He managed to play a perfect lowbrow-middlebrow-highbrow trifecta. Illustration by Ralph Steadman

Why do we read critical biographies of Shakespeare? The reasons that we shouldn’t have been ably given by his best critics. “Reader, looke / not on his Picture, but his Booke” was Ben Jonson’s advice right there at the start, on the title page of the First Folio, confronting the familiar Droeshout portrait of the unprepossessing bald guy with the ruff. The advice not to look at the life continues to this day. Artists, Auden insisted, should be anonymous; Shakespeare, for all intents and purposes, is, and we should revel in it. But Auden filled his criticism with confident assertions about Shakespeare’s love life, and Jonson himself couldn’t help but chat compulsively about the man: he couldn’t write Latin or Greek, he was a social climber, he needed an editor. Whatever our official pieties, deep down we all believe in lives. The sternest formalists are the loudest gossips, and if you ask a cultural-studies maven who believes in nothing but collective forces and class determinisms how she came to believe this doctrine, she will begin to tell you, eagerly, the story of her life.

The life and works of a man whose life is so plain and whose works are so fancy produces the kind of book that belongs less to a scholarly genre than to a performing genre, a hoop for a scholar to jump through when he no longer has anything to prove, as Lear is a role for an actor to jump through when he has done all the others. To the long run of such life-and-works books, the Harvard professor Stephen Greenblatt now offers his own reading, with the perfect punning title “Will in the World” (Norton; $26.95). 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. Greenblatt knows the life and the period deeply, has no hobbyhorses to ride, and makes, one after another, exquisitely sensitive and persuasive connections between what the eloquent poetry says and what the fragmentary life suggests. A fully postmodernized critic, he knows the barriers of rhetoric and artifice that make us write the poems and then have the feelings as often as we have the feelings first. But he does not make the postmodern mistake of overestimating those barriers, either. Poets may often write things they do not feel, but they rarely feel things that they do not, sooner or later, write. The absence of one emotion in Shakespeare, the undue intensity of another are powerful indicators of a mind and a man at work.

Drawing on surprisingly fertile decades of biographical scholarship, Greenblatt is not afraid to make definite assertions. He begins with a fine, disabused picture of Stratford circa 1564, when the poet was born. Against the old notion of an expansive Elizabethan culture connected by the open English road, he draws a portrait of a society nearly Soviet, or perhaps South American, in its paranoias, public persecutions, and sudden, murderous changes of ideology.

The underlying crisis was religious. In half a century—within the lifetime of Shakespeare’s father, John—England had gone through a very conservative regime of Catholicism, to an uneasy form of improvised state Catholicism under Henry VIII, through a period of radical Protestantism under King Edward VI, back to Roman Catholicism under Queen Mary, and then on to the staunchly Protestant monarchy of Elizabeth. As each sect seized power, it set about burning and disembowelling those who had been ascendant moments before. By the time Shakespeare was a young man, to be a Catholic priest at all was a capital offense.

The fear and brutality of this unending religious civil war was relieved by the richness of the surrounding folk culture: May Days and Robin Hood pageants, morality plays in tavern courtyards and miracle plays on holidays. “Folk culture is everywhere in his work, in the web of allusions and in the underlying structure,” Greenblatt writes. And this folk culture was, for Shakespeare, inextricably tied up, as it is in the Mediterranean world to this day, with the rituals and calendar and enveloping presence of the old faith. Greenblatt is assured here, where earlier generations of scholars were reserved: little doubt remains that Shakespeare, whose father, mother, and daughter were all, at times, secret Catholics, was at some level a partisan of the old religion. (A disinterested record remarks after his decease that “he dyed a papist.”) His mother, Mary Arden, came from an old, distinguished, and ardently Catholic family. His father, John, a glovemaker (and therefore an artisan, but one who dealt in luxury goods), was a leading citizen of Stratford, an alderman and bailiff, who participated in the Protestant ascendancy, arranging to have the local church ripped up and its icons and paintings removed—but who at the same time helped make sure that the schoolmasters hired for the public school were Catholic sympathizers, and secretly signed a Roman Catholic “Spiritual Testament” and hid it in the rafters of his house. (The testament of faith was found, still concealed, in the eighteenth century.)

There is no evidence that Shakespeare was a believing or a churchgoing Catholic; in his London years, he must have gone regularly to a Protestant church, or there would have been recorded legal consequences. Catholicism seems tied up for him, as it was for Englishmen well into the nineteenth century, with a love of ceremony and theatricality, a longing for a set of rituals that Protestant sobriety was eager to forbid. It was the pagan part of Catholicism that he loved—“Bare ruined choirs, where late the sweet birds sang”—and the Puritan part of Protestantism, its Malvolio-ism, that he feared. In 1575, Greenblatt tells us, when Shakespeare was eleven, a group of local artisans, exactly like those in “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” wanted to put on a play for the Queen on her visit to Kenilworth Castle, just twelve miles from Stratford. Playacting had been banned, however, and they wrote to complain tactfully about “certain of their preachers, men very commendable for behavior and learning, and sweet in their sermons, but somewhat too sour in preaching away their pastime.” It was this preaching away of his favorite pastime that Shakespeare associated with Protestantism. The medieval part of his imagination, his delight in lists of local flowers (“I know a bank whereon the wild thyme blows / where oxlips and the nodding violet grows”), the light of fairy tale and fable that shines through all his comedies, was haunted by the old faith and its rituals. Greenblatt uses “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” as a road map in his section on Shakespeare’s childhood, and persuasively so. The play, one of the very few in the entire canon without any previous literary model, is the most deeply autobiographical of Shakespeare’s works, in that it encompasses the three formative sources of his imagination: the fairy world of pagan folk memory and ritual; his father’s world of rustic tradesmen and artisans, joiners and tailors and glovers; and the world of young lovers having sex in the woods, which eventually got him trapped in a bad marriage—all seen from the safe point of view of the aristocratic life that he would get to know in London.