About the Book

Stephen Greenblatt’s Will in the World is widely recognised to be the fullest and most brilliant account ever written of Shakespeare’s life, his work and his age.

Shakespeare was a man of his time, constantly engaging with his audience’s deepest desires and fears, and by reconnecting with this historic reality we are able to experience the true character of the playwright himself. Greenblatt traces Shakespeare’s unfolding imaginative generosity – his ability to inhabit others, to confer upon them his own strength of spirit, to make them truly live as independent beings as no other artist has ever done.

Digging deep into the vital links between the playwright and his world, Will in the World provides the fullest account ever written of the living, breathing man behind the masterpieces.

ALSO BY STEPHEN GREENBLATT

The Swerve: How the Renaissance Began

Hamlet in Purgatory

Practicing New Historicism (with Catherine Gallagher)

Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World

Learning to Curse: Essays in Early Modern Culture

Shakespearean Negotiations:

The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England

Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare

Sir Walter Ralegh: The Renaissance Man and His Roles

Three Modern Satirists: Waugh, Orwell, and Huxley

EDITED BY STEPHEN GREENBLATT

The Norton Anthology of English Literature (general editor)

The Norton Shakespeare (general editor)

New World Encounters

Redrawing the Boundaries:

The Transformation of English and American Literary Studies

Representing the English Renaissance

Allegory and Representation

Bibliographical Notes

ALL BIOGRAPHICAL STUDIES of Shakespeare necessarily build on the assiduous, sometimes obsessive archival research and speculation of many generations of scholars and writers. The long history of this enterprise is the subject of Samuel Schoenbaum’s Shakespeare’s Lives (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970) and Gary Taylor’s Reinventing Shakespeare: A Cultural History from the Restoration to the Present (New York: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1989). Schoenbaum delights in chronicling the mythmaking extravagances and absurdities of Shakespeare biography, but there is at least as much to admire as to ridicule.

I have profited greatly not only from recent research, which has painstakingly winkled out some intriguing new details about the playwright’s life and times, but also from nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century studies. These studies came under fierce attack from C. J. Sisson in 1934 in an influential essay, “The Mythical Sorrows of Shakespeare” (in Studies in Shakespeare: British Academy Lectures, ed. Peter Alexander [London: Oxford University Press, 1964], 9–32), but recent scholarship, including Marjorie Garber’s Shakespeare’s Ghost Writers: Literature as Uncanny Causality (New York: Methuen, 1987), Leah Marcus’s Puzzling Shakespeare: Local Reading and Its Discontents (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), and Richard Wilson’s Will Power: Essays on Shakespearean Authority (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1993), has reassessed their significance and usefulness. Foremost among them is J. O. Halliwell-Phillipps’s two-volume Outlines of the Life of Shakespeare, 10th ed. (London: Longmans, 1898). Also useful and suggestive are Edward Dowden, Shakspere: A Critical Study of His Mind and Art (London: Henry King, 1876); Frederick Fleay, A Chronicle History of the Life and Work of William Shakespeare, Player, Poet, and Playmaker (London: Nimmo, 1886); Sidney Lee, A Life of William Shakespeare (New York: Macmillan, 1898); George Brandes, William Shakespeare: A Critical Study (New York: Frederick Unger, 1898); Charles Elton, William Shakespeare, His Family and Friends (London: John Murray, 1904); Charlotte Stopes, Shakespeare’s Warwickshire Contemporaries (Stratford-upon-Avon: Shakespeare Head Press, 1907); and David Masson, Shakespeare Personally (London: Smith, Elder, 1914). Edgar Fripp’s two-volume Shakespeare, Man and Artist (London: Oxford University Press, 1938) is a chaotic treasure trove of valuable information, which I have repeatedly mined.

Among more recent biographies, the most thorough, informative, and steadily thoughtful is Park Honan’s Shakespeare: A Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), which I have frequently consulted. Jonathan Bate’s fine collection of essays, The Genius of Shakespeare (London: Picador, 1997), contains important biographical insights, as does Katherine Duncan-Jones’s Ungentle Shakespeare: Scenes from His Life (London: Arden Shakespeare, 2001). Among the other biographical studies upon which I have drawn are Marchette Chute’s lively Shakespeare of London (New York: Dutton, 1949); M. M. Reese’s Shakespeare: His World and His Work (London: Edward Arnold, 1953); Stanley Wells’s Shakespeare: A Dramatic Life (London: Sinclair-Stevenson, 1994); Eric Sams’s The Real Shakespeare: Retrieving the Early Years, 1564–1594 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995); I. L. Matus’s Shakespeare, In Fact (New York: Continuum, 1999); Anthony Holden’s William Shakespeare (Boston: Little, Brown, 1999); and Michael Wood’s In Search of Shakespeare (London: BBC, 2003), written to accompany a BBC television series.

