9 - ‘Hywel in the World’

Summary

‘Let us imagine …’: thus begins Stephen Greenblatt's acclaimed study of Shakespeare, Will in the World, from which I have quite obviously pilfered the title of this essay. With these three simple words, readers are swept away into a version of the past that is at once completely plausible and yet, in its details, entirely hypothetical. Greenblatt's ‘speculative’ biography takes us from the vilest of taverns to the glittering Elizabethan court, and from dangerously overcrowded theaters to the iciest and most solitary of marriage beds. Ironically, it is primarily the biographer's own artistry that allows us to follow the Bard on this imagined journey of himself for, as one critic observed, ‘The things we know for sure about Shakespeare's life could be put into three pages and read aloud on Nickelodeon.’ Of course, the same could be said of any number of historical figures familiar to readers of this journal. Indeed, pre-modern specialists require more in the way of imagination than most, disposing as they all too often do of evidence so scanty as to be nearly invisible to the naked eye. As I recently overheard one of our more experienced undergraduates explain to a sophomore just entering the major, medieval and Renaissance are the best fields of history to study because there isn't any evidence to worry about and it is therefore impossible to be wrong. ‘Of course,’ he then added sagely, ‘it is also impossible to be right.’