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Thursday, Nov 26, 2009
In Stephen Greenblatt's marvelous new study, William Shakespeare emerges as a drab and conventional burgher who somehow became the greatest writer the world has ever known.
Sep 27, 2004 | In the 1998 movie "Shakespeare in Love," the most recent pop culture incarnation of the bard is a doe-eyed swain with writer's block who drapes himself fetchingly over a series of rough-hewn benches, bemoaning his lack of a muse, until his art and his career are saved by the love of Gwyneth Paltrow. The film's historical details, from the closure of London theaters during plague outbreaks to the layout of the Rose itself (not the Globe; that was later), are solid. However, the main premise is not only sappy but preposterous. A few years later, in a much lower-profile documentary called "Much Ado About Something," conspiracy theorists explained why they believe that William Shakespeare was merely a front man for fellow playwright Christopher Marlowe, who supposedly only pretended to die in 1593, the same year "Shakespeare in Love" is set. Not so sappy, but still preposterous.
There's plenty room for such speculation, though, because we know so little about Shakespeare. No letters or diaries have ever been found; in fact, there's only one sample of his handwriting. What we have is a bunch of official documents (christening records, bills of sale, etc.), a few coy references in contemporary texts and a bunch of dubious gossip that mostly dates to the years after his death. On this handful of old bones scholars have gnawed for over 400 years, and it's hard to believe that any more flavor can be got from them.
Nevertheless, believe it. Stephen Greenblatt's "Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare" is such a graceful effort to spin a life out of a few scraps of paper that only a churl would be unpersuaded by it. Greenblatt, a professor of the humanities at Harvard, 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. A pageant performed for the Queen in Leicester in 1575, the squalid death of a fellow poet, the discovery and routing of the 1605 plot to blow up the Parliament House -- each of these undergoes what Shakespeare called (in a lovely phrase, sadly spoiled these days by journalistic overuse) "a sea change, into something rich and strange."
It's not the precise accuracy of any particular theory -- for example the suggestion that Shylock was inspired by the Queen's Portuguese-Jewish physician -- that Greenblatt makes so persuasive. Rather, he convinces you that he has sunk so deeply into Shakespeare's time, mind and imagination that his guesses must be better than anyone else's. As a founder of New Historicism, a once controversial, now widely accepted school of literary criticism holding that writers works are profoundly shaped by the physical, cultural and political worlds they live in, Greenblatt has plenty of experience in this department.
Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare
By Stephen Greenblatt
W.W. Norton
384 pages
Slavering bardolatry is always a peril in such projects, and no doubt Greenblatt hung a photo of Harold Bloom over his desk while he worked: Exhibit A of Where Not to Go. By contrast, his own account of Shakespeare the man remains as grounded as the playwright's vision, described by Greenblatt as "bound to the familiar and the intimate," so that it "never soared altogether above the quotidian, never entered the august halls of the metaphysical and shut the door on the everyday." Stars wiped from his eyes, Greenblatt gives us a Shakespeare who can't fail to stir -- he's still Shakespeare, after all -- but also a writer who presents some unsettling questions about the nature of creative genius.
"Shakespeare in Love," on the other hand, offers an easy, pleasing dream about great artists. It tells us they are just like the rest of us, only more so. Because Shakespeare's words have the power to flood us with overwhelming sensations -- both the recollection of our own strongest feelings and those transports we only experience in the presence of made beauty -- people, perhaps naturally, want him to have been a grand and passionate man. According to the film, the only force capable of propelling Shakespeare -- or anyone, for that matter -- into the ranks of the immortals is romantic love, that Holy Grail of popular culture, and "Romeo and Juliet," the play that results from his dalliance with Paltrow's stagestruck noblewoman, becomes his entrée to greatness.
Although Greenblatt writes with tactful kindness about "Shakespeare in Love" (he got the idea for "Will in the World" during conversations with the movie's screenwriter, Marc Norman), he surely can't think much of this premise. Firstly, it pretends that romantic love was Shakespeare's prime subject, which is patently untrue, however closely it hews to the image of poetry held by people who never read it. Second, it makes Shakespeare himself out to be a romantic, and Greenblatt devotes two chapters of "Will in the World" to arguing just the opposite.
Shakespeare wrote about love because he wrote about all of life, and some of his works -- the sonnets, "Romeo and Juliet," "Antony and Cleopatra" -- put romantic love at their center. But even in these, the world seeps in, and the world in its fascinating particulars is the enemy of the all-consuming love that swallows Romeo and Juliet. Even the sonnets, supposedly devoted to praise of the beloved, get distracted by their own eloquence and slip into boasting about the triumph of art. "Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?" begins Sonnet 18 (written, according to "Shakespeare in Love," to Paltrow's crossdressing heroine, although in real life to a young man), but it ends by proclaiming that while fleshly beauty fades, "So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,/So long lives this, and this gives life to thee."
"Shakespeare in Love" briskly dismisses the inconvenient fact that its hero has a wife and three children back in his hometown of Stratford by writing off the marriage as sexless. Greenblatt also subscribes to the opinion that Shakespeare's marriage to Anne Hathaway was unsatisfying. Perhaps the two were mismatched, but Greenblatt, after contemplating the traces in Shakespeare's work of other affairs, suspects that "no single person could ever have satisfied Shakespeare's longings or made him happy." The playwright's imagination, after all, was anything but "single;" it had the "signature characteristic" of an "astonishing capacity to be everywhere and nowhere, to assume all positions and slip free of all constraints."
In an earlier chapter Greenblatt writes of how in Shakespeare's work his "fascination with the lives of aristocrats and monarchs" serenely coexisted with his affection for the country life of his childhood. He did not feel compelled to choose, and Greenblatt proposes that "he simply loved the world too much to give any of it up." Romeo and Juliet die to preserve their love, and as Greenblatt points out, the two most developed portraits of marital intimacy in the plays are problematic to say the least: Gertrude and Claudius in "Hamlet" and Lord and Lady Macbeth, marriages that are homicidal in one way or another. If romantic love must murder the world in order to replace it with the couple, Shakespeare wasn't interested.
