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To Read: “Will in the World”

Lauren

Is it summer yet?

The Shakespeare class is going well enough — or would be if the prof hadn’t agreed to the 7:30am class time, or didn’t turn out the lights and play quiet, wordy movies of Shakespearean plays, or if that person behind me didn’t lay a stank morning fart every day as though his or her classmates wouldn’t notice. I’ve kept up with the reading and been to all of the classes but one when I was sick last week.

I still don’t care about Shakespeare. I have managed to rebel against most canonical literature since the earliest days of my schooling, sticking with minority authors and my fascination with autobiographical theory and the creation of identity. Shakespeare was unfortunately ruined for me in the early days of middle school when a teacher forced me to read Hamlet and memorize a soliloquy that I promptly forgot about until the night before the exam. I failed that test and moved along, thankful that there are a bazillion movies of Shakespeare’s plays.

This time it isn’t so easy. Despite the use of film in the class, I must do the reading. Yet my prof isn’t so big on the historical or linguistic context in which the plays were written, something I could latch onto and run with, but more with the performative aspects of the plays. I’m already floundering and disengaged.

(I fear I picked the wrong major.)

I was pleased when my sister called last week and said she had the perfect book to ease my malaise. It arrived in the mail this weekend. According to Amazon, Will In the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare is “not just the life story of the world’s most revered writer. It is the story, too, of 16th- and 17th-century England writ large, the story of religious upheaval and political intrigue, of country festivals and brutal public executions, of the court and the theater, of Stratford and London, of martyrdom and recusancy, of witchcraft and magic, of love and death: in short, of the private but engaged William Shakespeare in his remarkable world.”

Being the lay history buff that I am, I hope this will be my key to undoing the disenchantment with this particular course, especially easing my sense of inadequacy with this material with the Shakespeare-based state teaching licensure tests ahead of me this semester.

After all the necessary phone calls are made and other reading assignments done for the day, I’ll be reading this book. Updates if anyone is interested.

8 thoughts on To Read: “Will in the World”

  1. If it isn’t already in the book you should check out the debates on who Shakespeare really was. There are some really interesting theories about a man named Edward De Vere which might help you get involved in the plays from another angle.

  2. Shakespeare was a minority in the modern sense–he was very clearly bisexual and wrote some lovely poetry to a young male lover that you would like.

  3. I have read the Edward de Vere angle and am not convinced. There’s also the angle that Shakespeare was anti-Jewish/semitic. However, that is debatable as in Shakespear’s day this would have been an accurate description of a Jewish merchant rather than a racially-bias stereotype designed to cause hatred.
    Certainly do update us on the quality of the book and any interesting tidbits in it.

  4. As a historian, this is where I get to do my impression of a manic flea. Firstly, the authorship debates can be entertaining, but only crazy conspiracy theorist types think that de Vere (or anyone else, really) wrote Shakespeare’s work. Second, Shakespeare was NOT ‘very clearly bisexual’. He may have been, but we don’t have the evidence to say. Yes, he wrote some ambiguous poetry but we cannot draw conclusions about his life simply from his writing. (Remember that thing called the writer’s imagination?) People do that kind of thing with Shakespeare all the bloody time because we don’t know very much about him, but it’s BAD HISTORY. There’s apparently some of that going on in Greenblatt’s book, but it sounds like a good read anyway.

  5. Sharon, it wasn’t ambigious. It was written to a young man, something he clearly states. The “ambiguity” was introduced later by homophobic scholars who just couldn’t stomach it. Nowadays, even really homophobic English scholars will admit that the sonnets are written to a young man and that they are probably indicative of a real relationship.

    Of course, the more famous sonnets were written to a woman, but those are later in the series. One has to wonder, though, if those sonnets are more famous because people were more comfortable reading hetro rather than homo poetry.

    Hell, people don’t even try to pretend Whitman was straight anymore.

  7. By ‘ambiguous’ I was referring to the sexual ambiguity of writing erotic poetry to both a man and a woman. I should have been less ambiguous, I suppose (but I personally and sexually happen to like ambiguity). But I’ll stress again: you cannot take Shakespeare’s writing in itself as an indicator of Shakespeare’s real life, certainly not as something ‘obvious’. AFter all, the latest theory is that because Shakespeare wrote vividly (and accurately) about the symptoms of syphilis… he must have had syphilis.

  8. You don’t like Shakespeare? They made it boring? Man, that sucks! We acted out part of Romeo and Juliet freshman year, and since this funny guy was playing Juliet’s dad, it made learning the play a lot better than it could have been. I suggest “The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, Abridged” to get straight to the sex and the killing, and a guide to all of Shakespeare’s dirty jokes.

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