Summer Reading: Will in the World, Chapter 1

Will in the World: Chapter 1
Primal Scenes

One of the defining factors of New Historicist study is that one looks at the norms of the time, holds up a figure against these norms and the events that happened around them and make suppositions based upon these. A large portion of this chapter is written with an air of “This could have happened” and William “probably saw this.” This is how schooling is spoken about within this chapter, and Greenblatt is able to hold up specific examples within Shakespeare’s plays that do seem influenced by teaching styles and curriculum of the time.

Chapter One of Will in the World explores what William Shakespeare’s life would have been like as a young boy growing up as the son of the Bailiff of Stratford-Upon-Avon. Greenblatt explains that Bailiff was an early form of Mayor and that Daddy Shakespeare may not have had the greatest grasp on written English – but was very insistent that his son attended the local grammar school, where he would learn to read and write in English and Latin.

Transition from school into entertainments, Greenblatt explains that Latin lessons were often reinforced by the use of plays within curriculum: Latin plays. In this plays, scholars of the time were very insistent that schoolmasters do not allow the boys to actually kiss in the performance of these plays, he quotes “For the kiss of a beautiful boy is like the kiss of ‘certain spiders’: ‘if they do but touch men only with their mouth, they put them to wonderful pain and make them mad’” (Kindle Location 279). My contemporary perspective sees this as a homophobic warning – not unbelievable, nor inexcusable at a time when sin was so heavily condemned by the church (which citizens were required to attend). Greenblatt does not mention here – but it does seem to foreshadow discussions of Shakespeare’s possibly homosexuality in future chapters.

Besides the use of plays in schools, plays also occurred in Stratford-Upon-Avon under the permission of William’s father, the Bailiff, who welcomed in the Queen’s Men on numerous occasions. Greenblatt uses the account of a man similar in age to William Shakespeare, who lived just a few towns over, to present the very likely possibility of Shakespeare viewing plays in his youth. Greenblatt brings up many examples from the common ‘Morality Plays’ that also appear within Shakespeare’s works to emphasize the likelihood of this occurrence.

            The royal tours that Elizabeth would embark upon to see her country and allow her people to see her are also brought up as a likely experience of the young Will. Greenblatt references records of performances put on by the infamous Earl of Leicester, Robert Dudley, Elizabeth’s famous favourite, for her tour of the Midlands (near to Stratford-Upon-Avon). Greenblatt draws upon the similarities in these performances to Shakespeare’s Rude Mechanicals in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Not too surprising considering the obvious references to Elizabeth within that very play. Many of the cultural occurrences that happen around Shakespeare are mirrored within moments of his plays, and I’m interested to see where else the culture of Early Modern England is present within his words as I continue reading.