He’s got Will power

You’ve seen the movie. Now read the book.

First, the movie: “Shakespeare in Love” was still an idea buzzing around screenwriter Marc Norman’s head when he sought out a preeminent Elizabethan literary scholar to help him flesh out the man behind the plays. Norman called universities around the country for names of “the major dudes in Shakespeare studies, and everyone kept mentioning Stephen Greenblatt,” Norman says.

Greenblatt’s gig as editor of “The Norton Shakespeare” certainly qualified him as a major dude in the field. But what had made his reputation was his role as a founding father of “new historicism” -- an approach to literary criticism that looks at art in its historical context. He was teaching at UC Berkeley at the time, so Norman flew up to see him and bat around ideas about the bard. The meeting went so well that the screenwriter continued to visit Greenblatt periodically as he shaped the Oscar-winning screenplay he and Tom Stoppard wrote about Shakespeare’s hardscrabble early years in the theater.

“Not only was he not huffy about some Hollywood guy poaching on his turf, he was playful and imaginative,” Norman says. “It was a fruitful experience for me.”

And an eye-opener for Greenblatt as well. The professor, now at Harvard, may have guided Norman through the thickets of Renaissance England, but the screenwriter introduced Greenblatt to new territory too -- an escape hatch from the ivory tower. The experience prompted the academic to write his first book aimed at a general audience, “Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare.”

Greenblatt’s experiment is already reaping kudos, not the least of which was a nomination for a National Book Award. The New Yorker’s Adam Gopnik called it “startlingly good -- the most complexly intelligent and sophisticated ... study of the life and work taken together that I have ever read.”

Greenblatt credits his brush with Hollywood with getting the five-year project off the ground. “The movie made me realize that you could interest a huge audience in what is fundamentally a literary question,” he says. “There’s the slightly despairing sense of literary critics that they’re addressing 38 people and that’s it. The movie’s fundamental question was, how did Shakespeare get from being the perfectly good workaday writer who wrote ‘Two Gentlemen of Verona’ to become the titanic writer who wrote ‘Romeo and Juliet’? And the answer the movie gives is not actually historically accurate, that it’s Gwyneth Paltrow.”

Greenblatt, a soft-spoken, elegant man wearing a sharply cut suit, is discussing the book at the W hotel in Westwood before giving a lecture at UCLA that evening, and his enthusiasm for its subject is clearly undimmed despite decades of study. Still, the book is stirring controversy.

Greenblatt may not be pushing the Paltrow theory, but he may as well be in the eyes of several academics and critics who’ve been sharpening their knives in reviews of the book. Writing in the Washington Post, Arthur Kirsch said he “makes historical connections that can be illuminating but are just as often far-fetched.” In the Los Angeles Times, Marina Warner accused him of indulging in “wild conjecture.”

Greenblatt takes such knocks in stride because in the mysterious world of Shakespeariana, speculation is the nature of the beast. The historical record is slim, so he reconstructs the playwright’s life with clues gleaned from his work and times. The goal is to “understand not only how the work came about but also vice versa -- to reach into the works to reconstruct what’s missing in the life and what we can only see in a shadowy way in the life,” says Greenblatt, a married father of three.

“That is one of the methods of the book, but it’s also potentially a weakness. Inevitably, there’s an enormous amount of both speculation and tact involved because you can’t simply look at the works and say, ‘This must have been going on in his life.’ How do you know? He could have imagined a lot of things that weren’t happening in his life at all. You have to be sensitive, careful and at the same time, daring and risk-taking.”

Greenblatt paints a portrait of a remarkable man living what was, in many ways, an unremarkable life. (He suggested that Norman consider writing about Shakespeare’s far more colorful contemporary Christopher Marlowe, a playwright, spy and heretic who was murdered when he was 29.)

The son of a glover who ended his days buried in debt and drink, Shakespeare sought safety in moderation. He saved and invested his money, living in modest quarters in London so he could retire at age 50 as a country burgher. He moved to a fine home in Stratford, where he died two years later.