Though by definition unreliable and often wildly inaccurate, some of the most searching reflections on Shakespeare’s life have come in the form of fiction: Nothing Like the Sun: A Story of Shakespeare’s Love-Life (London: Heinemann, 1964), by Anthony Burgess, who also wrote a lively straightforward biography (Shakespeare [Hammondsworth: Penguin, 1972]); Edward Bond’s play Bingo (London: Methuen, 1974); Marc Norman and Tom Stoppard’s screenplay for the film Shakespeare in Love (New York: Hyperion, 1998); and, above all, the brilliant “Scylla and Charybdis” chapter of James Joyce’s Ulysses.

At the other end of the spectrum from fiction, several important volumes make available the crucial historical documents upon which all Shakespeare biographies are based. These volumes, upon which I have drawn heavily throughout this book, include B. R. Lewis, The Shakespeare Documents: Facsimiles, Transliterations, and Commentary, 2 vols. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1940); Samuel Schoenbaum, William Shakespeare: Records and Images (New York: Oxford University Press, 1981); David Thomas, Shakespeare in the Public Records (London: HMSO, 1985); Robert Bearman, Shakespeare in the Stratford Records (Phoenix Mill, UK: Alan Sutton, 1994); and, above all, Schoenbaum, William Shakespeare: A Documentary Life (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975; also available in a 1977 compact edition).

Equally indispensable is the scholarship of the indefatigable E. K. Chambers: the two-volume William Shakespeare: A Study of Facts and Problems (Oxford: Clarendon, 1930), rich in significant details often buried in footnotes, asides, and appendices; the two-volume Medieval Stage (London: Oxford University Press, 1903); and the monumental four-volume Elizabethan Stage (Oxford: Clarendon, 1923). Geoffrey Bullough’s eight-volume Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare (New York: Columbia University Press, 1957–75) usefully brings together almost all of the known sources of Shakespeare’s plays and thereby provides a suggestive guide to Shakespeare’s wide and restless reading.

The evidence painstakingly gathered, edited, and appraised in Schoenbaum, Chambers, and Bullough is present throughout every chapter of this book. In the bibliographical notes below, I have listed the other principal sources, both primary and secondary, upon which I have drawn. I have, wherever possible, grouped these sources together by topic, in the order in which the particular topic appears in each chapter, so that readers eager to pursue one or another aspect of Shakespeare and his age can find their way through the immense forest of critical resources.

Convenient orientation to contemporary Shakespeare scholarship can be found in two valuable collections of essays, upon which I have repeatedly drawn: A Companion to Shakespeare, ed. David Scott Kastan (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999), and New History of Early English Drama, ed. John D. Cox and David Scott Kastan (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997). Many individual essays in these volumes bear on the topics I have treated.

All quotations from Shakespeare’s works in Will in the World are from The Norton Shakespeare, ed. Stephen Greenblatt, Walter Cohen, Jean E. Howard, and Katharine Eisaman Maus (New York: W. W. Norton, 1997). (Citations to King Lear are from the conflated text version.) The Oxford edition of Shakespeare’s plays, upon which The Norton Shakespeare is based, has an extraordinarily detailed Textual Companion, ed. Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor, which I have found valuable, as I have the individual volumes of the Arden Shakespeare series.

CHAPTER 1: PRIMAL SCENES

On Shakespeare’s schooling, William Baldwin’s bulky two-volume William Shakspere’s Small Latine and Lesse Greeke (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1944) is comprehensive but dull and daunting. C. R. Thompson’s School in Tudor England (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1958) is a helpful introduction. Joel Altman’s The Tudor Play of Mind (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978) suggestively links school exercises and the writing of plays. Roger Ascham’s The Schoolmaster (1570), a key Elizabethan educational text in which the teaching of Latin plays a central role, is available in a modern edition, ed. Lawrence Ryan (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1967).

On the love of verbal display in Elizabethan culture, a classic work is Rosemond Tuve, Elizabethan and Metaphysical Imagery (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1947). On the whole scope of literary production in this period, C. S. Lewis’s brilliant and opinionated English Literature in the Sixteenth Century, Excluding Drama (Oxford: Clarendon, 1954) remains indispensable. Among the immense number of critical studies of Shakespeare’s relation to language, Frank Kermode’s Shakespeare’s Language (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2000) is an illuminating place to begin.

On the mystery plays, see V. A. Kolve, The Play Called Corpus Christi (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1966); Rosemary Woolf, The English Mystery Plays (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972); and Glynne Wickham, Early English Stages: 1300 to 1660, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 1980). Two earlier books, Willard Farnham, The Medieval Heritage of Elizabethan Tragedy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1935), and H. C. Gardiner, Mysteries’ End: An Investigation of the Last Days of the Medieval Religious Stage (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1946), remain particularly valuable. Bernard Spivack, Shakespeare and the Allegory of Evil (New York: Columbia University Press, 1958), and Robert Weimann, Shakespeare and the Popular Tradition in the Theater: Studies in the Social Dimension of Dramatic Form and Function (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978), are useful guides to the “morality” backgrounds of Shakespeare’s plays. Andrew Gurr, “The Authority of the Globe and the Fortune,” in Material London, ca. 1600, ed. Lena Cowan Orlin (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000), 250–67, is illuminating on the magistrate’s power to license plays. On seasonal rituals, see C. L. Barber, Shakespeare’s Festive Comedy: A Study of Dramatic Form and Its Relation to Social Custom (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1959), and François Laroque, Shakespeare’s Festive World: Elizabethan Seasonal Entertainment and the Professional Stage (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993).

