<\/p>
Alastair Fowler has an eviserating review of Stephen Greenblatt\u2019s Will in the World <\/i> in the February 4 issue of the TLS <\/i> . He finds that Greenblatt, despite his new historicist interest in the historical embeddedness of literature, is rather sloppy with historical facts and contexts. Like other reviewers of the book, he notes Greenblatt\u2019s tendency to construct his biography based on imagined events and connections. Such as: \u201cRobert Nye\u2019s novel Mr. Shakespeare <\/i> is pressed into service to supply a visit by William, aged eleven, to Kenilworth to see the Earl of Leicester\u2019s splendid entertainment of the Queen. Did Shakespeare, Greenblatt asks, recall the Kenilworth festivities in his image of Arion in Twelfth Night <\/i> ?\u201d And Greenblatt speculates, based on a host of circumstantial and evanescent connections, that Shakespeare was a secret Catholic, and that this determined much of his life. <\/p>\n
Fowler also points to numerous factual errors. For instance: Greenblatt, Fowler says, \u201cexaggerates London\u2019s size: \u2018With a population nearing 200,000, it was some fifteen times larger than the next most populous cities in England and Wales; in all of Europe only Naples and Paris exceeded it in size.\u2019 The real London wasn\u2019t yet fifteen times as large as Norwich. Naples didn\u2019t merely exceed it, but was ten times as large at the 1595 census. And Naples and Paris weren\u2019t the only larger cities. In 1600 Constantinople had more than three times London\u2019s population. London (less than 60,000 in the early sixteenth century) also had to overtake Salamanca (133,000 in 1541 and 176,000 in 1591). Elizabethan Stratford, he writes, was \u2018a town with only some 2,000 inhabitants.\u2019 That \u2018only\u2019 speaks volumes about Greenblatt\u2019s geography. For, of the 600 or 700 towns in Shakespeare\u2019s England, at least 600 were smaller than Stratford, which was large for a market center.\u201d Greenblatt says that Mary Tudor \u201cmoved at once to reverse directions\u201d in religious policy, but Fowler notes that \u201cas many as twelve of Edward\u2019s councillors found places at Mary\u2019s council table.\u201d <\/p>\n
Where this really misleads, I think, is in Greenblatt\u2019s interpretation of the plays: \u201cRepeatedly conflating dramatist with characters, he imagines each play as directly transcribing Shakespeare himself, or someone Shakespeare knew. Consequently the dramatist is robbed of creative invention.\u201d <\/p>\n
Fowler concludes that the book, however imaginative, is \u201csloppy\u201d and \u201cnot bookish enough, and shows contempt for its readers \u2013 as if toy history were good enough for them.\u201d <\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Alastair Fowler has an eviserating review of Stephen Greenblatt\u2019s Will in the World in the February 4 issue of the TLS . He finds that Greenblatt, despite his new historicist interest in the historical embeddedness of literature, is rather sloppy with historical facts and contexts. Like other reviewers of the book, he notes Greenblatt\u2019s tendency […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3021,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1143","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-literature"],"yoast_head":"\n