description: 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.
language: English
title: Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare
titlecomplete: Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare
characters: William Shakespeare
genres: Theatre, British Literature, Drama, History, Books About Books, Literary Criticism, Biography Memoir, Biography, Literature, Nonfiction
ratings_count: 10290
places: United Kingdom, England
awards: name: Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, awardedAt: 1072944000000
name: National Book Award Finalist
category: Nonfiction
publisher: Recorded Books