Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare

How did Shakespeare become Shakespeare? Stephen Greenblatt enables us to see, hear, and feel how an acutely sensitive and talented boy, surrounded by the rich tapestry of Elizabethan life – full of drama and pageantry, and also cruelty and danger – could have become the world’s greatest playwright. Greenblatt makes inspired connections between an entertainment presented to Queen Elizabeth on a visit to the countryside during Shakespeare’s boyhood and passages in A Midsummer Night’s Dream; between his family’s secret Catholicism and the ghost that haunts Hamlet; between the hanging of a Jewish physician in London and The Merchant of Venice; between Shakespeare’s own son Hamnet’s death and the most famous burial scene in literature.