Hostility to performances of plays, whether by schoolboys or professionals, is explored in Jonas Barish, The Antitheatrical Prejudice (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981). For a close look at the important traveling company with which Shakespeare may have been associated, see Scott McMillan and Sally-Beth MacLean, The Queen’s Men and Their Plays (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).

The principal accounts of Elizabeth’s royal progresses are found in John Nichols, ed., The Progresses and Public Processions of Queen Elizabeth, 3 vols. (London, 1823). Robert Langham’s letter describing the Kenilworth festivities is available in a modern edition by R. J. P. Kuin, Robert Langham: A Letter (Leiden: Brill, 1983).

CHAPTER 2: THE DREAM OF RESTORATION

On Shakespeare’s provincial environment, Mark Eccles, Shakespeare in Warwickshire (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1961), provides a brief, yet surprisingly rich initiation. C. L. Barber and Richard Wheeler have suggestive psychoanalytic reflections on Shakespeare’s relation to his father in The Whole Journey: Shakespeare’s Power of Development (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986) and in “Shakespeare in the Rising Middle Class,” in Shakespeare’s Personality, ed. Norman Holland, Sidney Homan, and Bernard Paris (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989). On the presence of technical vocabularies in Shakespeare, see David Crystal and Ben Crystal, Shakespeare’s Words: A Glossary and Language Companion (London: Penguin, 2002). On the pattern of loss and recovery in Shakespeare’s late plays, see Northrop Frye, A Natural Perspective: The Development of Shakespearean Comedy and Romance (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1965).

L. B. Wright’s Middle-Class Culture in Elizabethan England (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1935) is a classic, if contested, guide to Elizabethan social structures, as is Lawrence Stone’s The Crisis of the Aristocracy: 1558–1641 (London: Oxford University Press, 1986). See also Felicity Heal and Clive Holmes, The Gentry in England and Wales, 1500–1700 (Basingstoke, UK: Macmillan, 1994), and Joyce Youings, Sixteenth Century England: The Penguin Social History of Britain (London: Penguin, 1984). On yeomen, the social class from which Shakespeare descended, see Mildred Campbell, The English Yeoman under Elizabeth and the Early Stuarts (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1942). On the wool trade, see Peter J. Bowden, The Wool Trade in Tudor and Stuart England (London: Macmillan, 1962). On Stratford, see Minutes and Accounts of the Corporation of Stratford-upon-Avon and Other Records, 1553–1620, ed. Richard Savage and Edgar Fripp (Dugdale Society, 1921–30), supplemented by a volume of the same title edited by Levi Fox (Dugdale Society, 1990).

Prices and wages in Shakespeare’s time are difficult to weigh in relation to the modern world, but for an initial glimpse, see the royal proclamation governing London wages, reprinted in Ann Jennalie Cooke, The Privileged Playgoers of Shakespeare’s London: 1576–1642 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981). E. A. J. Honigmann and Susan Brock produced an edition of wills by Shakespeare and his contemporaries in the London theater, Playhouse Wills, 1558–1642 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1993).

CHAPTER 3: THE GREAT FEAR

On the struggle between Catholics and Protestants in the sixteenth century, see Patrick Collinson, The Birthpangs of Protestant England (Houndmills, UK: Macmillan, 1988); Debora Shuger, Habits of Thought in the English Renaissance (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990); and Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England c. 1400–c. 1580 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992); all provide useful and usefully different points of orientation.

On the religion of Shakespeare and his family, there continues to be lively debate. Against the claim by Fripp, in Shakespeare, Man and Artist, that Shakespeare’s father was a Puritan, Peter Milward’s Shakespeare’s Religious Background (London: Sidgwick and Jackson, 1973) summarizes arguments for his Catholicism. That John Shakespeare was a Catholic would seem to be confirmed by his “spiritual last will and testament,” but the original is lost and its authenticity has been challenged. There are useful articles by James McManaway, “John Shakespeare’s ‘Spiritual Testament’” in Shakespeare Survey 18 (1967): 197–205, and F. W. Brownlow, “John Shakespeare’s Recusancy: New Light on an Old Document,” in Shakespeare Quarterly 40 (1989): 186–91. The case against authenticity is summarized in J. O. Halliwell-Phillips, Outlines of the Life of Shakespeare (1898), 2:399–404 and has been vigorously resumed by Robert Bearman in “John Shakespeare’s ‘Spiritual Testament’: a Reappraisal” in Shakespeare Survey 56 (2003): 184–203, but most recent scholarship has cautiously tended to confirm its authenticity.

