the New Pantagruel

Will in the Void: Stephen Greenblatt’s Shakespeare

by Dan Knauss

In the sixteenth century does not begin, as is conventionally phrased, a separation or differentiation of politics from a religious context; what actually begins is the elimination of the life of the spirit from public representation and the corresponding contraction of politics to a secular nucleus. In this process again we cannot distinguish clear-cut phases; we can speak only of a trend toward such contraction.

—History of Political Ideas, vol. 5, Religion and the Rise of Modernity, vol. 23 in The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin (Columbia and London: University of Missouri Press, 1998): 23-4.

The psychological boundaries by which the old culture had sought to understand the nature of man and predict his behavior were useless when he was no longer inhibited by the pressure of traditional community; and, experienced concretely in a more complex setting, human acts proved too ambiguous for neat classification. […] When man still clung to the old culture, he seemed to have become, in spite of himself, a trespasser against the order of the universe, a violator of its sacred limits—literally no man’s land—he had been conditioned to avoid. But his predicament was even worse if this experience had taught him to doubt the very existence of boundaries. He then seemed thrown, disoriented, back into the void from which it was the task of culture to rescue him. And this, I suggest, is the immediate explanation for the extraordinary anxiety of this period. It was an inevitable response to the growing inability of an inherited culture to invest experience with meaning.

—William J. Bouwsma, “Anxiety and the Formation of Early Modern Culture”

espite the author’s more than occasional declarative assertions about Shakespeare’s life, Stephen Greenblatt’s Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare is a sustained work of speculative, imaginative scholarship, as any biography of Shakespeare must be. The facts of Shakespeare’s life are few and enigmatic, but his literary output can only elicit wondering questions about the experiences that engendered it. Framing and answering those questions, however, can easily become an exercise in bardolatrous projections of an ideal and potentially anachronistic personality; it may also reduce that personality to simplistic historical causes.

As one would expect from the main architect of New Historicist criticism (or his preferred term, “Cultural Poetics”), Greenblatt labors to recover the primary, experiential tensions of Shakespeare’s life as it might have been rather than explain away those tensions with easy conclusions. Amid robust, colorfully detailed descriptions of Stratford and London life—a world that illuminates and is illuminated by frequent attention to the writings of Shakespeare and his contemporaries—Greenblatt preserves the mystery of the man in subtler ways than his subtitle may suggest. He limns out Shakespeare as a man thoroughly in his world and also profoundly alienated from it, a man of exceptional personal and artistic balance in a time of passionate and dangerous extremes embodied by many of his dramatic characters. Greenblatt also presents his readers with a Shakespeare whose deep, sympathetic capacities and great “imaginative generosity” (a frequent refrain) were coupled with a capacity for aesthetic distance that is “not entirely human.” What history can account for such a person?

Greenblatt sets out to answer that question with other questions that articulate what he imagines to have been “the central problems [Shakespeare] grappled with as a young man:—What should I do with my life? In what can I have faith? Whom do I love?” These questions make sense as parts of a whole, albeit conflicted, life, and Greenblatt’s most compelling chapters derive their strength from the fact that they sustain a unified narrative by acknowledging the central role that Christianity had in ordering (and disordering) Shakespeare’s world, its members’ relations to each other, and their sense of themselves. Other chapters concerning Shakespeare’s possibly “shotgun” marriage, illicit love affairs he may have had, and the decidedly wild lives of players and poets in London take very little account of the psychological and cultural realities of Elizabethan and Jacobean Christianity.

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