Will In The World

Stephen Greenblatt is Cogan University Professor of the Humanities at Harvard University. He is the author of fifteen books, including The Swerve: How the World Became Modern, which won the National Book Award and a Pulitzer Prize, as well as the New York Times bestseller Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare and the classic university text Renaissance Self-Fashioning. A prize-winning author and celebrated scholar, he has been studying, thinking and writing about Renaissance literature for his entire working life.

"Scholarly, comprehensive and fascinating study" -- Will in the World Stephen Greenblatt "Stephen Greenblatt's Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare is a delight, full of new insights and infused with a rich understanding of precisely why Shakespeare's writing gives us such lasting pleasure. His account of the link between Hamlet and the death of Shakespeare's son Hamnet is quite superb." John Simpson, Daily Telegraph "Unabashedly speculative, [Greenblatt] is acutely alive to the historical context, with an appetite for understanding the legalities of the time, the meanings of words, and the importance of friends and mentors" The Economist "A work of wonderful erudition that can be read as an accessible introduction to the social and political milieu from which Shakespeare emerged, and as an elegant guide to the astonishing poems and plays themselves" Jason Cowley, New Statesman "really gives me a sense of being in touch with the man. Greenblatt's knowledge of the plays and the times in which they were written is so encyclopaedic that he can assemble a convincing portrait of Shakespeare without resorting to smoke and mirrors." Humphrey Carpenter, The Sunday Times