Crossing the Border

Shakespeare Biography, Academic Celebrity, and the Reception of Will in the World

Authors

M. G. Aune North Dakota State University

Abstract

The publication in late 2004 of a new biography of Shakespeare—Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare, by the influential Harvard professor Stephen Greenblatt—elicited a wide range of reviews in popular and academic journals. Many reviewers found much to admire in the book, while others found very little to recommend. The most sharply negative reviews tended to appear in academic journals, where the expectation seems to have been that Will in the World should have been another instance of Greenblatt's new historicist work. Instead, the biography relies on conventional biographical strategies, most notably the use of conjecture and supposition. Reviewers for popular journals were more positive, but still evinced anxiety about Greenblatt's portrait of Shakespeare as an ordinary person rather than a transcendent genius. The often conflicting reviews from popular critics, academics, and students expose the discourses of academic responsibility and of the difference between "right" and "wrong" Shakespeare that constitute the boundary in American culture between low culture or popular Shakespeare and high culture or academic Shakespeare. By crossing this boundary, Greenblatt's Will in the World demonstrates the power of academic celebrity to enable such a transgression.

Author Biography

M. G. Aune, North Dakota State University

M. G. Aune is an Assistant Professor of English at North Dakota State University whose research interests include early modern travel writing and Shakespeare in performance. His reviews and articles have appeared in Early Modern Literary Studies, Renaissance Quarterly, Shakespeare Bulletin, and Theatre Journal.