Shakespeare may have created the most enduring portraits of lovers in the English language, but virtually all experienced passion outside the institution of marriage, and the playwright probably did too. For most of his 34-year marriage, he lived alone while his wife and children stayed behind in Stratford, a two-day ride from the city. Anne Hathaway Shakespeare is barely mentioned in his plays, letters or records, apart from his will, which bequeaths her his “second-best bed.”

Daddy’s girl

The bulk of Shakespeare’s estate went to the woman Greenblatt argues may have been the love of his life, his daughter Susannah. “You have this strange phenomenon at the end of his life where he’s writing a lot of plays about fathers and daughters, in particular aging fathers and beautiful young daughters,” he says. “And they have complicated, very charged relations like Prospero and Miranda [in “The Tempest”], Leontes and Perdita. There’s an amazing moment in ‘The Winter’s Tale’ where Leontes sees his daughter, whom he hasn’t seen for years, and he’s excited by her, aroused by her.”

Then Shakespeare leaves “basically everything to his daughter, who was clearly his favorite. Now ... it doesn’t take a major brain transplant to know you’re probably being told something about both the life and about the works.”

Greenblatt joins the speculation on the bard’s love for the Earl of Southampton, who was the subject of his eternal query: “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?” Shakespeare had been commissioned to persuade the comely young Southampton to succumb to his powerful guardian’s plan to marry him off despite his adamant refusal. The first 17 sonnets were meant to flatter him into reproducing: “only a fool would ‘be the tomb/of his self-love to stop posterity,’ ” Greenblatt writes, quoting from a sonnet.

But by the time Shakespeare penned the 18th sonnet, declaring, “Thou art more lovely and more temperate,” he was hooked, even though, as Greenblatt writes, “he knows that the young man regards him as little more than a servant -- an aging one at that. But ... he feels in his presence something he never felt with any woman. He wants to charm him, he wants to be with him, he wants to be him.”

He also argues that Shakespeare’s gnawing grief over the untimely death of his only son, Hamnet, at age 11 found expression in a mourning parent in “King John”: “Grief fills the room up of my absent child / Lies in his bed, walks up and down with me.”

Greenblatt will be the first to tell you that most if not all of his arguments have been made before -- whether he’s read them elsewhere or not. After all, scholars have had centuries to chew over the subject.

“There’s been more written on Shakespeare than on Christ,” says Thomas Wortham, UCLA’s English Department chairman. “There’s been more written on ‘Hamlet’ than on Christ. It’s impossible to think anything new about Shakespeare. But Stephen writes for a contemporary audience. As Emerson says, every age must rewrite its books. I find his contribution invaluable. Other people have brought forth suppositions, but Stephen brings them together in a way that in itself is a work of art.”

“Will in the World” isn’t Greenblatt’s only foray outside academia. He and the playwright Charles Mee recently completed a play called “Cardenio,” based on the lost Shakespeare play of the same name.

“I think that he understands really as no other Shakespeare scholar has before,” Mee says, “how a playwright takes the stuff of his own life and transforms it into theater, and that gives him a very deep understanding of the kind of person Shakespeare was.”

Greenblatt first became enthralled with Elizabethan England when he was earning a second bachelor’s at Cambridge and happened upon the poetry of Sir Walter Raleigh. His career-long inquiry into the relationship between art and life took wing with a dissertation he wrote on Raleigh at Yale.

In 1969, he returned to Berkeley, where he’d been an undergraduate, and he taught there until Harvard hired him away in 1996. At Berkeley, he and Catherine Gallagher co-edited a highly influential journal embracing new historicist thinking called Representations. At Harvard, he continues to pursue his endless fascination with the bard.

“Sometimes you spend a lot of time with writers and the effects begin to diminish,” he says, “but somehow the opposite is true with Shakespeare. The more time you spend with it, the more astonished you are by his ability to bring it off.”