E. A. J. Honigmann’s important Shakespeare: The Lost Years (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1985) focused attention on the young Shakespeare’s possible Lancashire connection, which continues to be intensely investigated and debated. Christopher Haigh’s Reformation and Resistance in Tudor Lancashire (London: Cambridge University Press, 1975) provides a useful account of the religious stuggle in that region. Some of the most tantalizing findings for Shakespeare studies are reported in Richard Wilson’s “Shakespeare and the Jesuits,” in The Times Literary Supplement (December 19, 1997): 11–13, and explored in Shakespeare and the Culture of Christianity in Early Modern England, ed. Dennis Taylor and David N. Beauregard (New York: Fordham University Press, 2003). Here too there are dissenting views, including those presented by Robert Bearman in “‘Was William Shakespeare William Shakeshafte?’ Revisited,” Shakespeare Quarterly 53 (2002): 83–94. Bearman’s arguments are countered by Honigmann in “The Shakespeare/Shakeshafte Question, Continued,” Shakespeare Quarterly 54 (2003): 83–86. Jeffrey Knapp, in Shakespeare’s Tribe (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), strenuously argues that the adult Shakespeare was committed to a broad-based Erasmian Christianity, carefully limited in its central doctrinal tenets, tolerant of the range of beliefs and practices that lay outside those tenets, and steadfastly communitarian. I have also had the benefit of reading in manuscript Wilson’s book Secret Shakespeare: Studies in Theatre, Religion, and Resistance (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004). In Wilson’s view, the young Shakespeare was linked in some way to the Jesuits’ “terrorist cells” in Lancashire. Though he became wary of fanaticism, Wilson argues, Shakespeare remained a Catholic throughout his life and coded many cryptic Catholic messages in his plays.

On Campion, Richard Simpson’s 1867 biography, Edmund Campion (London: Williams and Norgate), remains authoritative; Evelyn Waugh’s Edmund Campion (Boston: Little, Brown, 1935) is eloquent and highly partisan. See also E. E. Reynolds, Campion and Parsons: The Jesuit Missions of 1580–1 (London: Sheed and Ward, 1980); Malcolm South, The Jesuits and the Joint Mission to England during 1580–1581 (Lewiston, NY: Mellen, 1999); and James Holleran, A Jesuit Challenge: Edmund Campion’s Debates at the Tower of London in 1581 (New York: Fordham University Press, 1999).

CHAPTER 4: WOOING, WEDDING, AND REPENTING

On Shakespeare’s marriage, the principal source remains J. W. Gray, Shakespeare’s Marriage (London: Chapman and Hall, 1905). David Cressy’s Birth, Marriage, and Death: Ritual, Religion, and the Life-Cycle in Tudor and Stuart England (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997) is an illuminating guide to the contemporary conduct of the major life-cycle events. For the demographic estimates, I have relied on E. A. Wrigley and R. S. Schofield, The Population History of England, 1541–1871 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981). Anthony Burgess’s amusing novel, Nothing Like the Sun, is built around the presumption that Anne Whatley of Temple Grafton was a real person, Shakespeare’s lost love, rather than the trace of a clerical error.

For the sentimental picture of Shakespeare in the bosom of his family, see the nineteenth-century lithograph, by an unknown artist, reproduced in Schoenbaum, William Shakespeare: Records and Images, 199. The idea that sonnet 145 might be an early poem to Anne Hathaway is discussed in Andrew Gurr, “Shakespeare’s First Poem: Sonnet 145,” Essays in Criticism 21 (1971): 221–26.

The second-best bed is interpreted as a “tender remembrance” in Lewis, The Shakespeare Documents, 2:491, who cites Joseph Quincy Adams. For a more realistic reading of Shakespeare’s last will and testament, see E. A. J. Honigmann, “Shakespeare’s Will and Testamentary Traditions,” in Shakespeare and Cultural Traditions: The Selected Proceedings of the International Shakespeare Association World Congress, Tokyo, 1991, ed. Tetsuo Kishi, Roger Pringle, and Stanley Wells (Newark: University of Delaware, 1994), 127–37. Frank Harris, in The Man Shakespeare and His Tragic Life-Story (New York: Michael Kennerley, 1909), depicts a Shakespeare consumed with loathing for his wife; it is from Harris that I take the suggestion that the curse on the person who moves his bones was Shakespeare’s way of keeping his wife from being laid, at her death, by his side. On the late seventeenth-century visitor to the grave who was told that the curse was Shakespeare’s last poem, see Chambers, William Shakespeare, 2:259.

CHAPTER 5: CROSSING THE BRIDGE

On hunting (and its illegal cousin, poaching), see Edward Berry, Shakespeare and the Hunt: A Cultural and Social Study (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). Samuel Schoenbaum’s irenic view of Thomas Lucy’s character is found in William Shakespeare: A Documentary Life, 107. There is a suggestive chapter on Somerville in Stopes, Shakespeare’s Warwickshire Contemporaries. In Secret Shakespeare Richard Wilson revives the theory, first advanced by the Victorian critic Richard Simpson, that Somerville was not an isolated lunatic but rather a participant in a serious conspiracy. He did not commit suicide in the Tower, the theory goes, but was murdered by fellow conspirators in order to prevent his revealing incriminating evidence at the moment of his execution. (Why he should have waited until that moment is not readily apparent.) At some point before he wrote Hamlet (1600–1601), Shakespeare probably read Luis de Granada’s Of Prayer and Meditation (1582), but the link to Somerville should not be exaggerated: there was another edition of Luis’s work, published in 1599, without the incendiary dedicatory letter by Richard Harris that led Somerville to his fatal resolution.

