (of which he is the editor) are available in paperback from California. His most recent book is Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World (1991).

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    Reviews for Will in the World

    4.5/5

    41 ratings22 reviews

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    • 5/5
      This is an engrossing and convincing look at how William Shakespeare actually managed to have the knowledge needed to write his plays. It put me in Shakespeare's world better than anything I have read--though perhaps not as well as Shakespeare in Love!

      1 person found this helpful

    • 5/5
      I flew through this book. It is very enjoyable if you are interested in Shakespeare. This is my first biographical reading of Shakespeare. It should be my second or third considering the educated guesswork Greenblatt throws around in this book, but I survived. Greenblatt is very detailed. I wonder how many times he has read each play. His eye doesn't let much slip by him. There are so many interesting theories and explanations that this book makes me want to go on a Shakespeare hunt. The only qualm I have now is which Shakespeare book I will read next? There five gagillion!

      1 person found this helpful

    • 5/5
      Assuming the author is accurate this is one of the best explanations of the author I have read. Theattention to his early education,and the role drama and Latin played at his school and drama performed around him in his early years is especially interesting.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 4/5
      Critics have quibbled with some of Greenblatt's speculations about Shakespeare's life, but he delivers readable and detailed account of life in Elizabethan England. Read it before you attend a summer Shakespeare-in-the-Park production and you'll enjoy the experience a great deal more.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 5/5
      Elizabethan England is not really my period, but no English-speaking writer can be indifferent to Shakespeare. This book shows in careful detail how Shakespeare became the man he was (so far as genius can be explained by life experience), and how the plays he wrote proceeded from the things he saw and felt and did. I read it in sections before bedtime, and kept finding myself sitting up later than I'd meant to: each page leads to the next, each chapter to the one that follows, so smoothly and inevitably that I seldom got to bed much before midnight. Highly recommended.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 4/5
      Greenblatt is fascinating, brilliant, eurdite and yet accessible writer. His ability to bring the Elizabethan daily life alive is like watching a magic trick unfold, you dare not look away.However in the end that obsessive knowledge cripples him. Because Greenblatt is not just a scholar, he is the world's definitive Shakespeare fanboy, and deeply, **deeply** woven into this work is that unquestioning love. Which is fine, and his ability to share that passion is what makes this work compelling, but you are also aware that many questions are left unexplored, many assumptions unexplored, and I personally pined for that missed opportunity.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 4/5
      Will in the World didn't entirely convince me that William Shakespeare of Stratford on Avon is the author of the plays attributed to him. But it did convince me that he could have been, given Elizabethan education for males and the conventions for the theatre of the time. After all, genius can be found in people from all sorts of backgrounds.Greenblatt found links between Shakespeare's life and the sonnets and plays that strike me as plausible. I'm not a Shakespeare scholar and I'm not familiar with all his writings. But I will note that actual facts about his life are scarce.What I liked best about this book are the details provided about life in Elizabethan England. Greenblatt shares information on the religious upheavals, the views of women, and common, thoughtless violence of the culture. But in a lot of ways, their society was surprisingly modern. I'd recommend it for anyone interested in Shakespeare's plays or the historical period.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 5/5
      Superb and supple biography linking Shakespeare's life with the plays. A remarkable acheivement. Entertaining, readable, sustained momentum, one revelation after another. Outstanding book.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 4/5
      On June 29, 1613, the King’s Players put on Henry VIII at the Globe Theater in Southwark. Miniature cannons were fired during a scene representing Henry VIII attending a masque at Cardinal Wolsey’s house; some bits of wadding lodged in the thatched roof of the theater and set it on fire. Fortunately, the fire was slow, and there was plenty of time to rescue costumes, props, and manuscripts before the Globe burned to the ground. The rescued manuscripts included the only copies of Henry VI, Part 1; Comedy of Errors, Taming of the Shrew, Two Gentlemen of Verona, King John, Julius Caesar, As You Like It, Twelfth Night, All’s Well That Ends Well, Measure for Measure, Othello, Macbeth, Antony and Cleopatra, Coriolanus, Timon of Athens, Cymbeline, The Winter’s Tale, The Tempest, Henry VIII, and The Two Noble Kinsmen. That’s how close we came.Will in the World is an uneven but ultimately worthwhile biography of Shakespeare. The problem all Shakespeare biographers have – and what provides fuel for centuries of “Who Wrote Shakespeare?” theorists – is that other than the plays, poems and sonnets there is precious little documentation on the man. We know that he was baptized in Stratford on April 26, 1564 and that he was married, still in Stratford, sometime in late November or early December 1582. He had children in 1583 (daughter) and 1585 (son and daughter twins). Sometime soon after the birth of his twins he left Stratford and went to London, where there are sparse records of him; some business transactions, minor lawsuits, property tax receipts. He did well at his trade, amassing enough money to buy substantial properties in Stratford and a building in London. He retired to a comfortable manor in Stratford sometime between 1611 and 1616; he was buried in Stratford on April 25, 1616. This is all author Stephen Greenblatt has to work with; he has to fill it in with assumptions, hearsay from contemporaries and near-contemporaries, and, of course, inferences from the writings. Some of the assumptions, hearsay, and inference is reasonable; some is more speculative. Greenblatt goes furthest out on a limb trying to figure out what Shakespeare was doing as a child and young adult. There was a school in Stratford, and it’s reasonable Shakespeare attended it; he had to learn his small Latin and less Greek somewhere. He may have had some sort of run-in with a noble neighbor over poaching. His family fortunes seem to have declined; his father John, a glover, worked up gradually through public positions (one of his jobs was official ale taster) until he was bailiff (essentially mayor) of Stratford and then gradually loses prominence until he’s no longer mentioned in public records. Shakespeare’s marriage has provided a lot of material for speculation; he put up a £40 bond to avoid having the banns read and seems to have had marriage licenses for two different women (the question is if the William Shagspere licensed to marry Anne Hathwey on November 28 1582 is the same as the William Shaxpere licensed to marry Anne Whatley on November 27 1582, and if Anne Hathwey is the same as Anne Whatley; i.e., are there two, three, or four different people involved). The marriage question is one of the places I’d like to see some numbers; Greenblatt notes that the £40 bond represented a huge sum of money; two year’s salary for the Stratford schoolmaster. However, although he explains why the bond was necessary (you were