My Kind of Biography

There is a new biography of William Shakespeare, entitled Will in the World. It is hugely entertaining, although it adds little to established knowledge of Shakespeare. How did the author, Stephen Greenblatt of famous Harvard University, achieve this? Simple: when the facts are not known, he makes them up.

I'm not kidding. When he runs out of data, he just makes up stories. It's not like a historical novel, where a plot is run through established facts to illustrate and dramatize their coherence. It's the opposite, where the facts are so sparse that a plot (and fresh facts) must be invented to make them coherent.

Needless to say, the reviews have been mixed. Some say this is just a silly exercise in making stuff up. Killjoys. But some consider it "the best one-volume life of Shakespeare yet."

I'm here to tell you, it is both. Much of it is made-up and indefensible. And much of it is full of interesting facts and context that I hadn't known, despite having read several careful, dry, tedious, Shakespeare biographies.

The book addresses the biggest problem of Shakespeare for the reader, which is the maddening dissonance of reading something phenomenal, and saying "who wrote this and why?"...and getting a collective shrug from the English Departments of the world. "Shakespeare wrote it," they say. And you ask who was Shakespeare? And then they feed you some story about how he was gay, or how he got arrested for poaching, or how Francis Bacon actually wrote the plays. Or they say (as they did where I went to school): let the text speak for itself.

But the text is godlike. Who did this?! Greenblatt apparently could stand it no longer, and just goes for it. Key "findings" from one chapter:

• Falstaff is partly or largely based on the notorious drunk, wit, deadbeat and writer Robert Greene (author of Greene's Groatsworth of Wit: Bought With a Million of Repentance).
• Shakespeare probably interacted with Greene and learned a few things from this brilliant but dissolute academic. In many ways his relationship might have been like Prince Hal's with Falstaff. In fact, this might have been such a big deal for Shakespeare that the whole Prince Hal / Falstaff thing might have just been about that.
• Late in life Greene probably asked Shakespeare for money, and Shakespeare probably said no.
• When Groatsworth came out, friends of the late Greene fell all over themselves to disavow it. Greenblatt assumes Southampton turned the muscle on 'em: "the Earl knows you intended no disrespect...mebbe a little apology is in order." I personally suspect is was more like "say you're sorry, or you'll never work in this town again." Spielberg don't need messengers to deliver the threat, and those guys probably didn't need prompting to get the word out. It was an old game then - Sophocles probably played it.
  
• When Greene died he left a will asking his first wife, whom he had abandoned years before, to pay back the people who had nursed him late in life and buried him. Knowing her likely reaction ("fuck off, Mistah!"), this is a breathtaking achievement: (OK, this is my theory, not Greenblatt's) he didn't just bounce checks. He bounced his Will.
  
• And Shakespeare's name was...Will!

Get it? It's therapy. Once you get started, you can't stop.

Next week: conclusive evidence that Shakespeare might have known Guy Fawkes...