A review of Stephen Greenblatt’s "Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare"
Of course the book was full to the brim with vast research, racy
narrative and deep intimacy with all the Bard ever wrote. Of course my literary spinal pants were wet for most of the reading time.
Was that deserved?
Absolutely.
Greenblatt did not, it ought to be noted, make a novel discovery of any
documents or personal letters of Will's. However, he re-considered the
remaining documents we have, most of which are estate purchases, which
nevertheless tells a lot about the great sweet-tongued poet as a man. He didn't
invest his wealth into the normal activities as any a first-rate intellectual
would do, such as collecting books as Jonson or Donne did. Shakespeare sought
to enlarge his secular possessions in an accordance with his father's business
ventures' legacy and to rise in the Elizabethan hierarchy, of which dramatists
comprised the bottom. Unlike his father, Shakespeare succeeded in amassing
lucrative farm lands in and around Stratford-upon-Avon and unlike his father he
managed to secure a grant of arms signifying a noble family (after receiving
the required amount, the ‘clerks’ would “discover” a grant of arms filed
“somewhere” in the family’s papers, in other words, Shakespeare bought his way
into the petty aristocracy).
Was a
new biography of William Shakespeare really needed? No. But this was not a
traditional biography. It read insanely well and it was a book marked by a
crafty and heartfelt subjective stamp; in other words, Greenblatt used
conjecture a lot.
Greenblatt
imagined the most compelling case he could make about this classical
rags-to-riches story of an uneducated son of a glover. He imagined how
Shakespeare absorbed everything he
saw and experienced and stored it into his perfect memory. Greenblatt always
discusses a particular event from Will's life or a particular and supposed
relation or emotion of his, in connection with one or more of his works; how he
was able to write about great souls based on his mates, on the commonplace.
Greenblatt makes the case that Shakespeare based the great character Falstaff
on the rakish dramatist Robert Green, as an elegy to Green’s premature death.
Or that the painful musings of Hamlet were an expression of Will’s grief over
his son's Hamnet's death, or “the deepest expression of his being”. However, he
wrote Hamlet 5 years after his boy passed on.
This
is of course far-fetched and proves how conjectured and full of
wishful-thinking the biography is, nevertheless the points Greenblatt wished to
make were executed brilliantly and rivetingly. As the Guardian's reviewer of
the book Gary Taylor admits, “What matters is not the true story, but a good
story.” Greenblatt would make a great salesman.
Though
Greenblatt’s final great point don’t even require to be pitched; that
Shakespeare's greatness in depicting human experience was partly rooted in
his not forgetting ‘where he came from’; that he made clowns
companions to kings – that he never forgot we're all an absurd bunch of mortals
and he sung that fact like a God.
Jaromír
Lelek
