Far Away Wills

I remember the moment that I first knew for a fact that there was no Santa Claus. It’s a cliché really, the kind of a story that you see all the time on TV and in films. You see something you really like, you ask for it for Christmas, you really behave yourself for the whole month of December. Then you wake up on Christmas morning, creep downstairs full of hope and trepidation that it’ll be there waiting for you under the tree (which you really know, of course, it will be), and then: disaster. It’s a no-show and you’re whole childhood is ruined. No present, no Santa. And what was the one present that I really wanted more than anything else that year? Stephen Greenblatt’s biography of Shakespeare, Will in the World.

Unfortunate, but true. Sort of.

I first saw this book during my Erasmus year in Rome, before Christmas 2004. We could get English-language newspapers in Largo di Torre Argentina, and would usually get The Sunday Times. Their Culture section reviewed it fairly favourably, I think, but in particular I remember being struck by the idea of the book as appealing to me. At this stage I had no real notions of what New Historicism entailed, and I liked the novelty of the detective work involved in piecing together someone’s life from their writings. So I thought I’d ask for it for Christmas: I was pretty sure I wouldn’t easily get it in Rome, and being on Erasmus I had plenty of time to read outside the curriculum (there not really being one to speak of). By then I was 20, and so had outgrown the stage of being a predictable gift recipient - Lego didn't quite cut it anymore - so I thought I could make things easy for the parents and narrow down the search. ‘What would you like for Christmas?’ ‘Will in the World’. Sorted.

But no. I swear to God I have rarely been so disappointed. It might seem a little dramatic, but this was all I wanted. All I asked for. I don’t even remember what I actually got, that’s how clouded my memory has become with the outrage of being denied my rightful present.

So three long years passed, and I went Greenblattless. I remember a pang hitting me right in the stomach during final year English Renaissance Literature lectures when his concept of “Renaissance self-fashioning” was pounded into our heads, but aside from that I remained fairly uneducated as to who Shakespeare might really be underneath it all. I think I was too scarred to go out and buy it myself.

Eventually though, enough was enough. I brought up my trauma with my mother in about November, and on December 25^th, 2007, I was presented with a bright shiny copy all of my own. Happy days.

All told Will in the World is very entertaining. As mentioned, Greenblatt’s aim is to produce a portrait of the playwright armed only with his plays, poems, and whatever scanty contemporary information survives. Now, when it comes to Shakespeare’s extant work, there are plenty of people out there who know everything there is to know. Plays and sonnets have been analysed and reanalysed, parallels have been drawn, motifs outlined, and all in all Shakespeare has proved a renewable source of academic energy. But when it comes to Shakespeare the person, we know nothing. Greenblatt knows no different, and doesn’t profess to know any different, but if there’s anybody that can claim some sort of bragging rights on the subject, he can. Though he mightn't know anything for sure, what he does succeed in doing is providing us with real insight into the times in which Shakespeare lived and how they must have inevitably informed his work. While we have very little surviving documentation dealing with the personal life of Shakespeare, we do know a lot about the period that saw the end of Elizabeth I’s reign and the beginning of that of James I, during which time he was writing. Greenblatt introduces us to the world that Shakespeare inhabited, and to events which he must certainly have heard about, if not have been present at himself. We know a great deal about his illustrious circle of friends, the university wits that counted Jonson and Marlowe among their number, and as such can glean how Shakespeare fitted into their ranks, or didn’t fit, as the case may have been. And such is the book: a series of cultural episodes from which the main character is unfortunately absent. It’s all a bit Becketty, really…

What little documentation we do have is almost entirely of a legal bent, recording property purchases and disputes over moneys owed. Famously we have Will’s will, in which he leaves his wife, the much-maligned Anne Hathaway, his second-best bed. We do know a little about the playwright’s father, the prominent citizen and one-time bailiff of Stratford, John Shakespeare, and much is made of what influence this character must have had on his son both as a boy and as a man. Greenblatt pores over all these documents, both those directly related to William as well as the more tenuous connections, reaching beyond the legalese into what must have inspired so prolific a playwright and poet.

For the most part he is very convincing, but it must be said that at times Greenblatt is reaching for connections that he wants to see rather than ones actually present. One section of the book dealing with the suppression of Catholics in Elizabethan England is particularly interesting from a cultural point of view. In this chapter Greenblatt describes what it was like to live during a very confusing time for English Christianity. The approved religion of the state had flipped between Catholicism and Anglicanism every few years since Henry VIII decided to ditch his wife, and though during Elizabeth’s reign people’s outward allegiances were to Protestantism, it doesn’t take much to guess that people would have kept up Catholic practices in secret, as was the case. Greenblatt recounts tales of various crusading Catholics striving to uphold the damned Papist faith behind closed doors. We are even given a brief portrait of the lead up to the Catholic gunpowder plotters’ failed attack on the Houses of Parliament and James I in 1605. This is all very interesting, but Greenblatt’s attempt to draw Shakespeare into the mix is tenuous at best.

While Shakespeare’s father was most likely a clandestine Catholic, and William would certainly have been initially raised as Catholic, there is little evidence to suggest that Shakespeare himself was particularly militant about the old faith. Catholicism does raise its head in his works where perhaps it shouldn’t, notably in Hamlet, when the dead king describes his daily torments in the decidedly Catholic purgatory (described only as a ‘prison-house’, perhaps to get the play past censoring eyes of the Master of the Revels), but that is all we can say with any conviction. Based on some fairly spurious evidence, Greenblatt invents an extended visit to the north of England for the young Shakespeare where he would have been party to secret meetings organised by militant Jesuit missionaries. Undoubtedly such meetings occurred, but whether Shakespeare himself ever attended any is another thing.

Though not thoroughly convinced by some of the particulars of Shakespeare’s life put forward by Greenblatt, I did very much enjoy Will in the World. As would be expected of such an eminent academic, the book is exhaustively researched, and the depth of Greenblatt’s knowledge of the period is extraordinary. Greenblatt himself would be first to admit that the book is largely nothing more than guesswork, and this is made fairly explicit in the chapter dealing with the sonnets. Here he describes just how far we are outside the close-knit contemporary group that would have been fully ‘in’ on the sonnets’ countless allusions and flirty hints, hints that we, from this distance, simply cannot get. The detective work is a lot of fun, and sometimes very rewarding, but in the end we can’t be certain of anything about the man. They say never meet your heroes, and I suppose it’s probably a blessing that we never can with Shakespeare. We won't ever know his secrets, but then again, he won’t ever disappoint.