I finally got around to reading Stephen Greenblatt's Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare years late, and after thoroughly enjoying the first part of his book The Swerve: How the World Became Modern. I emphasis first part, because that book is really two texts: one is a thoroughly entertaining and engaging account of how Poggio Bracciolini found and published the sole sizable manuscript of Lucretius' De Rerum Natura, a text that informed 15th-17th century skepticism towards Christianity. The second, less recondite and rather pretentious text, is essentially an anti-religious polemic from a rather tired point of view, that the so-called "Renaissance" bloomed with insightful and wise humanism and overcame centuries of superstition and dogmatism --in other words, Burckhardt's or Gibbon's point of view of the Middle Ages. This second text springs not only from a historically questionable point of view, but contains factual errors (such as ascribing the New Testament sentence, "Jesus wept" to Luke rather than John --an easy error any publisher's fact-checkers should have caught). The failure of the second part of Greenblatt's text do not overshadow the value of the first, but one does wonder, why bother?
Will in the World is an equally engaging reading of most of Shakespeare's works (poetry and theatre) to inform careful speculation about his life, inner life, and how he came to produce them. It does not seek to explain Shakespeare so that his achievement becomes merely quotidian --far from it! Insofar as facts about Will's life are known, but threadbare, due to the careful record-keeping of legal proceedings in Elizabeth's England, Greenblatt bases his account on well-received points of text well-known to scholars. What Greenblatt brings is careful but not over-fussy readings of Shakespeare's text themselves with an eye to what may have informed his imagination, such as the premature death of his son Hamnet in the period just before Will wrote Hamlet --an unsubtle play on names, especially since both orthography and pronunciation were not standard in Will's time. Consequently Greenblatt's text is noticeably furnished with careful speculations, verbs including must have, likely have, may have, and words such as probably and apparently —all in service of trying to pry beyond the veil of historical silence to ask what was going on in Will's mind and spirit.
Scholars may or may not approve of some, all, or any of Greenblatt's well-founded conjectures, and David Stenhouse justifiably would retitle the book Will in the Work. Greenblatt discovers no new facts, but does not disguise his conjectures. For a non-specialist reader, he conveys vividly the peculiarities of London ca. 1590-1610, odd legal features of property and time (such as "liberties," a legal trick by which the civic legal authority over formerly monastic lands, once held by houses long since dissolved, continued to be limited). Will's world is evoked very credibly in many places; in others not so much. Will's Catholic sympathies, or down-right Catholicism, seems less well-established than Greenblatt would make it. Will's utter silence regarding the leading source of social unrest and legal danger in his time still seems more prudential than protective: we just don't know what he thought about any questions of faith.
The problem is that for a figure in his time, Shakespeare leaves no letters, very few reliably autograph manuscripts, no diaries, few reliable, personal reminiscences remain from those who knew him, and few legal records beyond the barely factual. No wonder speculation remains that the figure of Will was a front for someone more notably connected or well-born, who however remains equally elusive, or more so. Compared even with earlier figures such as John Calvin or Heinrich Bullinger, figures at home in a different but equally litigious, dangerous, and ambiguous culture, Will left so little --but what he did leave was sometimes startling revelatory of human feelings that are still accessible, as well as affections and desires long since, often thought unworthy (such as same-sex desire), but now recovered and celebrated.
I'm glad I read it --it helps me to hear Will's works and words on stage. Where's Will? is a more serious game of where's Waldo? however -- and he's still hard to spot. Greenblatt's New Historicism serves him well in this case. The book is worthwhile to read, and if you wish a dive into Will's texts, I recommend it. His reading alone of Julius Ceasar in Elizabethan context is worthwhile —and in the current age of political lies, alternative facts, fake news, looming tyranny, and unbridled ambition, is highly topical.