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When an historian treats a great figure of the past or touches upon the canon of literature, his or her speculative choices gain credibility to the degree that he or she controls the data.
Stephen Greenblatt’s intensely speculative exploration of William Shakespeare is data-driven and anchored in a stupendous familiarity with the poet’s historical moment and the documentary fund that allows us access to the time and place in which the Bard strode large across the land. Or at least across London, where his profession was and his family was not.
This is an intriguing, maddening, and informative work. Yet it’s chief virtue is that it is utterly absorbing for anyone who knows Shakespeare’s plays or has vowed once again this January 1st to read them.
Greenblatt’s methodology is to inform himself of the minutae of Shakespeare’s environs and then to canvass his works for evidence of alignment with those details. In this way, the author believes he can ferret out the influences, references, allusions, obligations, and opportunities to which ‘Will’ was responding with his unequalled artistry.
The result is maddening in those moments where the ‘could haves’ and ‘might have beens’ metamorphise into ‘must have beens’, but profoundly suggestive if one allows for a significant margin of error between Greenblatt’s speculative insight and what we can actually know.
A lesser scholar would be entombed by the cumulative weight of his guesses. Greenblatt is elevated by them.
One glimpses through his daring and thorough scholarship possibilities for understanding this Moses of the English language that otherwise—alone and novitiate that we are—might never, must never have occurred.
Canter Bridge 
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