On touring, the ongoing volumes of the Records of Early English Drama (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1979–) are invaluable. Peter Greenfield, “Touring,” in New History of Early English Drama, ed. John D. Cox and David Scott Kastan (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), 251–68; and Sally-Beth MacLean,” The Players on Tour,” in Elizabethan Theatre, vol. 10, ed. C. E. McGee (Port Credit, Ontario: P. D. Meany, 1988), 55–72, are useful and suggestive. On the possible connection of Shakespeare to the Queen’s Men, see McMillan and MacLean, The Queen’s Men and Their Plays.

For the impression London made upon first-time visitors, the place to begin is William Rye, England as Seen by Foreigners (London: John Russell Smith, 1865). See also A. L. Beier and Roger Finlay, eds., London 1500–1700: The Making of a Metropolis (London: Longman, 1986); N. L. Williams, Tudor London Visited (London: Cassell, 1991); Lawrence Manley, Literature and Culture in Early Modern London (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995); and David Harris Sacks, “London’s Dominion: The Metropolis, the Market Economy, and the State,” in Material London, ca. 1600, 20–54. The characterization of London as “the Fair that lasts all year” is cited in Sacks.

A crucial primary source for this and the following chapter is John Stow’s 1598 Survey of London, available in a modern edition, ed. C. L. Kingsford (Oxford: Clarendon, 1971).

On the legal concept of Benefit of Clergy, see my “What Is the History of Literature?” Critical Inquiry 23 (1997): 460–81. On the concept of “moral luck,” see Bernard Williams, Moral Luck: Philosophical Papers, 1973–1980 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981).

CHAPTER 6: LIFE IN THE SUBURBS

Ian Archer has a useful account of “Shakespeare’s London,” in A Companion to Shakespeare, ed. David Scott Kastan (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999), 43–56. On London’s “entertainment zone,” see Steven Mullaney, The Place of the Stage: License, Play, and Power in Renaissance England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987). On bearbaiting, see S. P. Cerasano, “The Master of the Bears in Art and Enterprise,” Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England 5 (1991): 195–209; and Jason Scott-Warren, “When Theaters Were Bear-Gardens; or, What’s at Stake in the Comedy of Manners,” Shakespeare Quarterly 54 (2003): 63–82. The contemporary amused by the spectacle of the ape on the pony was the Spanish secretary to the Duke of Najera, who visited Henry VIII in 1544 (cited in Chambers, Elizabethan Stage, from whence the Dekker quotation and the account of the Southwark spectacle also come).

A mid-sixteenth-century undertaker kept a gruesome contemporary record of London’s “theater of punishments”: The Diary of Henry Machyn, Citizen and Merchant-Taylor of London, from A.D. 1550 to A.D. 1563, ed. John Gough Nichols (London: Camden Society, 1848). Machyn’s diary stops before Shakespeare’s birth, but there is no sign in the later sixteenth century of a substantial reduction in the punishments he so assiduously notes.

On the design and operation of the principal London playhouses in Shakespeare’s time, see, in addition to Chambers’s Elizabethan Stage, Herbert Berry, Shakespeare’s Playhouses (New York: AMS Press, 1987); Andrew Gurr, The Shakespearean Stage, 1574–1642,3rd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992); William Ingram, The Business of Playing: The Beginnings of Adult Professional Theater in Elizabethan London (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992); and Arthur Kinney, Shakespeare by Stages (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003). Many of the finer details of theatrical architecture and finance remain in dispute.

A famous resource for Elizabethan theater studies is the detailed account book kept by the impresario Philip Henslowe. The book, Henslowe’s Diary, has been edited by R. A. Foakes (2nd ed.; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). One problem, even with this remarkably detailed record, is to understand the contemporary significance of the charges and payments. Helpful guidance may be found in Roslyn L. Knutson, Playing Companies and Commerce in Shakespeare’s Time (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001); G. E. Bentley, The Profession of Dramatist in Shakespeare’s Time, 1590–1642 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971); and Peter Davison, “Commerce and Patronage: The Lord Chamberlain’s Men’s Tour of 1597,” in Shakespeare Performed, ed. Grace Ioppolo (London: Associated University Presses, 2000), 58–59.

The attacks on the stage by Northbrooke and Gosson, along with the ironic dialogue by Florio, are conveniently assembled in Chambers, Elizabethan Stage. There is an excellent account of the anxieties of Elizabethan officials in Lacey Baldwin Smith, Treason in Tudor England: Politics and Paranoia (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986). On the government’s attempts to regulate the theater, see Richard Dutton, Mastering the Revels (London: Macmillan, 1991), and Janet Clare, “Art Made Tongue-Tied by Authority”: Elizabethan and Jacobean Dramatic Censorship (New York: St. Martin’s, 1990).

