陳俐如 (Karen Chen)

October, 2010

A Reading of

Stephen Greenblatt's Will in the World:

Chs 1-2

And let us, ciphers to this great accompt,

                On your imaginary forces work.

(Henry V. Prologue, 17-18)

Stephen Greenblatt, a distinguished scholar of Shakespearean studies, tries to answer one great question that has puzzled scholars for centuries--“How did Shakespeare become Shakespeare?” (11) --in his semi-biographical fiction: Will in the World.

As an eminent practitioner of new historicism, Greenblatt subtly employs the critical method throughout this book. New historicism is known for the challenge of authenticity in historical writings. Only this time, Shakespeare's life is treated as a text waiting to be decoded. At the beginning, Greenblatt presents “A Note to the Reader,” in which he frankly admits “there are huge gaps in knowledge that make any biographical studies of Shakespeare an exercise in speculation” (18). Whether an excuse or a disclaimer, it seems to give Greenblatt the privilege to lead us into the world of Shakespeare that he reconstructed: “Let us imagine that Shakespeare” (23, my emphasis). This approach implies a self-awareness in the fictiveness of biographical writing, and serves as a blatant manifesto to ask readers' permission to forgive any possible audacious linkage he is to make between Shakespeare's personal life and his work. Greenblatt, then, invites readers to this intellectual playground of imagination. Hence, it would be pointless to investigate how irresponsible Greenblatt is according to the common criteria that we would expect from a biographical author.

Moreover, Greenblatt's new historical approach is manifested in the insertion of historical documents, anecdotes, biographies, and Shakespeare's works in his narration. In so doing, all the conjectural statements he makes gain plausibility. New historicists consider literary texts as a production of particular socio-political circumstances, stressing the symbioses between historical documents and literary works. Greenblatt engagingly interweaves historical documents with fictional elements and analogizes how the Bard became the Bard.

Chapter 1, entitled “Primal Scene,” depicts the childhood of Shakespeare in the Elizabethan era and the theatrical convention that he inherited and that nourished him, such as morality plays, rural rituals, and touring ensembles. The title also suggests possibly Shakespeare's first experience of watching a play which Greenblatt traces through memoirs by the Bard's contemporaries. Among his critical appreciations within this chapter, Greenblatt's suggestion regarding how the play-within-the-play in A Midsummer Night's Dream was created might be a fertile insight to readers of Shakespeare. According to Greenblatt, a festival performance held for Queen Elizabeth's 1575 visit in Kenilworth, which the eleven-year-old Shakespeare might have attended, might have prompted the young Shakespeare to create “A tedious brief scene of young Pyramus/And his love Thisbe: very tragical mirth.” Greenblatt contends that this peculiar experience could very well have stimulated his sense of both the “transforming power of theatrical illusion” (50) and “coarse reality that lies beneath the illusion” (50).

The subject of Chapter 2, entitled “The Dream of Restoration,” is the re-creation of Shakespearean “Lost Years.” Truth first. Concerning the years between the registration of Will's twins and Robert Greene's notorious attack in Groats-Worth of Wit, Shakespearean scholars seem to have a consensus that there is a shortage of evidence for events taking place after Shakespeare left his hometown (McDonald 11-15). However, as the title of this chapter suggests, Greenblatt, based on the family's coat of arms reapplication, deduces that the financial deterioration of his father must have affected Shakespeare so much that, later in life, he aspired to restore and establish his family's honor in the intensely hierarchical society.

Under the influence of so-called Foucaultian “discursive formation,” new historicism foregrounds the configurative process of signification, and thus shows the complicity of literature in the predominant ideology. In short, new historicism is concerned with power relations among different social entities. As a result, Greenblatt would, in terms of power relationship, interprets Shakespeare's “Lost Years” as a process of social ascension, an interpretation in keeping with the fact that players were considered vagabonds in the sixteenth century England. As David Ellis points out, all that biographers of Shakespeare can do is provide approximate assumptions or comparable situations by collecting records similar to Shakespeare's age since there are few legal documents left (308). Thus, Greenblatt's rendering of Shakespeare's life might be said to be persuasive to a certain extent.

Works Cited

Ellis, David. “Biography and Shakespeare: An Outsider's View.” Cambridge Quarterly 29.4 (2000): 296-313. Print.

Greenblatt, Stephen. Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare. New York: Norton, 2004. Print.

McDonald, Russ. “Shakespeare, ‘Shakespeare,' and the Problem of Authorship.” The Bedford Companion to Shakespeare. 2ed. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin's, 2001. 1 2-35. Print.

Shakespeare, William. “Henry V.” The Norton Shakespeare. Ed Stephen Greenblatt, Walter Cohen, Jean E. Howard, and Katharine Eisaman Maus. New York: Norton, 1997. 1454-1523. Print.

References

Brannigan, John. Introducing Literary Theories: A Guide and Glossary. Ed. Julian Wolfreys. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2001. Print.

Raman Selden, Peter Widdowson, and Peter Brooker. A Reader's Guide to Contemporary Literary Theory. 5th ed. Harlow: Pearson Longman, 2005. Print.