Will In The World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare (Biography) by Stephen Greenblatt, 2004

Here's the latest attempt at a biography of one of the most intriguing human beings who ever lived. I say "attempt" because there is so little to go on. The biographical details that we know for certain about Shakespeare would fill two pages at most. So the would-be biographer has to fill out the picture with a lot of conjecture and surmise based on what we know about the era and the hints we can glean from the plays.

Stephen Greenblatt does an especially good job of making the times and the circumstances of Shakespeare's life and his writing come alive. It strikes me that probably not much of the information here is published here for the first time (although I don't have the expertise to say for sure) but the range and the quantity of it, the way it's all massed together to create a compelling picture, is impressive.

Take the vignette of little Will standing between his dad's knees to watch the morality plays that came to Stratford. Mr. Greenblatt reasonably assumes that the boy would have had such experience because his dad, John Shakespeare, was the town official who granted licences to the strolling players. The description of how young Will would have enjoyed the rustic celebrations, the harvest festivals and so on, and how these would have influenced his playwriting is also very convincing. And the rough-and-tumble, cut-throat world of London theatre is vividly conveyed. (Shades of  the movie Shakespeare In Love, a project on which Mr. Greenblatt was a consultant in the early stages.)

Unexpectedly -- but not surprisingly in retrospect -- this book gave me a new appreciation of Shakespeare's writing. When you see that so many of his best barbs are directed at his rivals or at certain political trends, the writing suddenly becomes as fresh as if we're reading the Steve Martin of his day. I think Mr. Greenblatt also does a good job of probing the mystery of the Sonnet collection. Many scholars have insisted that the passionate language of the first 126 sonnets, obviously addressed to a young man, was an expression of purely platonic, courtly flattery. While Mr. Greenblatt warns us of the impossibility of trying to build a biography on the poems -- no answers to the questions of who? when? where? how often? -- he does argue quite convincingly that Shakespeare quite clearly knew sexual attraction to a beautiful young male (or males). There are simply too many very explicit sexual references (often puns not immediately noticed) to pass these sonnets off as high-flown praise. Granted, the sublime erotic fulfillment imagined in these poems contrasts starkly with the self-loathing lust for the dark lady of the final 27 sonnets.

One of the strangest (to me) claims that Mr. Greenblatt makes for the later plays is that Shakespeare's great leap forward was to add opacity to the main characters' motives. In the original plays whose plots Shakespeare lifted almost holus-bolus, the motives of Hamlet, Lear and Iago, for example, are explained clearly and unambiguously. Shakespeare clouded the issue considerably. Just what is Hamlet's madness all about? Why does Lear put his loving daughter to such a stupid test? What's with Iago? In Mr. Greenblatt's view, apparently, these ambiguities make the characters richer, more imaginatively human, more touching.

Much has been made in reviews of Mr. Greenblatt's re-construction of Shakespeare's presumed Catholic connections. About 100 years after his father's death, a document hidden in the rafters of John Shakespeare's home was found to be a Catholic last will and testament. The document professed that the signatory, regardless of all outward appearances, truly believed the Catholic faith and wished to be prayed for in the Catholic manner after death. Mr. Greenblatt argues that, assuming the signature of John Shakespeare on the document is authentic, this would mean that the playwright's father remained a devout Catholic in spite of the outward Protestantism required by his official position in Stratford.

Mr. Greenblatt suggest that the great creative revolution in Hamlet was the result of Shakespeare's religious crisis over the death of his son Hamnet and the impending death of his father. In the new regime, it was forbidden to pray for the dead in the Catholic style with masses, rosaries and so on. Funeral rites were much curtailed. None of the supports of the old religion were available to console the bereaved. Mr. Greenblatt proposed that Shakespeare, like many of the populace caught in this transition period, may have had great misgivings about his duties to his dead son and his dying father. Thus the obsession in Hamlet with the reappearance of the dead as ghosts and the question of one's responsibility towards them.

In the end, though, it is that enigmatic personality behind the famous mask-like face that looms largest over this biography. I've always felt that, given the choice of meeting one of the two greatest creative geniuses the world has ever produced -- Shakespeare or Mozart -- I'd choose Shakespeare. Much as I love the divine Mozart's music, I feel he would be too skittish to have a nice chat with. Given that I wouldn't be able to engage him in musical discussion that would be erudite enough for him, he'd be wanting to get back to his card game, his gambling, his partying. Shakespeare, I've always assumed, would be more thoughtful, more willing to enter into discussion on almost any topic, given his wide reading and his knowledge of almost every subject.

