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”
Despite 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.
The chapters of the former description render a life and world that ring true in their complexity and liminality, their mixture of alien and familiar aspects, their rich and strange commerce between radically changing boundaries and notions of the sacred and profane. Here Shakespeare appears remote, at least as medieval as he is modern. In the other chapters, one finds a more decisively secularized but religion-haunted skeptic, a lovelorn bisexual who is trapped in an unsatisfying marriage, a man unable to avail himself of a divorce and, consequently, happiness. Here one finds, as it seems at times, the prototype for angst-ridden Woody Allen characters. The chapters of the latter description, which are the least historically analytical and the most anachronistic, suffer from the effects of what C. S. Lewis disdained as “poetolatry”—the treatment of dead authors as saints and their literary remains as relics, the objects of scholarly devotion in an age when art and literature constitute a new, post-religious religion.
Will in the World is not covert about its veneration of Shakespeare—it is neither a hidden nor entirely debilitating flaw. And it is only a flaw because it sometimes prevents Greenblatt from dwelling on what may be for him some of the most unsaintly scenes in Shakespeare’s life. Greenblatt in these cases refrains from probing Shakespeare’s wounds, so to speak, as he did with other figures in his earlier books, in favor of minimizing their import to the man by emphasizing how pain, injury, guilt, suffering and moral conflict became material for literary triumphs.
For instance, in a long and colorful chapter, Greenblatt presents Shakespeare’s Prince Hal (subsequently Henry V) as a type for Shakespeare himself and Falstaff as a type for Robert Greene, a brilliant but dangerously dissolute writer who died in sickness and poverty, perhaps rejected by Shakespeare when he requested aid. The sharpness and necessity of Hal’s ultimate rejection of Falstaff, his former friend, resonates with Shakespeare’s own sense of self-interest: here is a man who will revel in the hardscrabble and ebullient world of players and playwrights, but his true loyalty is always to his own private financial and social advancement. Greenblatt rightly finds this image of Shakespeare distressing; it is “utterly unsentimental and […] not entirely human.” Yet Greenblatt then elevates Shakespeare’s substitution of “pecuniary generosity” with “aesthetic generosity”—“the gift of transforming [Greene] into Falstaff”—to the status of “an incalculable gift.” That conclusion sounds a facile and utterly sentimental note.
In an early chapter, Shakespeare’s failed and evidently bitter marriage to a woman he all but abandoned (perhaps eventually taking male and female lovers, in Greenblatt’s view) is presented as a tragedy in which Shakespeare was the chief victim. (The wife’s perspective is not the subject for equal, or any, consideration.) Shakespeare, Greenblatt indicates, was particularly the victim of unenlightened divorce laws and retrograde beliefs about sex and marriage that would begin to be swept away once progressives like John Milton realized that marriage is really “about the dream of long-term love,” and “deep emotional satisfaction […] turned out to depend heavily upon the possibility of divorce.” While Greenblatt admits “it is not clear how much of this dream could have been envisaged” by anyone when Will married Anne Hathaway in 1582, he suggests it was indeed possible and probable. He does not mention the undoubtedly significant (and very different) dominant view of marriage as represented in the Book of Common Prayer and other relevant sources.
As one of Greenblatt’s colleagues, Debora Shuger, has noted, for people in Shakespeare’s time, “Sin [was] secularization, the attempt to avoid the drastic personal confrontation between absolute power and one’s own guilty, wormlike selfhood by refusing to hear the constraints such power imposes.” Yet Greenblatt excludes consideration of how Shakespeare might have experienced some measure of sin, guilt, or moral conflict regarding his actions and how that experience might be pertinent to his literary representations of marriage. For Greenblatt, the upshot is essentially that Shakespeare had a bad marriage, and that is why there are no truly happy, sustained examples of marital intimacy in his plays.
(Notably, Shuger’s argument implies that Greenblatt has projected thoroughly modern biases onto early modernity when she writes, “Both in politics and theology, modernity entails the rejection of the absolutist paradigm based on the polarities of power and subjection and therefore of the psychocultural formation which made this paradigm acceptable. At a certain point in Western history, guilt, dependence, and longing for passivity and for being ‘in relation’ to personal power […] became offensive.”)
For Greenblatt to press further into Shakespeare’s troubled soul would be, ironically, to remedy one Lewisian vice (that of “poetolatry”) with another, which Lewis called the “personal heresy” and defined as the idea that an author’s work can be taken as a representation of his personality and character. Lewis himself was not all of one mind concerning the nature and avoidability of the heresy. By granting, quite rightly, that one cannot separate an author from his work, Lewis left the door open for precisely the kind of hard-edged moral and political analysis of early modern personae for which Greenblatt is best known.
Reading for Lewis meant “sharing [an author’s] consciousness.” For Greenblatt it is an act of “speaking with the dead,” as he has frequently described the end and impulse of his scholarly vocation. Lewis expressed a desire to spare the act of sharing an author’s mind from the act of studying it, lest the latter profane the former with its judgments, but inevitably this is impossible.
