Book Review: Will in the World

For someone who is as poorly initiated to Shakespeare as I am, "Will in the World - How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare" by Stephen Greenblatt was a tough read, though I imagine that for someone more familiar with the plays this would be a ripping good read.

Very little is well documented about Shakespeare's life, so all Shakespeare biographies are even more speculative than most. In "Will in the World", Greenblatt attempts to piece together the story of Shakespeare's formative experiences by inference, as much from his theatrical writings as from the sparse letters, newspaper articles, and city records that suggest facts about Shakespeare's life.

Therefore, much of the book amounts to a forensic interpretation of Shakespeare's plays as a reflection of who he was. For example, Greenblatt speculates extensively that the recurrent character Falstaff could in fact a rendering of a contemporary poet and associate who made quite an impression on young Shakespeare (Robert Greene.)

But because the book relies so heavily on correlating imagery from the plays with known history of the times during which Shakespeare wrote them, its difficult for someone like me to have much confidence in Greenblatt's inferences. It comes off as so speculative that it left me wishing it had been written as a historical fiction.

Shakespeare is on my Lifetime Reading List; perhaps after I've studies the plays a bit more "Will in the World" will do a better job bring Will to life for me.