Sonntag, April 05, 2009

Signs of life

Shakespeare scholar Stephen Greenblatt is hot. He was hot 15 years ago when I took a course from him, and judging by Youtube he looks and acts exactly the same in his mid-60s as he did at 50.

I wasn
't exactly hot for teacher myself, though his genius intellect was unmistakeably charismatic. He was a flirt, and the girls lurved him - one rather modelish-looking freshman was rumored to spend suspicious amounts of time attending his office hours. (It just so happens his first marriage broke up just after this and he married an academic who I figure was a grad student of his at Berkeley, which was then still his home base. This academic was herself a Chanel model years ago, it is rumored...)

I mention
all this as evidence, if any is needed, of the invisible complexities of personality. If to the world at large Greenblatt is a distinguished scholar, if to a former student he is this and these other things, then in his personal reality he surely is this, the other and a hundred further things. Which brings me to his book "Will in the World," which draws out connections in what is known of Shakespeare's life, what can be read in his work and what is known of the politics and culture of England at the turn of the 17th century.

The book is interesting and entertaining, but it forgets - and certainly allows or encourages the reader to forget - that much of what it proposes would hardly qualify even as a theory, but would instead be justly labelled convincing fiction. Some of Greenblatt's work has the interior logic of a conspiracy theory, jumping from temporal coincidence to causality, and above all presuming that imagined chains of consequence that make sense are necessarily true.

Most objectionable is Greenblatt's occasional decision that he knows Shakespeare's mind, that he knows what Shakespeare felt. This is clearly crossing a line that I doubt Greenblatt would claim to approach: it presumes to know something about Shakespeare's personality, and no number of cultural drivers will ever tell us anything about that. We are told by contemporaries that Shakespeare was not as much of a party animal as Marlowe and Co., but that leaves every other personality under the sun. Was he a Greenblatt, a charming, charismatic intellectual? Was he, like many actors, an introvert in person, a nerd? I can't demand that Greenblatt be able to answer such questions, but whenever he claims Shakespeare was afraid (for instance), he is presuming to do just this.

I shouldn't be so negative - I thought the book was terrific, and it inspired me to reread Shakespeare, and you can't ask much more of a book of criticism than rekindling your interest in its subject. It will help me read with an ear much more open to historical context. I just feel a bit like I was led down the garden path - Shakespeare seemed to come to life, but then again the person I read about probably wasn't Shakespeare. Chances are, it seems to me, that a great number of Greenblatt's suppositions are not just wrong but are really just made up, believeable fictions.

I suppose the most frustrating thing about this sort of hypothetical biography is how short it surely falls of its mark: Greenblatt pitches in a few superlatives here and there, but they are detached from the portrait itself, which is consistently ordinary - inevitably ordinary, given that it is derived by a normative process from Shakespeare's cultural milieu.