Paving the way for scholars like Greenblatt who attend closely to the typically unseemly role that the human will has in shaping what individuals and institutions conceive and do, Lewis pointed out in The Allegory of Love that there are some parts in The Faerie Queene where Edmund Spenser “becomes a bad poet because he is, in certain respects, a bad man.” Lewis believed that “the wickedness [Spenser] had shared” as “an instrument of a detestable policy in Ireland” could be seen as having “corrupt[ed] his imagination” in these passages. Similarly, in a chapter in Will in the World that concerns Elizabethan anti-Semitism and The Merchant of Venice, Greenblatt contends that Shakespeare was both implicated in moral wrongs and resistant to them. Greater balance of this sort would have benefited his discussion of Shakespeare’s relationship with his literary peers and his wife.
Elsewhere in Will in the World, evidently due to his rejection of the ideal of an “impersonal” critic, Greenblatt accomplishes that balance quite well and resists oversimplification in his account of what the Reformation meant for Shakespeare, his family, and their contemporaries. This material hearkens back to his last book, which examined Hamlet and other plays as parts of the afterlife of formerly orthodox beliefs and rituals concerning Purgatory. There Greenblatt described his experience of praying the Kaddish for his own father who had left provisions for it to be said by others after his death, as he did not expect his secular son to do it for him. For Greenblatt, the conflicting emotions and loyalties entailed in this experience poignantly illuminate sixteenth and seventeenth century England, where a long process of religious change was imposed from above (really a series of reformations for some and reversals for others), dividing families and creating perhaps the first and most profound “generation gap.”
Along the lines of Charles Taylor’s recent reprise of Max Weber, Greenblatt sees the Protestant Reformation as a “great disembedding” of European society from Latin Christendom. Far more a “cultural revolution” than a popular reform movement, the Protestantization of England was a painful and drawn-out, disenchanting, and often disenfranchising process inflicted by a minority of elites on an unwilling and mostly powerless populace. In line with this view of the Reformation—one that has come to be widely accepted among literary scholars and historians since Eamon Duffy’s seminal work on the period—Greenblatt sees Shakespeare, his father, and other family members as “part of a very large group, probably the bulk of the population, who found themselves still grappling with longings and fears that the old resources of the Catholic Church had served to address.”
In this milieu, William Shakespeare learned the value and cost of survival. His father, John, whom Greenblatt opines fell into financial ruin due to alcoholism, left a secret spiritual testament with provisions for masses to be said for his soul’s repose. Other members of Shakespeare’s extended family and family friends appear to have been recusant Catholics as well, some perhaps housing and supporting members of the Catholic resistance, including radicals like the Jesuit Edmund Campion. (Going out on the book’s farthest limb, Greenblatt imagines a meeting between Campion and the young Shakespeare.)
While holding small political offices in Stratford during such troubled times, John Shakespeare had to keep the peace and balance intractably conflicted obligations and loyalties. At one time he was compelled to oversee the “reparation” of the parish church—that is, the defacement and removal of its murals and rood screen. Events like these marked William’s formative years, and Greenblatt convincingly surmises that they led him to become, like his father, “both Catholic and Protestant,” a Christian whose faith “was not […] securely bound either by the Catholic Church or by the Church of England.” (Belying the complexity of the crisis, Greenblatt’s use of the terms “Protestant,” “Catholic,” and “Puritan” are no doubt a convenience for the general reader, but they are rather anachronistic and non-specific terms, as all sides (which are in any case not reducible to two or three general camps) claimed catholicity and denounced the sectarian identities pushed on them by their enemies.)
In his most compelling argument, to which I can scarcely do justice here, Greenblatt conjectures that the death of Shakespeare’s young son, Hamnet, while Shakespeare was absent in London, resurfaced in the playwright’s mind a few years later to inspire Hamlet’s uniquely “tormented inwardness” and “spiritual crisis.” That crisis is of course precipitated by the unsettled ghost of Hamlet’s father, in whom he may have glimpsed the spectral images of his father and son.
At the time of Hamlet’s writing, John Shakespeare was close to his death and may have been seriously ill. He may have raised his grandson in his own son’s absence, and for Hamnet’s and now his own soul’s peace he would have needed to know that he would be remembered and properly cared for when he died. Though the official form in the prayerbook for the burial of the dead had erased from the language of orthodoxy the old religion’s recognition of the continuity and community that exists between the living and the dead, that bond was still intensely felt, as it may still be felt in Hamlet’s many pleas for remembrance.
How father and son experienced and responded to these needs in a society where centuries of belief and practice regarding purgatory had been criminalized, we cannot know. Undoubtedly their actions felt inadequate, and the traces of their lack of closure may linger in Shakespeare’s greatest tragedy, which, as Greenblatt contends, “drew upon the pity, confusion, and dread of death in a world of damaged rituals (the world in which most of us continue to live) because [Shakespeare] himself experienced those same emotions at the core of his being.”
When the ghost of Hamlet’s father speaks—lines that Shakespeare delivered on stage himself in his best performance, according to one observer—Greenblatt remarks that “Shakespeare must have conjured up within himself the voice of his dead son, the voice of his dying father, and perhaps too his own voice, as it would sound when it came from the grave. Small wonder that it would have been his best role.” Again Greenblatt sees the fragments and dispersed energies of alienated religious belief reconstituted in Shakespeare’s art, but this time he lets that inadequate recompense resonate into silence.
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