Book Review: Greenblatt, Will in the World [Aardvarchaeology]

Published: June 7, 2008, 7:19 am

Tags: books

I'm not a very frequent theatre-goer, and if I don't like a play, I leave in the intermission. But I have had the good fortune to see some excellent productions through the years, notably of Shakespeare. (It is of course entirely possible to play Shakespeare poorly too, and I've seen it done both by professionals and by amateurs.) I haven't seen all his plays, and I've read only two, but dangle an opportunity to conveniently see more in front of me, and chances are I'll bite. During my recent Orkney jaunt, I read a fascinating biography of William Shakespeare, Stephen Greenblatt's best-selling Will in the World (2004). This is, according to a Sunday Times reviewer, "the best one-volume life of Shakespeare yet". As I would not be terribly interested in reading a multi-volume one, that was all I needed to know. Greenblatt (born in 1943) is a professor of literature at Harvard and the founder of a school of thought in his discipline: "new historicism". This is a post-modernist

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