There are few famous people whose lives are as sparsely documented as William Shakespeare’s. In his book “Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare” (Norton, 430 pages, $26.95), Harvard University professor Stephen Greenblatt makes do with the paucity of traditional forms of evidence–letters and diaries–and looks deeply into the social context of Shakespeare’s time to establish connections between his life and the art he created. On a recent visit to Chicago, Greenblatt spoke with Tribune literary editor Elizabeth Taylor about the writing of the book, a National Book Award finalist:
Q. Why do we need a book about Shakespeare’s life if we have his art?
A. Going on 40 years, I have been brooding about the relationship between the way people lived back then, in the 16th and 17th Centuries, and why they wrote at all, what they wrote, and what the relationship was between what they wrote and the lives they led. My whole enterprise was to somehow throw the windows open and to look around and see what that historical world was like. What the social, political and anthropological forces were that were at work that were affecting people.
So that’s part of the answer. And the more local part of the answer, and probably more interesting for your readers, is that about 10 years ago when I was teaching at the University of California at Berkley, I had a visit from a Hollywood screenwriter named Marc Norman. He wanted to write a movie about Shakespeare, roughly modeled on the movie “Amadeus,” and he wanted to know what he should use about Shakespeare’s life. And I said: “Forget it. His life isn’t very interesting. All we have of the life is real-estate documents and a tax-evasion bill and a rather unpleasant last will and testament.”
He came up twice, and we had more conversations about this, but I didn’t make particularly brilliant breakthroughs. And I figured it would never get done anyway. But then [in] 1998 “Shakespeare in Love” came out, [which] Marc Norman had written with Tom Stoppard, and they even gave me a screen credit, which was very generous of them. I hope it won’t disappoint your readers if I say the movie is not historically accurate. But the movie got a very, very large audience to be interested in what is fundamentally a literary question: How did Shakespeare go from being the man who wrote “Two Gentlemen of Verona” to being the genius who wrote “Romeo and Juliet”?
The movie’s answer, Gwyneth Paltrow [as an inspirational love interest], is no better than trivia. It’s an invention, but you know, it was charming. And more important for me than its charm is that behind that plot device was an intuition that is a popular intuition, not widely shared among academics, that it wasn’t only Shakespeare’s innate genius–and he had astonishing genius–that can account for this change in his work. A jump of that magnitude, to become what he became, must in some way have had to do with his life and the world, with things that were actually happening to him that he was interacting with and experiencing. It can’t only have to do with study and whatever he brought to the table genetically.
Out of that I began to think that it might be possible to . . . conjure up a life from these details, these archival details, that would help to illuminate in a serious way the work that he wrote.
Q. How did you replace traditional forms of evidence?
A. I did different things. First of all, as a general principle, I tried to keep firmly in mind that what mattered most were the works. That the life is only interesting insofar as it can make the works resonate more.
The second thing is that I proposed to myself the question of how to solve a mystery, which is how to get from this person who didn’t have a university education, who didn’t have the right social connections and who didn’t have a patronage system and so forth, how do you get from that to the person who wrote these things?
The mystery is something worth grappling with. I tried to figure out how to make it narratively compelling. Truth, or facts and details, are only useful if you can make sense of them, feel them, if they keep you going. So I tried to figure out a way in which traces of his life could actually be used as part of a conjuring, a sustained act of conjuring or bringing back from the dead someone who seemed once again to be living, and not simply be kind of abstract and a fundamentally boring figure. How can you get him in life? How can you catch him at moments in which you can define all the forces around him? We know from our own lives that there are abstract forces out there, but what matters is really that you experience those abstract forces through life–whether you can buy a meal, whether you can buy a house, whether you accept a war.
In terms of evidence, I just tried to use multiple things, obviously starting with the chicken scratchings that he left in the ground, the archival records that are abundant but thin. The question is how to make them alive. And then what I did was to think very hard about recurrent patterns in his work. What he seems to be obsessing about over a lifetime. And of course, with any of these things it is extremely easy to mount a kind of skeptical counterargument. I mean, the fact that he obsessed about them doesn’t mean that he experienced them in his life. Nonetheless, it is interesting.
He keeps coming back over and over again in his life to a situation in which someone experiences a kind of shipwreck, literally a shipwreck. Loses his identity, winds up on an alien shore and needs to recover or construct out of nothing a social identity. And then, what I do is to talk about what happened to Shakespeare when he was 13, when his father lost social position and when the application for the coat of arms doesn’t get fulfilled. And to think about the relationship between that set of events and what he wrote. Because those events by themselves are only mildly interesting. But for me they are deeply interesting in relation to what he actually made of them in his life.
There is a reason Shakespeare keeps coming back to this story over and over again. It means something to him. He thinks he can work with it. And I tried to find things like that that I could keep coming back to and think about.
Q. How important is an understanding of Shakespeare’s life to an appreciation of his work?
A. It is true that one of the great things about Shakespeare is that you don’t need to know anything, zero, as a price of admission. You can go to the movies and see Leonardo DiCaprio in “Romeo and Juliet” and love it. Even though they cut a lot of it and change it, it is still terrific. So it is not, I think, that you need to know these things or else you can’t begin to understand these things. It is more that . . . the fundamental act of human curiosity about who wrote these things seems so basic to me.
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