Funds for Bookworm are provided in part by Lannin Foundation.

You are a human animal.

You are a very special breed.

Or you are the only animal.

Who can think, who can reason, who can read.

From KCRW Santa Monica, I'm Michael Silverblatt, and this is Bookworm. Today I'm very happy

to have as my guest, Stephen Greenblatt. He's written a new book about William Shakespeare

called Will in the World, how Shakespeare became Shakespeare.

It's published by Norton.

Now, I have not done very many critics,

literary critics on Bookworm,

because, you know, so few of them do the things that the people who taught me, Leslie Fiedler, Hugh Kenner, could do, which was to shyly manifest a surprise and to demand the criticism astonish you, if not as much as the text did,

but astonish you about the text or about how much could be discovered or imputed to it.

And I've always felt that my favorite critics, maybe they were telling the truth, but it didn't matter. Truth wasn't

the essence. Wonder was, and the renewed love of the book you loved, the book you cared about

was the point. Now, I had feared that this kind of thing had disappeared until I read Will and the World,

which is a book that contains so many surprises largely as a result of its method.

Could you explain the relationship then in this book of what we've known of Shakespearean biography and the widened sense of history that informs the reference here?

Well, we have, Michael, we've known basically what there is to know about Shakespeare in the narrowest sense of the traces that he left, chicken scratchings

and the bureaucratic records of his time. We've known that for, oh, better part of a hundred

years, maybe even a little longer. And we've rehearsed those precious scraps of information.

And I rehearse those precious scraps of information quite gleefully.

...