Review by Choice Review
Greenblatt (Harvard) attempts to step outside academia--and the pervasive new-historicist approach to literary criticism that is largely his creation--to write a biography of Shakespeare that is accessible to the nonspecialist reader. He largely succeeds in answering the biographical question that the subtitle sets up, describing how "a young man from a small provincial town--a man without independent wealth, without powerful family connections--moves to London in the late 1580s and, in a remarkably short time, becomes the greatest playwright not of his age alone but of all time." The book is beautifully written, combining analysis of sweeping historical events with the minutiae of everyday life in 16th-century England. Greenblatt is most effective when expounding on the plays, and his insights into Shakespeare's dramatic art are at times breathtaking. He is on less solid ground in his attempts to draw grand conclusions about Shakespeare's life based on historical events and incidents that may or may not have impacted the playwright. These attempted linkages, typical of new-historicist criticism in general, expose both the strengths and (especially) the weaknesses of this methodology. ^BSumming Up: Recommended. Undergraduate, graduate, and general collections; faculty researchers. D. Pesta Oklahoma State University
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by Booklist Review
For all his generosity in enriching world literature with deathless characters--Romeo and Juliet, Falstaff and Bottom, Hamlet and Othello--Shakespeare kept his own personality remarkably hidden. A Harvard scholar here sheds penetrating light on this enigmatic genius, teasing out the mystery of artistic transformation by carefully connecting the Bard's brilliant verse to his times and circumstances. We see the importance of probable early encounters with Marlowe, Watson, Nashe, and other prominent dramatists, and at the other end of Shakespeare's meteoric career, Greenblatt discerns the alchemy that converted fears of old age into the fury of King Lear 0 and transformed mingled pride and misgivings over a lifetime's work into the autumnal poise of The Tempest0 . As the same spirit of sympathetic inquiry--by turns subtly speculative and candidly skeptical--plays over other key episodes in Shakespeare's life, readers finally glimpse the exceptional man who turned poetry into a panoramic mirror for all of humanity. A valuable resource for both professional and casual Shakespeareans. --Bryce Christensen Copyright 2004 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
This much-awaited new biography of the elusive Bard is brilliant in conception, often superb in execution, but sometimes-perhaps inevitably-disappointing in its degree of speculativeness. Bardolators may take this last for granted, but curious lay readers seeking a fully cohesive and convincing life may at times feel the accumulation of "may haves," "might haves" and "could haves" make it difficult to suspend disbelief. Greenblatt's espousing, for instance, of the theory that Shakespeare's "lost" years before arriving in London were spent in Lancashire leads to suppositions that he might have met the Catholic subversive Edmund Campion, and how that might have affected him-and it all rests on one factoid: the bequeathing by a nobleman of some player's items to a William Shakeshafte, who may, plausibly, have been the young Shakespeare. Nevertheless, Norton Shakespeare general editor and New Historicist Greenblatt succeed impressively in locating the man in both his greatest works and the turbulent world in which he lived. With a blend of biography, literary interpretation and history, Greenblatt persuasively analyzes William's father's rise and fall as a public figure in Stratford, which pulled him in both Protestant and Catholic directions and made his eldest son "a master of double consciousness." In a virtuoso display of historical and literary criticism, Greenblatt contrasts Christopher Marlowe's Jew of Malta, Elizabeth's unfortunate Sephardic physician-who was executed for conspiracy-and Shakespeare's ambiguous villain Shylock. This wonderful study, built on a lifetime's scholarship and a profound ability to perceive the life within the texts, creates as vivid and full portrait of Shakespeare as we are likely ever to have. 16 pages color illus. not seen by PW. Agent, Jill Kneerim. (Sept.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
From Harvard professor Greenblatt, editor of The Norton Shakespeare: portrait of an artist as he crafts himself. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
A re-sifting and re-imagining of the Shakespeare evidence in an attempt to discover how the Stratford lad became the celebrated poet and playwright. Greenblatt (Humanities/Harvard; Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World, 1991) begins and ends with the acknowledgement that there will probably never be definitive answers to our most fundamental questions about Shakespeare, for the world's most luminous writer left no personal writing at all--no letters, diaries, manuscripts. So scholars are left to infer the writer's external life from assorted legal documents and his internal one from his creations. Even a renowned scholar like Greenblatt, who has an encyclopedic knowledge of Elizabethan England, of Shakespeare's material world, of his literary works and who has a capacious imagination equal to the task of writing the life of someone who died 400 year ago--even such a scholar must populate his paragraphs with those vague characters named Seems and Probably. That said (and Greenblatt, to his credit, says it more than once), this is a remarkably informative and enlightening look at Will Shakespeare. Greenblatt speculates that the young man, charmed by the touring player companies that visited the region, left home (and wife and child) to pursue his alluring dream. Greenblatt examines in the Bard's work the many allusions to the countryside, to leather craft (after all, he was a glover's son), and even to Roman Catholicism, the religion his queen had outlawed but that his father could not surrender. Greenblatt describes Shakespeare as a sort of hybrid chameleon and sponge: He could find a way to fit with any group and could absorb from it the language and practices that later gave his plays such verisimilitude. Greenblatt also offers new ways to view the Bard's strange epitaph, to understand the mysterious motives of Hamlet, Iago, and Lear. He ignores Oxfordian conspiracy theories and speculates that Shakespeare retired to be with his beloved daughter Susanna. An imaginative voyage to the undiscovered country in company with a master mariner. (16 pp. color illustrations, not seen) Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
