'Will in the World': Reinventing Shakespeare

On March 12, 1819, John Keats, in a letter to his brother and sister, asked them to give him in their reply a precise description of where they were sitting in the room as they wrote. ''Could I see the same thing done of any Man long since dead,'' he wrote, ''it would be a great delight: as to know in what position Shakespeare sat when he began 'To be or not to be.' '' Keats, in his curiosity, is our contemporary. The desire to know every move and the slightest feeling of the famous dead remains a central part of our culture.

''No one was as many men as this man,'' Jorge Luis Borges wrote. Shakespeare was ''everything and nothing.'' For any biographer approaching the life of Shakespeare, this is almost literally true. The plays and poems represent everything: a complex worldview, an astonishingly varied sense of character and tone, a command of poetic form and rhetoric and dramatic structure.

The life, on the other hand, was hardly documented: there are no letters or diaries or contemporary descriptions. Shakespeare's life was charted in the same way as most of his contemporaries': we have evidence of his parentage, his birth and death, his marriage, the birth and death of his children, his property deals. The rest, except for his name on poems and plays and some stray references to his work, is a silence we are barely able to tolerate. As Henry James wrote in his introduction to ''The Tempest'': ''It is never to be forgotten that we are in the presence of the human character the most magnificently endowed, in all time . . . so that of him, inevitably, it goes hardest with us to be told that we have nothing, or next to nothing.''

Stephen Greenblatt has been at the forefront of a movement called the New Historicism, which has suggested, sometimes with subtlety and scholarship, but sometimes with far-fetched absurdity, that with Shakespeare the context is the thing, rather than, say, the text itself. In books like ''Shakespearean Negotiations'' (1988) and ''Hamlet in Purgatory'' (2001), he has imagined the plays as unwritten, in the state of being composed, with the theater itself an aspect of the flux of late-16th-century rite and ritual; he has studied the sources for the plays both hidden and direct, and steeped himself in contemporary belief and power systems and taboos. While the image of Shakespeare alone in a room composing, using an unearthly talent and an autonomous imagination, would have given John Keats immense satisfaction, it would for Greenblatt be of very little interest.

The tone of Greenblatt's essays on Shakespeare tends to be allusive and dense. ''Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare,'' an attempt at a biography of Shakespeare, is written in clearer and often more elegant prose. Greenblatt is alert to the problems facing a biographer. Although he believes we possess information about Shakespeare in ''relative abundance,'' he admits that ''there are huge gaps in knowledge that make any biographical study of Shakespeare an exercise in speculation.''

William Shakespeare was born in Stratford-upon-Avon and baptized on April 26, 1564. Although his birthday is celebrated on April 23, the evidence for this is, like much else in his life, merely conjectural. Both his parents were probably illiterate; his father rose to prominence in the town, becoming, effectively, the mayor, but began during his son's adolescence to lose his modest wealth, slowly selling much of his property. It is presumed that William Shakespeare attended the local grammar school, but there is no documentary evidence for this. Since the curriculum of such schools is freely available, then it is also presumed that he followed this curriculum.

Almost every step forward in reconstructing his life involves a step backward into conjecture and a further step sometimes into pure foolishness. Greenblatt discovers, for example, that Shakespeare's father in his official capacity was responsible for paying two groups of touring players who came to the town in 1569. Would the father ''have taken his 5-year-old son to see the show?'' Greenblatt asks. The answer is as emphatic as the question is banal: We do not know. In the following paragraph, nonetheless, Greenblatt writes as though Shakespeare had in fact attended the play. ''His son, intelligent, quick and sensitive, would have stood between his father's legs. For the first time in his life William Shakespeare watched a play.''

Shakespeare was brought up in an age when private and public religious allegiance could differ, when many adhered in some secret way to the old religion but also obeyed the rules and attended the new official church as ordained by the queen. Because of a document said to have been found in the roof tiles of his parents' house in 1757, but now missing, there is some doubtful evidence that Shakespeare's father remained secretly loyal to the Roman Catholic Church. Because of certain elements in Shakespeare's work, like the use of ghosts and the sense of terror (which Catholics felt in Elizabeth's England), his religious background may be of great importance. The problem is, once more, that there is very little hard evidence.