supposed to read the banns on three successive Sundays to see if anyone objected, and Anne Hathaway was already three months pregnant) he doesn’t say how common this was; were such bonds routine or rare?. Similarly he proposes that the name “Shakespeare” in its numerous orthographic variants was common for the place and time, to provide a possible explanation for the multiple marriage licenses, he doesn’t say how common; are there a couple of other Shakespeares, or a dozen, or tens, or hundreds? Given the scanty evidence, Greenblatt accepts the relatively common position that Shakespeare and his wife didn’t really get along. The general idea is that her pregnancy made it a fowling-piece marriage; her family was relatively well-to-do and would have pressured the Shakespeares to do the right thing. They did have children, of course; however after the twins were born in 1585 there aren’t any more, even after Shakespeare’s only son died in 1596. There’s no evidence that Shakespeare even visited Stratford between 1586 and his retirement to there in 1611 or after. A lot is made of the fact that all he left to Anne was his “second best bed”; in fact Greenblatt notes that nothing was left to her in the original will at all; the bed bequest was added in a later codicil, as if Shakespeare had to be nudged to remember her with something.Greenblatt doesn’t know quite what to do with Shakespeare in between his wedding and his arrival in London (or even exactly when that arrival was). Was he working as a glover, working as a tutor in some noble household, wandering around the country, or what? There’s a whole chapter, based on sparse to nonexistent evidence, suggesting that Shakespeare was up in the north of England working in some capacity (presumably tutor) for a cryptoCatholic family. Not impossible but not well supported either.Once Shakespeare’s in London, Greenblatt can start using his writings as evidence for various hypotheses. The catch, of course, is Shakespeare’s writings are like the Bible; if you are sufficiently determined and willing to disregard context you can find support for just about anything you want. Thus the questions Catholic/Protestant, misogynist/philogynist, straight/gay/bi are all discussed with support for one position or another drawn from the plays/poems/sonnets but there’s no real conclusion.Still, there’s a lot of good stuff here – background on the religious controversy in England; James I’s fear of witchcraft, and the role of actors in contemporary life (I learned that “role” is derived from “roll”; because play manuscripts were bulky and scarce, actors were given a roll of paper with only their lines and entry cues rather than the whole play). I also discovered there are several “unknown” Shakespeare plays floating around; Sir Thomas More, which exists in a single manuscript copy penned in multiple hands (Hand “D” is supposed to be Shakespeare); The Tragedy of Gowrie, banned after two performances and with no extant copies; The Two Noble Kinsmen, a collaboration between Shakespeare and John Fletcher; and the lost (maybe; might be a play renamed as The Second Maiden’s Tragedy) History of Cardenio, another Fletcher/Shakespeare collaboration.Worth it, then, just to see the range of speculation available for the Bard of Avon.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 4/5
      The early life of William Shakespeare.
    • 4/5
      This biography of William Shakespeare will not appeal to everyone, and parts of its ~400 pages did not appeal to me, but I am still very glad that I read it.There is so much that is not known about Shakespeare but this author has done his research and also done his best to tie all the parts together. What I loved most about the book was seeing how so much of Shakespeare's writing reflected his life. The influence of the ongoing war between Catholicism and Protestantism, of his rather odd relationship with his wife, of his day-to-day life is apparent in his writing, and made his writings all the more meaningful to me.What I didn't like is that some parts just plain bored me. There was too much detail in some areas for my tastes, and some parts I skimmed over. Occasionally, the book was a little too pedantic for me.I read this as part of a group read for a book discussion group, and most of the people didn't finish the book, really did not care for it. It seems that the ones who did finish it, those who did like it, are either more familiar with Shakespeare's works or with theater in general. I loved it for how it made some of the plays I've read come alive for me, and I'm sure will add to my enjoyment as I read other plays and sonnets. Still, some parts were just too much dry toast.
    • 5/5
      An informative written journey on what external factors contributed to some of the greatest plays ever written.
    • 5/5
      Fascinating. Wish I had read it whilst I was teaching English lit.
    • 4/5
      Few -- very few -- historical documents exist that would allow biographers to bring us the life of William Shakespeare. Reading this book by Stephen Greenblatt, I was struck with the thought of how much history we may have already lost by not telling and writing down the stories of our ancestors, famous or otherwise.And Shakespeare is famous. So much so, that the lack of hard "evidence" hasn't dissuaded scholars from attempting to chronical his life; nor readers to peruse their writings. Stephen Greenblatt has studied what little evidence there is, and accounts of life in England during Shakespeare's lifetime. He has analyzed Shakespeare's writings deeply. From all of this, he constructs a plausible account of Shakespeare's life. Yes, it is partly -- at times, highly -- speculative. Unavoiable, under the circumstances. But, reading this book has given me a much deeper understanding of the context for Shakespeare's writing and I know I will enjoy watching his plays performed so much more for having done so.
    • 3/5
      A bit frustrating, really. My brain is too scientific to find vague references in a monologue given by an unlikable character to be indicative of *anything*, much less who his drinking buddies were. But I appreciate the effort, the breadth of sources, and the fact that just about every play and a large number of sonnets get referenced--it is a good way of humanizing him, and certainly got me interested in a few of the plays I hadn't read. I think I might have enjoyed it more in bits and pieces--read the Macbeth chapter while I read the play. A potential for re-read, even though the overall book didn't really do it for me.
    • 2/5
      Could have been good, but was filled with unwarranted speculation on all aspects of Shakespeare's life. Stick to the facts, please.
    • 4/5
      Some stretches based purely on literary interpretation, but overall enjoyable and thought-provoking
    • 5/5
      wdewysockie wrote my review for me. Read this book, and enjoy it, whatever its flights of fancy may be. It's a terrific read.
    • 2/5
      Neither a history book nor a work of fiction, but the author's fantasy about what Shakespeare's life might have been like. The author lost me at the end of Chapter 4: too much idle fantasy when I had hoped for a window onto Will's world. Bill Bryson's book on Shakespeare is better: all history, plus his self-deprecating humor.
    • 2/5
      Nature Abhors a Vacuum: “Will in the World – How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare” by Stephen Greenblatt Is there a Shakespearean lover who does not know that there is precious little actual information about Shakespeare and as a result there are all these theories speculating about who he really was? I’ve read a few of them, and I’ve always considered these to be crap that show us more about the enthusiast of the theory than they do about Shakespeare. I have read many books about Shakespeare, but none have provoked a more mixed and reaction in me than Greenblatts’. There are some great weaknesses. Read on.

