I have been reading Will in the World by Stephen Greenblatt. I was attracted to it because I remembered reading favorable reviews of it ten years ago when it came out, because it had an attractive cover, interesting color plates, and because I read a little bit and found myself swept along by Greenblatt's lively, handsome and accessible writing. I was intrigued when Greenblatt explained that Shakespeare is one of our greatest biographical puzzles because while there is a large amount of certain kinds of documentation, such as criminal charges, lawsuits, property records, church attendance records, and wills, there are no personal letters, no diaries, and little eyewitness account.
I believe it is intended to be a biography in which the author's own creative output is used to illuminate the biography. It's intended for a general audience, rather than a scholarly one, and if you have been watching Will on TNT and want to know more about the life of William Shakespeare, this book is an excellent choice.
If you are specifically interested in the "lost years," the seven years between Shakespeare's marriage and the first mention of him in London living as an actor and a playwright, you will be disappointed. Greenblatt mentions the usual suppositions: that he worked as a tutor for one or more wealthy Northern recusant families, that he traveled in Italy, that he worked for his father and possibly, worked for a touring acting company. I should mention that almost nothing is known about these seven years of Shakespeare's life. There are no diaries or letters to or from Shakespeare in this period, and no universally accepted records of his employment. Records that we do know about are the schoolmasters of the Stratford Grammar School that Shakespeare himself had attended for some time; Greenblatt shows that there is evidence that three schoolteachers had links to the Catholic recusant movement (Catholics who did not attend Church of England services and English and other priests, educated and ordained on the Continent), which means that he could have had the connections to work in that capacity.
If you are interested in knowing whether it's likely that Shakespare's life was touched by Catholic thought and politics, or the politics of the Tudor era, this book would be a good resource because Greenblatt explains this very well. He talks about the references to Catholicism in his plays and other aspects of Shakespeare's biography that appear in the plays: references to the processes of curing leather, for instance, something Shakespeare knew from having worked in his father's glove business.
I found that aspect alone fascinating; I took Elizabethan Era History in college and cannot recall anything about "recusants," or about how the Elizabethan police state and the continuing loyalty to the Catholic faith in rural England, especially the north, created ongiong fear and tension. (At this time, everybody was expected to go to a Church of England church.) In fact, Greenblatt argues that there are many references to Catholic ritual in the plays and Shakespeare may have viewed the theatre as a sphere in which some of the communal concerns of a population that felt the absence of a former practice and cultural dislocation might feel some acknowledgment of their feelings.
There is a great deal here about Shakespeare's life in London, and about the aspects of Shakespeare's life that influenced his playwriting. Especially, Greenblatt makes some interesting inferences about Shakespeare's life: 1) That he regretted his early marriage at 18 (he finds references to the foolishness of marrying young in his work); 2) that he detested his wife; 3) That Hamlet was not only informed by the loss of his son and the impending loss of his father but by his awareness that Protestantism's relationship to the dead was very different from that of Catholicism, and less comforting; 4) That his father's reversal of fortune made the theme of restoration a recurring one in Shakespeare's work; 5) that the late plays' recurring father-daughter relationships reflected Shakespeare's close relationship with his elder daughter, Susanna. Greenblatt also discusses the biographical aspects of the sonnets, Venus and Adonis, and The Rape of Lucrece. I have not read these poems and only a few of the sonnets, but I found this discussion very interesting.
There is much evidence of factual events Shakespeare's life but it comes almost entirely from legal documents: lawsuits, contracts, references to his father's life as a local public official and Shakespeare's own will.
For students, I think the chapter notes at the back of the book may be quite helpful in locating books that deal with certain questions in greater depth.
