"The first thing we do," one of the rebellious followers of Jack Cade famously proclaims in William Shakespeare's "II Henry VI," "let's kill all the lawyers!"
The London of Shakespeare's time, however, may well have benefited from a few more lawyers, or at least a little more law. When the young poet first came to the city in the mid-1580s, convicted murderers hung rotting in gibbets and criminals were publicly whipped. Shakespeare himself may have even been among them, supposedly convicted as a young man for poaching deer from a nobleman's land.
Such is the picture that is painted in "Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare," a new book that provides a colorful, lively interpretation of the great playwright's life.
"Will in the World" was written by Stephen Greenblatt and published last month by W. W. Norton. Its release was heralded with a mixed shower of accolades and criticism.
A professor of the humanities at Harvard University, Greenblatt is well known for his Shakespeare criticism. He has edited the Norton Shakespeare edition of the playwright's works and has written several other books on Shakespeare and his plays, including "Hamlet in Purgatory" (2002).
With "Will in the World," Greenblatt takes a much different approach to studying the Bard. Though Shakespeare has fascinated audiences for centuries, few documents or records detailing his life have survived, and scholars have been left trying to fit together the puzzle with far too few pieces.
As a result, Greenblatt is left to make his own guesses about what the infamous Bard's life must have been like. Could young Will have become interested in theater after watching morality plays as a youth, the essence of which is reflected in his later work? Do his later examinations of drunkard role models like the incorrigible Falstaff of "Henry V" result from his own decaying relationship with his father?
For the most part, Greenblatt's assumptions and logical jumps add color to the normally dry world of Shakespeare. In "Will in the World," he is not writing to a faceless crowd of Shakespearean scholars; he is instead trying to make the great playwright's life accessible to the more plebian reader. Shakespeare penned his plays for the masses, and Greenblatt the critic borrows from the Bard's dramatic techniques to relate the story of his life to a similar audience.
Shakespeare, Greenblatt tells us, was born to a poor family with a father struggling to rise above his means. The youth may have penned his first simple verses working for John Shakespeare's glove business, with simple rhymes like "The gift is small, the will is all," cleverly inserting the poet's name in a note sent to a gentleman's mistress.
Shakespeare is presented as a contradiction in terms. He struggled to get the family coat-of-arms that his father almost achieved before he fell into debt, but he mocked such aspiration in others.
Greenblatt, likewise, shifts back and forth between detailing the playwright's life and discussing its impact on his plays. Folk customs that were practiced in the region where Shakespeare grew up, always associated with May Day and Robin Hood, may have influenced "A Midsummer Night's Dream." Young Will's experiences learning Latin surface in "The Merry Wives of Windsor," when a teacher puts a young student through a rigorous lesson that may have mirrored Shakespeare's own recitations in grammar school.
But Shakespeare was as much a product of his environment as he was his early experiences, and Greenblatt paints a very different picture of a time that the average person today regards simply as a list of dates and kings.
When William Shakespeare first made his way to London, heads on pikes would have lined the Traitor's Bridge. Bear-baiting, where men would beat chained beasts to death, was regarded as a high form of entertainment, and the newly introduced theaters often used dogfights as a way of playing to the crowd.
Shakespeare's relationships with his wife, his colleagues, his rivals and his lovers are all described, and the critic does his best to draw parallels between the supposed facts of Shakespeare's life and the fictional stories he tells in his timeless plays.
Not all of Greenblatt's conclusions are infallible, and he has been rightly criticized for making assumptions and dismissing any opposing perspectives out of hand. In "Will in the World," his vision of Shakespeare is treated as the only interpretation, and the reader is invited to accept his presumptions as if they were obviously proven facts.
He tells his readers that Shakespeare could have starred in a play called "The Two Menaechmuses" as a youth, but his only justification for that seems to be that one of the playwright's early comedies, "The Comedy of Errors," borrows heavily from the original.
But "Will" is, after all, Greenblatt's vision, and for the average reader that he is clearly writing to, it is both entertaining and accessible. Not all of his conclusions may necessarily be as accurate as presented, but they are still interesting and relatively educational, as long as the reader keeps in mind that one critic's interpretation of the Bard is hardly universal.
Since Shakespeare first put his pen to paper, millions upon millions have lived and loved, wed and wept by his works. For those whose passing interest in the playwright gives them a burning desire to know more about his life, "Will in the World" offers them the opportunity to edge closer to the actual world in which the great man lived.