All citations of the plays of Christopher Marlowe, with the exception of 2 Tamburlaine, are from English Renaissance Drama, ed. David Bevington, Lars Engle, Katharine Eisaman Maus, and Eric Rasmussen (New York: W. W. Norton, 2002). 2 Tamburlaine is cited from Christopher Marlowe, Plays, ed. David Bevington and Eric Rasmussen (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998). The large critical literature on the impact of Marlowe on Shakespeare includes an illuminating article by Nicholas Brooke, “Marlowe as Provocative Agent in Shakespeare’s Early Plays,” in Shakespeare Survey 14 (1961): 34–44.

On Edward Alleyne, see S. P. Cerasano, “Edward Alleyn: 1566-1626,” in Edward Alleyn: Elizabethan Actor, Jacobean Gentleman, ed. Aileen Reid and Robert Maniura (London: Dulwich Picture Gallery, 1994), 11–31. There is no proof that Edward Alleyne was the first Tamburlaine, but he was famous for the part, and Nashe’s reference to him in 1589 as the Roscius of the contemporary players suggests that Alleyne created the role.

On Shakespeare’s relation to the printing press, see David Scott Kastan, Shakespeare and the Book (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), and Peter W. M. Blayney, The First Folio of Shakespeare, 2nd ed. (New York: W. W. Norton, 1996). On Shakespeare’s reading, in addition to Bullough’s eight-volume Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare, I have found useful Henry Anders, Shakespeare’s Books: A Dissertation on Shakespeare’s Reading and the Immediate Sources of His Works (Berlin: Reimer, 1904); Kenneth Muir, The Sources of Shakespeare’s Plays (London: Methuen, 1977); Robert S. Miola, Shakespeare’s Reading (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000); and Leonard Barkan, “What Did Shakespeare Read?” in Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare, ed. Margareta de Grazia and Stanley Wells (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 31–47.

CHAPTER 7: SHAKESCENE

On the competitive world in which Shakespeare worked, see James Shapiro, Rival Playwrights: Marlowe, Jonson, Shakespeare (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), and James Bednarz, Shakespeare and the Poets’ War (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001). On the collaborations that coexisted with the rivalries, see Jeffrey Masten, Textual Intercourse: Collaboration, Authorship, and Sexualities in Renaissance Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), Jonathan Hope, The Authorship of Shakespeare’s Plays: A Socio-Linguistic Study (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), and Brian Vickers, Shakespeare, Co-Author: A Historical Study of Five Collaborative Plays (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002). It is striking that the five plays to which Vickers devotes his lengthy study—Titus Andronicus, Timon of Athens, Pericles, Henry VIII, and The Two Noble Kinsmen—are, by a wide consensus, among the weakest to bear Shakespeare’s name. The odd effect, then, of the most recent account of collaboration is to reinforce a highly traditional account of Shakespeare’s singular creative genius.

Helpful and informative on the way in which Shakespeare and his contemporaries organized and conducted their professional lives are Bentley, The Profession of Dramatist in Shakespeare’s Time, 1590–1642;Peter Thomson, Shakespeare’s Professional Career (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992); Andrew Gurr, The Shakespearian Playing Companies (Oxford: Clarendon, 1996); and Knutson, Playing Companies and Commerce in Shakespeare’s Time. Though not always reliable, T. W. Baldwin, The Organization and Personnel of the Shakespearean Company (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1927), lays out most of the key information. T. J. King, Casting Shakespeare’s Plays: London Actors and Their Roles, 1590–1642 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992); Tiffany Stern, Rehearsal from Shakespeare to Sheridan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000); and David Bradley, From Text to Performance in the Elizabethan Theatre: Preparing the Play for the Stage (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), are illuminating, along with G. E. Bentley, The Profession of Player in Shakespeare’s Time, 1590–1642 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984). In Shakespeare as Literary Dramatist (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), Lukas Erne argues that Shakespeare was more interested than scholars have usually recognized in the printed as well as the performance aspect of his plays.

On Shakespeare as performer, see Meredith Skura, Shakespeare the Actor and the Purposes of Playing (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993). David Wiles, Shakespeare’s Clown: Actor and Text in the Elizabethan Playhouse (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), and David Mann, The Elizabethan Player: Contemporary Stage Representation (London: Routledge, 1991), are useful, as is Jean Howard, The Stage and Social Struggle in Early Modern England (London: Routledge, 1994).

Shakespeare’s extraordinary talent was not ignored by his contemporaries and rivals. For some of their responses, see E. A. J. Honigmann, Shakespeare’s Impact on His Contemporaries (London: Macmillan, 1982), and the two-volume Shakspere Allusion-Book: A Collection of Allusions to Shakspere from 1591 to 1700, ed. John Munro (London: Oxford University Press, 1932). Emrys Jones, The Origins of Shakespeare (Oxford: Clarendon, 1977), is illuminating on the first flowering of this talent.

Marlowe’s strange and violent life has been the subject of many biographies, including Charles Nicholl’s engagingly speculative The Reckoning: The Murder of Christopher Marlowe (London: Jonathan Cape, 1992), Constance Kuriyama’s Christoper Marlowe: A Renaissance Life (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2002), and David Riggs, The World of Christopher Marlowe (London: Faber, 2004). Greene’s Groatsworth of Wit, Bought with a Million of Repentance (1592) is available in an informative edition by D. Allen Carroll (Binghamton: Center for Medieval and Early Renaissance Studies, 1994).

