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Outstanding
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Boston Globe William E. Cain
Vividly written, richly detailed, and insightful from first chapter to last, Stephen Greenblatt's fascinating biography of Shakespeare is certain to secure a place among the essential studies of the greatest of all writers.
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Outstanding
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Chicago Sun-Times Mark Athitakis
Richly entertaining.
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Outstanding
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Christian Science Monitor Norman A. Anderson
What is finally endearing about Greenblatt's examination and explanation is his obvious affection and admiration for his subject. And a study as fine as this one can only encourage more devotion.
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Outstanding
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Houston Chronicle Earl L. Dachslager
While Greenblatt's version of how Shakespeare became Shakespeare is at times rather speculative and extravagant (which Greenblatt clearly is aware of), nevertheless Will in the World is an impressive accomplishment, easily one of the most thought-provoking and perceptive accounts to date of Shakespeare's life and time.
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Outstanding
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Kirkus Reviews
A remarkably informative and enlightening look at Will Shakespeare.
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Outstanding
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Publishers Weekly
Brilliant in conception, often superb in execution, but sometimes-perhaps inevitably-disappointing in its degree of speculativeness.
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Outstanding
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Salon Laura Miller
Such a graceful effort to spin a life out of a few scraps of paper that only a churl would be unpersuaded by it.
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Outstanding
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The Economist
[Greenblatt] has an appetite for the out of the way, for deletions in an old document, for minutes and judicial proceedings, for the technical meanings of words, for networks of friends and mentors. More than that -- in a book intended for the general reader -- he can make these things eloquent.
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Outstanding
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The Guardian Gary Taylor
At his best, Greenblatt understands Shakespeare so well because he understands himself. We should all be so wise.
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Outstanding
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The New Yorker Adam Gopnik
Greenblatt's book is startlingly good -- the most complexly intelligent and sophisticated, and yet the most keenly enthusiastic, study of the life and work taken together that I have ever read.
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Outstanding
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The Onion A.V. Club Keith Phipps
But for all his talent for the well-drawn detail, Greenblatt's ability to make connections is what makes Will In The World so revelatory and unexpectedly gripping.
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Outstanding
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Wall Street Journal Denis Donoghue
A beautifully engaging work of scholarship... The book shows a divided allegiance between biographer and critic, but it becomes a magnificent achievement by negotiating the division with such intelligence and forbearance.
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Favorable
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Washington Post Arthur Kirsch
He is a masterful storyteller; his prose is elegant and subtle, if sometimes slippery; and his imagination is rich and interesting. When he focuses more exclusively on Shakespeare's texts, as he does in his chapter on the sonnets, he is a brilliant critic.
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Favorable
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The New York Times Michiko Kakutani
A highly readable if uneven book...This volume is very much aimed at the lay reader and nonacademic Shakespeare fan.
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Favorable
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The Globe And Mail [Toronto] Philippa Sheppard
Greenblatt's leaps of faith are compellingly argued, and buoyed up with historical realities.
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Favorable
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The Guardian Anthony Holden
This authoritative trot through the documented facts, effortlessly buttressed by fresh readings between the lines, is unafraid of the kind of speculation of which scholars usually take a dim view.
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Favorable
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San Francisco Chronicle Robert Hurwitt
It's an exceptionally well-told tale, an engrossing page-turner, in fact. But it's not so much a biography of Shakespeare as of one of many possible Shakespeares.
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Favorable
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Los Angeles Times Marina Warner
[Greenblatt] has difficulty, however, keeping to his adopted part as chronicler and often reverts to literary comment -- a chorus role... To use his own terms, Shakespeare is self-fashioning rather than self-revealing, a man of "double consciousness," hidden, with immense powers of empathy and self-projection. The current form of biography won't let him honor those qualities.
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Favorable
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Daily Telegraph Andrew Marr
There is a final, simple fact in this book's favour. It is beautifully written.
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Favorable
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Chicago Tribune Jeff Dolven
Every now and then the book verges on sentimentality, especially in the account of boyhood, and it does not have as much to say about the astonishments of the language--its concern is more with characters and plots. But a nuanced and convincing portrait emerges from the careful mix of fact, reconstruction and interpretation.
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Favorable
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Booklist Bryce Christensen
As the same spirit of sympathetic inquiry--by turns subtly speculative and candidly skeptical--plays over other key episodes in Shakespeare's life, readers finally glimpse the exceptional man who turned poetry into a panoramic mirror for all of humanity. [1 Sept 2004, p.39]
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Mixed
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Atlantic Monthly Cristina Nehring
The larger problem with Will in the World, however, is that it pays infinitely more attention to the miscellaneous curiosities and marginal obsessions of the sixteenth century than to anything that seems pivotal in Shakespeare's life or work.
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Mixed
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Daily Telegraph Jonathan Bate
The perennial problem with an approach of this kind is that the choice as to which bits of Shakespeare are based on his capacious imagination and which on his actual experience is entirely arbitrary.
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Mixed
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Library Journal Shana C. Fair
Students and scholars will be better served by Michael Wood's Shakespeare, which covers the same ground but provides better documentation of sources and more clearly indicates where the author provides his own deductions about Shakespeare's life. [Aug 2004, p.76]
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Mixed
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New York Observer Robert Cornfield
The book is made up of episodic riffs, letting stages of Shakespeare's life (education, first years in London, marriage, last plays and retirement) be an opportunity to ramble over the period's social, artistic, religious and political impingements on the man, and then ferret out how these sneak into the plays.
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Mixed
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New York Review Of Books Peter Holland
For at the heart of the problem of Will in the World is exactly the difficulty of reading out from the plays, especially when his argument is framed as a way of reading into them, of making the external apparent in the words that now survive only on the page.
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Mixed
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The New York Times Book Review Colm Toibin
Almost every step forward in reconstructing his life involves a step backward into conjecture and a further step sometimes into pure foolishness.
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Mixed
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The Spectator Katherine Duncan-Jones
Like much of Greenblatt's recent work, Will in the World combines a good deal of insight and sensitivity with a strangely uncritical mish-mash of ideés fixes and nonsense.
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Mixed
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The New Republic Richard Jenkyns
Skillfully written, with spirit and verve. It gives a vivid picture of the Elizabethan world, and it has fine and illuminating things to say about particular aspects of Shakespeare... Yet much of the book is silly. It shows small understanding of how to weigh historical evidence; and its notion of the creative process, and of the relation between a writer's work and a writer's life, is naive.
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Unfavorable
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London Review Of Books Colin Burrow
Will in the World is the literary-biographical equivalent of Coca-Cola. The sweetness gets too much after more than a couple of swigs, and after a while it starts to produce a build-up of gas which eventually squirts right up your nose.
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Unfavorable
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The Independent Colin MacCabe
The problem is that Greenblatt's own formulations, 200 years down a well worn line, lack conviction. "Shakespeare's imagination took it all in", "words came easily to him" - this is the Shakespeare of a celebrity booker for the Oprah Winfrey show. These phrases are not momentary lapses; they litter every page.
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