Stephen Greenblatt
Will in the World
How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare
"So engrossing, clearheaded, and lucid that
its arrival is not just welcome but cause for celebration."
—Dan Cryer, Newsday
Stephen Greenblatt, the charismatic Harvard
professor who "knows more about
[Shakespeare] than Ben Jonson or the
Dark Lady did" (John Leonard, Harper's), has
written a biography that enables us to see, hear,
and feel how an acutely sensitive and talented boy,
surrounded by the rich tapestry of Elizabethan
life—full of drama and pageantry, and also cruelty
and danger—could have become the world's
greatest playwright.
Bringing together little-known historical
facts and little-noticed elements of Shakespeare's
plays, Greenblatt makes inspired connections
between the life and the works and delivers "a
dazzling and subtle biography" (Richard Lacayo,
Time). Readers will experience Shakespeare's vital
plays again as if for the first time, but with
greater understanding and appreciation of their
extraordinary depth and humanity.
"Startlingly good—the most complexly
intelligent and sophisticated, and yet the most
keenly enthusiastic, study of the life and work
taken together that I have ever read."—Adam
Gopnik, The New Yorker
STEPHEN GREENBLATT is the John
Cogan University Professor of the
Humanities at Harvard University, editor
of The Norton Shakespeare, and prize-winning
author of many academic books, including
Hamlet in Purgatory.
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