CHAPTER 8: MASTER-MISTRESS

On Southampton’s claim to be the fair young man of the sonnets, see, especially, G. P. V. Akrigg, Shakespeare and the Earl of Southampton (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1968). On the career of the possible go-between, see Frances Yates, John Florio: The Life of an Italian in Shakespeare’s England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1934).

Joel Fineman, who had little or no interest in Shakespeare’s biography, has, in my view, written the most psychologically acute study of the sonnets, Shakespeare’s Perjured Eye (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986). The editions of the sonnets by Stephen Booth (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977), Katherine Duncan-Jones (Arden Shakespeare, 1997), and Colin Burrow (Oxford Shakespeare, 2002) each provide abundant commentaries, as does Helen Vendler’s The Art of Shakespeare’s Sonnets (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997); and Duncan-Jones rehearses in detail the competing identifications of the principal figures in the sequence. In Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being (London: Faber and Faber, 1992), Ted Hughes has brilliant pages on Venus and Adonis, which he views as the key to unlocking Shakespeare’s whole poetic achievement. Leeds Barroll’s Politics, Plague, and Shakespeare’s Theater: The Stuart Years (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991) describes the circumstances that led to the periodic closing of the theaters on public health grounds. In “Elizabethan Protest, Plague, and Plays: Rereading the ‘Documents of Control,’” English Literary Renaissance 26 (1996): 17–45, Barbara Freedman argues against the view that plague closures were always enforced.

The homoeroticism of Shakespeare’s sonnet sequence was registered with shock at least as early as the eighteenth century, when the editor George Steevens remarked, “It is impossible to read [it] without an equal mixture of disgust and indignation.” On the complex erotic environment in which Shakespeare lived, worked, and (presumably) loved, see Stephen Orgel, Impersonations: The Performance of Gender in Shakespeare’s England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); Alan Bray, Homosexuality in Renaissance England, 2nd ed. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995); and Bruce R. Smith, Homosexual Desire in Shakespeare’s England: A Cultural Poetics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), as well as his Shakespeare and Masculinity (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000). Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s chapter on the sonnets in her book Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985) is also extremely interesting.

CHAPTER 9: LAUGHER AT THE SCAFFOLD

In Shakespeare and the Jews (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), James Shapiro argues that there was a significant, if clandestine, Jewish community in London in Shakespeare’s time. Though this claim is debatable, Shapiro provides ample evidence for a widespread Elizabethan and Jacobean interest in Jews. See also David S. Katz, The Jews in the History of England, 1485–1850 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), and Laura H. Yungblut, Strangers Settled Here Amongst Us: Policies, Perceptions, and the Presence of Aliens in Elizabethan England (London: Routledge, 1996).

In “‘There Is a World Elsewhere’: William Shakespeare, Businessman,” in Images of Shakespeare: Proceedings of the Third Congress of the International Shakespeare Association, 1986, ed. Werner Habich, D. J. Palmer, and Roger Pringle (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1988), 40–46, E. A. J. Honigmann analyzes Shakespeare’s own involvement in moneylending and other mercantile enterprises, as does William Ingram, “The Economics of Playing,” in A Companion to Shakespeare, ed. David Scott Kastan (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999) 313–27.

On the single surviving manuscript play that may contain scenes in Shakespeare’s handwriting, see Scott McMillin, The Elizabethan Theatre and “The Book of Sir Thomas More” (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1987), and T. H. Howard-Hill, ed., Shakespeare and Sir Thomas More: Essays on the Play and Its Shakespearian Interest (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). The dating of Sir Thomas More and of Shakespeare’s own participation in the project is uncertain. The script may have been drafted by Anthony Munday and others in 1592–93 or 1595, at the time of the agitation against “strangers”; Shakespeare could have been involved from the beginning or could, as seems more likely, have made his additions as late as 1603 or 1604 during a further attempt to have it approved for performance.

Direct evidence of Shakespeare’s personal involvement with the community of “strangers” living in London dates from the early seventeenth century. In 1604, and probably for some time before, he was living in rented rooms on the corner of Mugwell and Silver Streets. His neighbors in the tenement were Christopher Mountjoy, a French Protestant, and his wife, Marie. Mountjoy had fled to England in the wake of the St. Bartholomew’s Day massacre in 1572 and had prospered as a manufacturer of ladies’ wigs and other headgear. In 1612 Shakespeare was deposed as a witness in a lawsuit between Mountjoy and his son-in-law Stephen Belott. The latter claimed that his father-in-law had pledged to give him sixty pounds on marrying and to leave him a legacy of two hundred pounds. Both parties to the suit agreed that in 1604 Shakespeare had helped, at the parents’ request, to persuade the young man to marry Mountjoy’s daughter and therefore knew the terms that had to be agreed upon. In his testimony Shakespeare spoke well both of the Mountjoys and of Belott, whom he had known, he said, “for the space of ten years or thereabouts,” but he declared under oath that he did not remember the precise financial terms of the marriage settlement. The documents from the lawsuit were unearthed in 1909; there is a good account of them in Samuel Schoenbaum’s Records and Images and in Park Honan’s Shakespeare: A Life.

