Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare (Anniversary Edition)

Stephen Greenblatt

May 2010 · W. W. Norton & Company

About this ebook

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.

Ratings and reviews

There are many reviews of this book which speak about the logical leaps made by Stephen Greenblatt. Greenblatt tends to extrapolate from the facts available and make certain guesses, but this is not simply the trait of the author. Greenblatt comes from the New Historical school of literary criticism. In this school, this is the norm and the narrativizing of events is also common. It is fine to criticize this approach to literary criticism, but to admonish this scholar for following his modus operandi is ridiculous. This book is not a simple biography. It is ABOUT conjecture. That being said, this book is beautifully written and well-researched. If nothing else, the reader can gain a great knowledge of the historical context in which Shakespeare came into his own. It is also fun to imagine the possibilities Greenblatt lays out for the reader. Over all, this is a fascinating read and I would recommend it to even a casual reader of Shakespeare.

About the author

Stephen Greenblatt (Ph.D. Yale) is Cogan University Professor of the Humanities at Harvard University. Also General Editor of The Norton Anthology of English Literature, he is the author of eleven books, including Tyrant, The Rise and Fall of Adam and Eve: The Story that Created Us, The Swerve: How the World Became Modern (winner of the 2011 National Book Award and the 2012 Pulitzer Prize); Shakespeare's Freedom; Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare; Hamlet in Purgatory; Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World; Learning to Curse: Essays in Early Modern Culture; and Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare. He has edited seven collections of criticism, including Cultural Mobility: A Manifesto, and is a founding coeditor of the journal Representations. His honors include the MLA’s James Russell Lowell Prize, for both Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England and The Swerve, the Sapegno Prize, the Distinguished Humanist Award from the Mellon Foundation, the Wilbur Cross Medal from the Yale University Graduate School, the William Shakespeare Award for Classical Theatre, the Erasmus Institute Prize, two Guggenheim Fellowships, and the Distinguished Teaching Award from the University of California, Berkeley. He was president of the Modern Language Association of America and is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and Arcadia—Accademia Letteraria Italiana.