      As I was reading this what came into my mind was that celebrated statement, I think by AL Rowse that he was prepared to stake his reputation on the claim that all the Dark Lady from the sonnets 127-154 was in fact Emilia Lanier. Never mind that it’s never been clear that Lanier was a dark lady, let alone the Dark Lady – or indeed, whether or not there was a real Dark Lady at all in real life. By Jove, what if Shakespeare actually made the whole thing up? What if Greenblatt wanted to give Rowse a run for his money when it comes to reinventing Shakespeare’s life? I’m quite astonished that it found a publisher at all let alone that someone paid close to a million dollars to have it published. I’m not talking about being littered with spelling mistakes or grammatical errors; the worst is the utter lack of scholarly accuracy (e.g., Shakespeare hating Anne Hathaway, Shakespeare’s Anti-Jewishness, the meeting in Lancashire between Edmund Campion and the teenage Shakespeare, Falstaff as being a tribute both to Robert Greene and to Shakespeare's own father, the attempt at simplifying and normalizing the complex sexuality of Shakespeare, etc.).

      If you're into Shakespeare, read on.
    • 4/5
      I don't necessarily agree with all of Greenblatt's arguments, but he creates here a worthy portrait and discussion to add to the vast database of information and theories on Shakespeare's life and times.
    • 4/5
      The author brings together little-known historical facts and elements of Shakespeare's plays and connects them to his life and the prevailing 16th Century environment in which he lived. This book provides the best description of life for the common people in 16th Century England that I've ever been exposed to. The book also makes Shakespeare's plays very accessible to the modern reader and exposes the extraordinary depth of humanity depicted by his plays. Read in May, 2007