Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare
By Stephen Greenblatt,
Jonathan Cape, ? 20

?I accept Shakespeare?s memory,? says Hermann S?rgel to Daniel Thorpe, over ?dark warm beer? in a London pub. And these solemn and slightly ridiculous words mark a bizarre rite of transmission between the two men in Borges?s story, ?Shakespeare?s Memory?. Thorpe is the writer of a fictionalized biography of Shakespeare, ?which garnered the contempt of critics but won some small commercial success in the United States and the colonies?. He is here making to S?rgel, a minor Shakespeare scholar from Germany, an offer of nothing less than ?Shakespeare?s memory, from his youngest boyhood days to early April, 1616?. Thorpe had received this magical gift from a dying soldier during the Great War, who, in his last moments, barely had time to explain the ?singular conditions of the gift?: ?The one who possesses it must offer it aloud, and the one who is to receive it must accept it the same way. The man who gives it loses it forever.?

Thorpe goes on to explain to S?rgel how he possesses, and is possessed by, two memories ? his own and Shakespeare?s. ?There is a place where they merge, somehow.? Yet, most of what Thorpe now ?knows? about Shakespeare?s inner and outer lives is incommunicable ? an immense and multitudinous sea of trivia ? and therefore of no use to the biographer. Hence, his desperate search for a successor who would relieve him of this oppressive and profoundly disorienting burden. Something compels S?rgel to accept Thorpe?s terrifying gift, and Borges?s account of what happens then to the German reads like a New Historicist?s dream come true ? but only as a waking nightmare. S?rgel does bring out a Shakespeare Chronology. Yet he realizes that the actual stuff of a life in the past, and indeed of that past itself, is a ?chaos of vague possibilities?. The fleeting substance of Shakespeare?s ?history? is held inside S?rgel?s mind and body; but behind his own great body of work, Shakespeare remains the ?grey man?, maddeningly unremarkable. S?rgel eventually finds another successor, and lets Shakespeare drain out of him into this other man, as he immerses himself in the ?strict, vast music? of Bach and becomes again ?a man among men?.

Borges himself had brilliantly caught the essence of Shakespeare?s greyness in the briefest of his ?fictions?, ?Everything and Nothing?. ?There was no one inside him,? he writes, and behind that ?fundamental identity of living, dreaming, and performing? in Shakespeare?s career, there was an equally fundamental ?nobodiness? that ?might not be discovered?. Borges?s story is, at once, an affirmation of historicism and a serene undermining of its vanities. Stephen Greenblatt?s reliving of this much-lived life reads like a long, histrionic footnote to Borges?s little tale. But it adds nothing new to what Borges immediately captures in four dense paragraphs.

One senses in Greenblatt a desperate need to enliven the Shakespearean greyness with the richest hues of the New Historicist palette. Every scholarly and rhetorical resource is feelingly deployed, and the great Shakespearean silences sounded with an indomitable speculativeness. The result is a warmly uneven book, with patches of wonderful local reading, set against an ?evocative? backdrop of ?Life & Times? kitsch of a soft-Rabelaisian, Merry-England variety. This scene-painting culminates in a reading of Hamlet, in which Greenblatt rehearses the arguments of his previous book, Hamlet in Purgatory, and then peters out into a lugubrious celebration of Shakespeare?s retired years in Stratford as ?a final fantastic theatrical experiment?.

Greenblatt acknowledges how the idea of this book originated in his conversation with Marc Norman, who was then in the early stages of scripting the ?celebrated movie?, Shakespeare in Love. In many ways, Will in the World is a belated counterpart of that film ? Cool Britannia?s and Cooler Hollywood?s ever-so-clever, life-and-love-affirming effort at telling the world how Shakespeare is our contemporary, especially on Valentine?s Day and despite the Master-Mistress. In a publicity interview on Amazon.com, Greenblatt admits that enjoying Shakespeare is more about ?opening your eyes and ears and taking pleasure?: ?But once you get the pleasure, then as a kind of natural extension of love, you want to know more.? And this is when Will in the World comes in handy. It will tell you, without taking away the joy and the wonder of that initial experience, ?how on earth could this person have done it?. Shakespeare?s ?immense, imaginative generosity? is a whackily contemporary free-for-all: ?This is a person who looked around in his world and tried to think his way deeply into unruly women, into blacks, into Jews, into homosexuals. That?s astonishing!?

This eminently marketable hybrid of Berkeley and Blair speaks a predictably mixed-up language ? so that the grunge-kids floundering through their Shakespeare courses as well as the Japanese tourists filing out of the reconstructed Globe might go for it. There is a sensational blurb-writing mode, as Macbeth ?burrows deep into the dark fantasies that swirled about in the king?s brain?. Or the tweeness of the Poet?s longing for the Friend: ?He wants to charm him, he wants to be with him, he wants to be him?He is in love with him.? But one also hears the grander cadences of an earlier, more eloquent Greenblatt, and not surprisingly, this is when the book sounds least redundant, as difficult things are made lucid, without being rendered easy, colourful and fun. He describes, for instance, the ?breakthrough? in Hamlet as Shakespeare working out how to create ?a strategic opacity?, shaped ?by his experience of the world and of his own inner life: his skepticism, his pain, his sense of broken rituals, his refusal of easy consolations?.

Keats had once observed that, unlike Byron, Shakespeare never bothered to ?cut a figure?, but ?led a life of Allegory; his works are the comments on it?. Keats?s ?life of Allegory? and Greenblatt?s ?strategic opacity? try to capture the same ?quality of nothing? that Shakespeare becomes in the body of his work, the vanishing trick that he invariably manages to pull off. Yet, paradoxically, it is Samuel Schoenbaum?s ?documentary life?, doggedly empirical and unspeculative, rather than Greenblatt?s relentlessly thick-descriptive celebration of Shakespeare?s ?magnificent imaginative achievement?, that takes us closer to this living Art?s core of reticence.

Aveek Sen