Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare

by Stephen Greenblatt

Overview

Named One of Esquire's 50 Best Biographies of All Time

The Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award finalist, reissued with a new afterword for the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death.

A young man from a small provincial town moves to London in the late 1580s and, in a remarkably short time, becomes the greatest playwright not of his age alone but of all time. How is an achievement of this magnitude to be explained? Stephen Greenblatt brings us down to earth to see, hear, and feel how an acutely sensitive and talented boy, surrounded by the rich tapestry of Elizabethan life, could have become the world’s greatest playwright.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780393352603
Publisher:	Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.
Publication date:	04/04/2016
Edition description:	Anniversary Edition
Pages:	464
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.30(h) x 1.10(d)

About the Author

Stephen Greenblatt is Cogan University Professor of the Humanities at Harvard University. He has written extensively on English Renaissance literature and acts as general editor of The Norton Anthology of English Literature and The Norton Shakespeare. He is the author of fourteen books, including The Swerve, winner of the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award, and Will in the World, a Pulitzer Prize finalist.

Hometown:

Cambridge, Massachusetts

Date of Birth:

November 7, 1943

Place of Birth:

Cambridge, Massachusetts

Education:

B.A., Yale University, 1964; B.A., Cambridge University, 1966; Ph.D., Yale University, 1969

Table of Contents

Preface 11

Acknowledgments 15

A Note to the Reader 17

Chapter 1 Primal Scenes 23

Chapter 2 The Dream of Restoration 54

Chapter 3 The Great Fear 87

Chapter 4 Wooing, Wedding, and Repenting 118

Chapter 5 Crossing the Bridge 149

Chapter 6 Life in the Suburbs 175

Chapter 7 Shakescene 199

Chapter 8 Master-Mistress 226

Chapter 9 Laughter at the Scaffold 256

Chapter 10 Speaking with the Dead 288

Chapter 11 Bewitching the King 323

Chapter 12 The Triumph of the Everyday 356

Afterword 391

Bibliographical Notes 399

Index 417

Editorial Reviews

"Dazzling and subtle."

Time - Richard Lacayo

"Vividly written, richly detailed, and insightful from first chapter to last…certain to secure a place among the essential studies of the greatest of all writers."

Boston Sunday Globe - William E. Cain

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

Newsday - Dan Cryer

"Greenblatt’s masterful biography is like traveling back in time to see firsthand how a small-town Englishman became the greatest writer of all time."

Esquire - Adam Morgan

"A magnificent achievement."

Wall Street Journal - Denis Donoghue

There are no obscure invocations of the French philosopher Michel Foucault in these pages, no pseudo-Marxist readings of Shakespeare's plays. Instead, in the opening sections of this book, Mr. Greenblatt succinctly and vividly conjures up the Elizabethan world in which young Will came of age, showing how the religious and political upheavals of the day, as well as contemporaneous aesthetic conventions, shaped his sensibility and his work.
— The New York Times

Michiko Kakutani

… Greenblatt has unusual talents. He is learned, he marshals an enormous amount of detail in the book, and he depicts the fabric of Elizabethan life, both its paranoia and festivities, compellingly. He is a masterful storyteller; his prose is elegant and subtle, if sometimes slippery; and his imagination is rich and interesting. When he focuses more exclusively on Shakespeare's texts, as he does in his chapter on the sonnets, he is a brilliant critic. One can see why Will in the World is a nominee for the National Book Award.
— The Washington Post

Arthur Kirsch

Greenblatt takes the bits we do know, nourishes them with a thorough understanding of the Elizabethan world Shakespeare inhabited, and then coaxes each bud of information to flower within our understanding of the plays.... Only a churl would be unpersuaded by it.

Laura Miller - Salon

An exceptionally well-told tale, an engrossing page-turner, in fact.

Robert Hurwitt - San Francisco Chronicle

The most complexly intelligent and sophisticated, and yet the most keenly enthusiastic, study of the life and work taken together that I have ever read.

Adam Gopnik - The New Yorker

Greenblatt's revelatory book pays tribute to the glorious democracy of Shakespeare's art by the openness and elegance of his own writing style.

Maureen Corrigan - "Fresh Air"

At last, the book Shakespeare has deserved: a brilliant book written by a virtual eyewitness who understands how a playwright takes the stuff of his life and his world and makes it into theater.
”

Charles Mee

Greenblatt offers many facts about Shakespeare’s times, many wild conjectures about Shakespeare’s life, and many specious analyses about Shakespeare’s art. Written divertingly, if not convincingly, the book is yet another critical exegesis on the Bard of Avon’s life and times. What sets it apart is the engaging performance of narrator Peter Jay Fernandez, whose obvious relish for this material--especially the excerpts from the plays--is evident throughout. He is not the most insightful or graceful interpreter of the poet’s writings, but he is by no means the worst either. He enjoys quoting the Elizabethan sources, and his relish is infectious. Those who may miss a British accent should be reminded that Shakespeare and his fellow players did not have what we today recognize as a British accent. Y.R. © AudioFile 2005, Portland, Maine

FEB/MAR 05 - AudioFile