"Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare"

I am in no position to make any statements about Shakespeare. As someone who is vastly under-read on the matter and has only studied the comedies (I dropped out of school before we got to the romances, much less the histories, tragedies or any of the poetry) I really am the last one to make any lasting statements about the bard, but Stephen Greenblatt is. He is the author of Will in the World. The man is also a professor at Harvard as well as the editor of The Norton Shakespeare, the definitive Shakespeare collection.

Greenblatt is a pretty good writer himself and his sheer enthusiasm for the text really makes the book fun to read. The notes on Shakespeare’s life are informative, but not really interesting or even new, as almost all that information has been said before (the notable exception, for me, was the concept that Hamlet was written for Shakespeare’s dead son, Hamnet). The real joy of the book comes the anecdotes about Elizabethan and Jacobean England and their interplay with Shakespeare’s plays. The chapters of note are the two on The Merchant of Venice and Macbeth. They serve to highlight the era in which those masterpieces were written while drawing attention to the reasons why (aside from the prose) they are so important.

In the end Greenblatt concludes that what really makes Shakespeare so special is his opacity and his love of the mundane. To me that is the definition of high art. One must fill the work with vagaries, giving the audience something to question, to seek. There has to be some sort of knot at the heart of the work that can never be untied, but is impossible to stop playing with. Then for art to be truly high it must be universal and what is more universal than the mundane.