But now I'm not so sure. Mr. Greenblatt paints him as a character who was very cagey. He didn't let himself be sucked into the riotous lifestyle of his rival playwrights. Which, of course, is why he survived all of them. And there's the point. Shakespeare was essentially a survivor, a man who watched his step very carefully, who managed his money with canny skill, steadily building up the small fortune that would enable him to retire and live the life of the small town gentleman. As far as we can tell from the scant documentation, he spent his retirement years in banal real estate deals and financial affairs, in the end drawing up a calculating and shrewd will. While he could express the most passionate human longing in the most beautiful language,  he wanted the life of a secure, dull bourgeois. If I came knocking on his door in Stratford and asked to see the king of English literature, the response might very well be, "Sorry, the king is in his counting house, counting out his money."

Casanova: The Man Who Really Loved Women (Biography) by Lydia Flem, translated by Catherine Temerson, 1997

Can't remember how this book found its way onto my list. It may have appeared in one of the Globe and Mail's round-ups of books on some topical subject. Perhaps the hook in this case was Bill Clinton's memoirs. As I've never known much about the original Casanova, it seemed a good idea to take a look at this book. Not that the curiosity was purely intellectual. What guy can't help wondering: what was it really like?

Turns out Giacomo Casanova (1725 - 1798) was accomplished in more ways than one (you know the one I mean). He was a philosopher, mathematician, musician, physician, writer, cabalist and an expert linguist, self-taught in most of these areas. Several of his play translations got big productions. There are strong indications that he had a hand in writing at least one scene of the libretto of Mozart's Don Giovanni. He could converse with monarchs and scientists on any subject as readily as he could charm a chambermaid.

Clearly, his brain was a  match for any other part of his anatomy. Some of his observations strike a remarkably fresh and contemporary note: "Some things become real that previously existed only in the imagination, and therefore some effects attributed to faith may not always be miraculous. They are miraculous for people who attribute limitless power to faith." On being a tourist, he notes the inevitable disappointment when one finally sees a famous site one has read about. He acknowledges that women become irritable in connection with their monthly cycles, but to say "that this influences the source of their faculty for thought is no more credible than that sperm influences the nature of the soul." As a child, he suggested to his mother and some of her arty friends that perhaps it is not the sun that moves, but the earth that moves around the sun. They blew him off.

As for his main claim to fame, Ms. Flem presents him as a feminist 250 years ahead of his time. He wanted women to be his equals in love-making. There was never any hint of coercion on his part. He hoped his women would enjoy unbridled pleasure as much as he did. Although he could pursue a women indefatigably, when it came to the actual deed, there was something almost passive about him. He considered women omnipotent godesses; men were, in his world view, mostly ineffectual and inconsequential. He usually parted with his lovers on the best of terms, trying to help them financially and socially, and remaining friends with them for life.

This man begins to look like the patron saint for any decent guy who wants to make the most of himself and his opportunities. But the writing of this book is so muddled that I can never get a clear picture of the man. Here's one particularly vexing example of the self-contradictory aspect of the work. We're told that, to avoid giving women the fatal "plumpness", he scrupulously made use of a certain eight-inch [sic!] sheath tied with a pink ribbon. Then how come he was always running into his illegitimate sons and daughters in his travels?

Ms. Flem bases her writing almost entirely on Casanova's published memoirs. Not once is there any questioning of whether he's telling the truth. Never is there any adequate explanation of circumstances and context. Take that business of his torrid affair with the nun who admired him in church and sent him a come-hither letter. Their trysts took place in a sumptuous apartment provided by the nun's regular lover, a wealthy nobleman. Excuse me for being naive, but how does that work?

And then there's the time when he has finally decided to marry a very beautiful young woman. Just before the wedding, in a great coup de theatre, he finds that her her mother is one of his former lovers. So his proposed bride is actually his daughter. Years later, when the young woman's elderly husband can't impregnate her, our Casanova is perfectly willing to oblige. Thus he becomes both the father and the grandfather of the baby produced. Are we to believe this story? Is any of this credible?

Not for Ms. Flem to raise such questions. She has written a book that is not so much a biography as an effusive riff on various themes in Casanova's life. The book circles repetitively around various events, with no regard for chronolgy. It's not for Ms. Flem to question anything or to attempt coherence or clarity. It's all about showing how cleverly she writes, what amazing theories she can spin about the great man, regardless of facts. Dealing with his last years, when he was writing his memoirs in seclusion, Ms. Flem quotes a passage where Casanova remembers how bummed he felt about his physical decline at the age of 47. "If such were my reflections twenty-six years ago, it is easy to imagine the ones that obsess me today when I am alone," he writes. Ms. Flem says, "When he formulates this sentence, he is a man of seventy-three with only a few months to live, yet he feels young in spirit and writing diverts him from boredom and melancholy. At the end of his life, Casanova remains free and happy." Really???? Either written words don't mean to Ms. Flem what they mean to me or she just doesn't give a damn. (To give her some benefit of doubt, it's possible that the English translation hasn't done her justice. Several sentences don't feel quite right. In one instance, someone is described as having done something "melancholically".)

The aspiring young man who wants to emulate the great one will have to look elsewhere for instruction. Wasn't there a Fellini movie years ago? Didn't it star Donald Sutherland?