Perhaps the most famous Catholic martyr of the time was Edmund Campion, a Jesuit priest who was executed by Elizabeth in 1581. Although some biographers have suggested a connection between Campion and Shakespeare's father, neither Peter Levi (1988) nor Park Honan (1998) nor Anthony Holden (1999) in their biographies suggested there was ever a meeting between William Shakespeare and Campion. Indeed, Samuel Schoenbaum in ''Shakespeare's Lives'' (1970), still the definitive book on how biographers have dealt with the scant documentation surrounding Shakespeare, does not even mention Campion.

It is true that Campion visited some families with whom Shakespeare may have had a vague association, and that he heard confessions. ''Was one of those with whom he exchanged whispered words the young man from Stratford-upon-Avon?'' Greenblatt asks. He does not even answer. Instead, he immediately writes: ''Let us imagine the two of them sitting together then, the 16-year-old fledgling poet and actor and the 40-year-old Jesuit. Shakespeare would have found Campion fascinating. . . . The Jesuit too, perhaps, even in a brief encounter, might have noticed something striking in the youth.'' Edmund Campion might indeed have found it striking that the youth was not, in fact, there at all.

We have documentary evidence, on the other hand, that the youth got married in 1582. Once again, there is a difficulty of interpretation over the name of his bride, as the clerk may have erred in his spelling, or Shakespeare may have attempted to marry someone else before he married Anne Hathaway. It is clear in any case that Anne Hathaway gave birth to a daughter, Susanna, who was christened in 1583, and twins, Hamnet and Judith, in 1585. Hamnet died in 1596. When Shakespeare went to London in the 1580's -- and we have no real idea of exactly when or quite how -- he traveled without his family, who remained in Stratford. In 1597 Shakespeare bought the second-largest house in Stratford; he subsequently bought more property in the town and its environs. On his death in 1616 -- he had retired to Stratford some years earlier -- he left the bulk of his estate to his daughter Susanna. He left his wife his ''second-best bed with the furniture,'' thus offering his many biographers, including Greenblatt, much room for speculation.

It is very difficult to connect any of the events in Shakespeare's personal life with his work. Greenblatt concedes that ''very little is understood about the life experiences'' that caused the imaginative leaps Shakespeare made. He is ready to imagine a set of plausible triggering events, but he is not always convincing. Because Shakespeare's own marriage may have been unhappy, for example, he may as a result have not written about happy marriages. But, on the other hand, unhappy marriages are by their very nature more dramatic, so the creation of exciting drama may have impelled him more than the obvious display of his conscious experience. He may certainly have named his character and his play ''Hamlet'' to commemorate his dead son, but the play itself does not have a dead son. He did dramatize unforeseen material catastrophe, but this may or may not have been influenced by his father's slowly waning fortunes. As Greenblatt himself writes about ''King Lear'': ''Once again, there is no easy, obvious link between what Shakespeare wrote . . . and the known circumstances of his own life.''

Greenblatt is at his best when he merges his gifts as a literary critic and scholar with his instincts as a biographer. He writes with real subtlety and skill about the sonnets -- suggestive rather than certain about what they tell us of Shakespeare the man. ''The sonnets,'' he writes, ''are a cunning sequence of beautiful locked boxes to which there are no keys, an exquisitely constructed screen behind which it is virtually impossible to venture with any confidence.'' He also writes very well about the climate of fear and the use of public punishment and torture in Elizabethan and early Jacobean England, and how this enters into the very spirit of Shakespeare's work.

This dark spirit is most apparent in the four tragedies, daring and original even 400 years later, written in the early years of the 17th century: ''Hamlet,'' ''Othello,'' ''King Lear'' and ''Macbeth.'' Greenblatt, returning to the more difficult rhetoric of his essays, offers an interesting key to their endurance. He calls it ''the excision of motive'' and the use of a ''strategic opacity'' in the creation of character. Action thus becomes ''more arbitrary and more rooted in deep psychological needs'' than explicable by outward events. The technique displayed, he writes, Shakespeare's ''preference for things untidy, damaged and unresolved.''

After 400 years Shakespeare's own life and its relationship to his work remain also untidy, damaged and unresolved. The opacity surrounding him adds to the mystery of his work, which is all we have, save a few poor and rather useless facts about his life. Greenblatt would, perhaps, be the first to admit that this is enough to be going on with.