Some scholars are concerned that "Will in the World," like "Shakespeare in Love," will give students inaccurate ideas. But Greenblatt's vision of Shakespeare seems to rankle them all the more because they interpret it as a dismissal of their labors.

Other scholars, meanwhile, see it as a kind of refutation of new historicism, the school of criticism that Greenblatt helped found at Berkeley in the 70's, which seeks to place works of literature in their social, political and religious contexts. Done well, a new historicist analysis can illuminate dimensions of a work of literature difficult for the untrained eye to see. Done badly, it can be rather like reading marginalia through a magnifying glass while ignoring the main text.

Although new historicists never went as far as poststructuralists like Roland Barthes or Michel Foucault, who essentially argued that works of literature are the product of social forces more than of the individual artist, the methodology did lean far enough in that direction for it to seem somewhat ironic for Greenblatt to turn to biography. As one scholar wisecracked, "For a million-dollar advance, the author exists!" But a more common response is, why didn't Greenblatt write another work of new historicism? Why rely on speculation rather than peel away the "layers of significance in the play and its revelation of the fault lines in Elizabethan culture -- which is what his own previous practice would have led us to expect him to do?" as Jonathan Bate wrote in The Telegraph.

Similarly, in The New York Review of Books, Peter Holland wondered why Greenblatt, in discussing Shakespeare's father's possible alcoholism, didn't examine drunkenness in Shakespeare more deeply. "Greenblatt's own work has taught us the kinds of questions we might ask of this repeated interest in alcohol abuse," wrote Holland, who is the author of the entry on Shakespeare in the new Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. historicism," and placed it in the context of contemporary literary biography. "It comes out of the other side of what new historicists and postmodernists understood, which is that lives aren't simply given, that they're fashioned -- fashioned by people as they live them and fashioned by us," Greenblatt said in a telephone interview. "The life of the author isn't an inert background to the works. The life is part of what the author is transforming into his or her achievement."

Indeed, Greenblatt seems to be fashioning himself into a popular author along the lines of Louis Menand or Simon Schama, academics whose work appeals to generalists but is often dismissed by experts keenly attuned to the lacunae. "I've never been a great believer in the obscure sublime in academic writing," Greenblatt said. Indeed, in introducing his fine scholarly book "Hamlet in Purgatory" (Princeton University, 2001), he wrote, "It seems a bit absurd to bear witness to the intensity of 'Hamlet'; but my profession has become so oddly diffident and even phobic about literary power, so suspicious and tense, that it risks losing sight of -- or at least failing to articulate -- the whole reason anyone bothers with the enterprise in the first place."

ESSAY Rachel Donadio is a writer and editor at the Book Review.