Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare (Anniversary Edition)

The Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award finalist, reissued with a new afterword for the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death.

A young man from a small provincial town moves to London in the late 1580s and, in a remarkably short time, becomes the greatest playwright not of his age alone but of all time. How is an achievement of this magnitude to be explained? Stephen Greenblatt brings us down to earth to see, hear, and feel how an acutely sensitive and talented boy, surrounded by the rich tapestry of Elizabethan life, could have become the world’s greatest playwright.

• The Swerve: How the World Became Modern
• A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare: 1599
• Tyrant: Shakespeare on Politics
• Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human
• The Rise and Fall of Adam and Eve
• Shakespeare After All
• Hamlet in Purgatory: Expanded Edition (Princeton Classics)
• The Year of Lear: Shakespeare in 1606
• Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare?
• The Bedford Companion to Shakespeare: An Introduction with Documents