Product Description

"So engrossing, clearheaded, and lucid that its arrival is not just welcome but cause for celebration."—Dan Cryer, Newsday

Stephen Greenblatt, the charismatic Harvard professor who "knows more about Shakespeare than Ben Jonson or the Dark Lady did" (John Leonard, Harper's), has written a biography that enables us to see, hear, and feel how an acutely sensitive and talented boy, surrounded by the rich tapestry of Elizabethan life—full of drama and pageantry, and also cruelty and danger—could have become the world's greatest playwright.

Bringing together little-known historical facts and little-noticed elements of Shakespeare's plays, Greenblatt makes inspired connections between the life and the works and delivers "a dazzling and subtle biography" (Richard Lacayo, Time). Readers will experience Shakespeare's vital plays again as if for the first time, but with greater understanding and appreciation of their extraordinary depth and humanity.

A best book of the year: The New York Times 10 Best Books of 2004 • Time magazine's #1 Best Nonfiction Book • A Washington Post Book World Rave • An Economist Best Book • A San Francisco Chronicle Best Book • A Christian Science Monitor Best Book • A Chicago Tribune Best Book • A Pittsburgh Post-Gazette Best Book • NPR's Maureen Corrigan's Best

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #23704 in Books
• Published on: 2005-09-19
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 384 pages

Review
Startlingly good—the most complexly intelligent and sophisticated study of the life and work taken together that I have ever read. -- Adam Gopnik, The New Yorker

About the Author
Stephen Greenblatt is the John Cogan University Professor of the Humanities at Harvard University, editor of The Norton Shakespeare, and prize-winning author of many academic books, including Hamlet in Purgatory.

Customer Reviews

Appreciating Will
Will in the World enters the crowded arena of Shakespeare biographies with a bang. Many reviews have complained about the speculative nature of the text and the fact that Greenblatt takes "liberties" with many details of Shakespeare`s life. Well, how could he not?
Don't read this book for a run of the mill biography. Read it for its interesting analysis of Shakespeare's works and their possible connections to his life and values. Appreciation of biographies of Shakespeare are only as valuable as the reader's knowledge and interest in the subject's own plethora of plays and poems. If you don't enjoy Shakespeare's art and are not interested in receiving some prized human insight into his complex works then don't read this. It is that simple. The value of this text is in how convincingly and seamlessly Greenblatt recreates a complex, ambiguous , and richly textured life of the world's greatest writer by demonstrating a close reading of the world's greatest literary works. Any biography that enhances my appreciation for the works of Shakespeare has done its job, and this bio certainly accomplished that!
Greenblatt especially shines in his detailing of many historical events that receive little attention in the typical American education, and in his sublime rendering of Shakespeare's greatest accomplishment, his creation of Hamlet and his perfecting of the interior voice of character in dramatic literature.
An eminently readable and well organized text. If you read it and then rethink, and reread, some of Shakespeare's works than I am sure Greenblatt has met his goal.

GREENBLATT MAKES WILL NEFARIOUS TO SELL BOOKS
Despite a strong first half, this book diminishes in the second into a mere hack work instead of a first-rate scholarly piece largely due to Greenblatt's decision to become an A.S.S. [another secular scholar ]
and aim at high sales;instead of remaining focused on the greatest writer to ever live, he spices the narrative with little-known saucy tidbits such as the "Dark Lady "of the sonnets was a negress and Will really DID have a thing for his daughter. These lurid details on top of Greenblatt's firm conviction Shakespeare was bi-sexual only besmirch the great playwright's reputation. To this end, this piece becomes just another post -freudian pscyhoanalysis obssessed with sex. Miss it if you can and read a respectable bio published when scholars had integrity and purposively did not destroy their heroes because of Freud.

A slew of theories
The book is well-written overall. My main disappointment arose when trying to sort out fact from fiction and fiction from conjecture. The author makes a lot of inferences based off of the little information about Shakespeare's life. It seems a lot like PCR (polymerse chain reaction), where a little DNA is taken and amplified so that there is more to work with. This is not a great way to write about a person's life. Unfortunately, it does not end there. He will go on for pages about what may or may not be true. At the end of chapter two, the conclusion was that Shakespeare may have been either Roman Catholic or Protestant. I do not feel that 20+ pages is necessary for a subject with no real known answer. Overall, if one has the time to spend sorting through fact, fiction, and conjecture, there is some good information that can be found.