CHAPTER 10: SPEAKING WITH THE DEAD

For the development of the Shakespearean soliloquy, see Wolfgang Clemen, Shakespeare’s Soliloquies, trans. C. S. Stokes (London: Methuen, 1987). On Shakespeare’s working and reworking of Hamlet and other plays, see John Jones, Shakespeare at Work (Oxford: Clarendon, 1995). On the impact on Shakespeare of the death of Hamnet, see the sensitive psychoanalytic account by Richard P. Wheeler, “Death in the Family: The Loss of a Son and the Rise of Shakespearean Comedy,” in Shakespeare Quarterly 51 (2000): 127–53. In Hamlet in Purgatory (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), I have written at length on the consequences for Shakespeare of the change in the relationship between the living and the dead. See also Roland M. Frye, The Renaissance Hamlet: Issues and Responses in 1600 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984). On the larger historical, cultural, and theological issues, see Theo Brown, The Fate of the Dead: A Study of Folk-Eschatology in the West Country after the Reformation (Ipswich, UK: D. S. Brewer, 1979); Clare Gittings, Death, Burial, and the Individual in Early Modern England (London: Croom Helm, 1984); Julian Litten, The English Way of Death: The Common Funeral since 1450 (London: R. Hale, 1991); Cressy, Birth, Marriage, and Death; and Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars.

CHAPTER 11: BEWITCHING THE KING

Alvin Kernan’s Shakespeare, the King’s Playwright: Theater in the Stuart Court, 1603–1613 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995) discusses Shakespeare’s relation to James.

On the relation of Macbeth to the Gunpowder Plot, see Henry Paul, The Royal Play of Macbeth (New York: Macmillan, 1950), and Garry Wills, Witches and Jesuits: Shakesepare’s Macbeth (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995). On the Gowrie conspiracy, see Louis Barbé, The Tragedy of Gowrie House (London: Alexander Gardner, 1887). Kramer and Sprenger’s Malleus maleficarum is available in an English translation and edition (1928; repr., New York: Dover, 1971) by Montague Summers, who also edited Reginald Scot’s Discoverie of Witchcraft (1930; repr., New York: Dover, 1972). Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1971), and Stuart Clark, Thinking with Demons: The Idea of Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe (Oxford: Clarendon, 1997), are particularly helpful on the place of the occult in the mentality of the period. In “Shakespeare Bewitched,” in New Historical Literary Study: Essays on Reproducing Texts, Representing History, ed. Jeffrey N. Cox and Larry J. Reynolds (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), 108–35, I discuss at greater length Shakespeare’s relation to witch hunting.

CHAPTER 12: THE TRIUMPH OF THE EVERYDAY

Bernard Beckerman, Shakespeare at the Globe (New York: Macmillan, 1962), and Irwin Smith, Shakespeare’s Blackfriars Playhouse: Its History and Its Design (New York: New York Universitiy Press, 1964), are both extremely useful introductions to Shakespeare’s principal theaters in the latter part of his career. On staging, Alan Dessen and Leslie Thomson’s A Dictionary of Stage Directions in English Drama, 1580–1642 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999) is illuminating, as is Dessen’s Elizabethan Stage Conventions and Modern Interpreters (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984). The account of the burning of the Globe, from a letter, dated July 2, 1613, written by Sir Henry Wotton to his nephew Sir Edmund Bacon, is cited in Chambers, Elizabethan Stage, 4:419–20.

Will in the World

How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare

Stephen Greenblatt

CHAPTER 1

Primal Scenes

LET US IMAGINE that Shakespeare found himself from boyhood fascinated by language, obsessed with the magic of words. There is overwhelming evidence for this obsession from his earliest writings, so it is a very safe assumption that it began early, perhaps from the first moment his mother whispered a nursery rhyme in his ear:

(This particular nursery rhyme was rattling around in his brain years later, when he was writing King Lear. “Pillicock sat on Pillicock-hill,” chants the madman Poor Tom [3.4.73].) He heard things in the sounds of words that others did not hear; he made connections that others did not make; and he was flooded with a pleasure all his own.

This was a love and a pleasure that Elizabethan England could arouse, richly satisfy, and reward, for the culture prized ornate eloquence, cultivated a taste for lavish prose from preachers and politicians, and expected even people of modest accomplishments and sober sensibilities to write poems. In one of his early plays, Love’s Labour’s Lost, Shakespeare created a ridiculous schoolteacher, Holofernes, whose manner is a parody of a classroom style that most audience members must have found immediately recognizable. Holofernes cannot refer to an apple without adding that it hangs “like a jewel in the ear of caelo, the sky, the welkin, the heaven” and that it drops “on the face of terra, the soil, the land, the earth” (4.2.4–6). He is the comical embodiment of a curriculum that used, as one of its key textbooks, Erasmus’s On Copiousness