Customer Reviews

Will

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This is a great read! It is a page turner that presents a vivid picture of Elizabethan London. I especially enjoyed the subtle comparison between the way Will sees an event and his daughter's view of the same event as described in Tiffany's earlier novel about Shakespeare's daughter, Judith. Also, the reference to the Earl of Oxford is very funny. (The Earl's descendant's claim that he wrote Shakespeare's plays.) We do not exactly enter Shakespeare's mind, but we can see something of how he observed human nature and how the words flowed to paper and stage. (It reminded me of the scene in Amadeaus in which we see Mozart writing his Requiem.) Brevity may be the soul of wit, but this book is too short. More pages next time please!!!!

I loved Tiffany's first Shakespearean novel, My Father Had a Daughter, so I had high hopes for Will. I was not disappointed. Tiffany vividly explores the complex personal and historical forces that shaped Shakespeare's life and work, including his contact with fellow playwrights, his relationship with his wife Anne, etc. I was struck by Tiffany's uncanny ability to sketch the bard as an ordinary yet inspired--and inspiring--man. Though it's possible that Will may irk the Marlowe enthusiasts who give Marlowe credit for Shakespeare's plays, I found its account of the competition and friendship between Renaissance playwrights subtle and convincing. I also appreciated how Tiffany's second novel provides us with Shakespeare's perspective on events reported by his daughter in My Father Had a Daughter. Wonderful!

This is a great read! It is informative, funny, and moving, and hard to put down. Alas, it is too short -- brevity is not the soul of historical novels. We are shown much of Shakespeare's London and meet Marlowe and other real characters. We are shown a glimpse of Shakespeare writing in passages that remind me of the scenes from Amadeus in which Mozart composes his Requim. Finally, the reference to the Earl of Oxford, claimed by some to be the real author of Shakespeare's work, is very funny.

Unlike with fictional Shakespeares created by other, more famous writers, I could actually believe this fictional Will wrote the great man's plays. He is complex, warm, insightful, funny, ambitious, innocent and sophisticated at once. One can imagine him having penned Shakespeare's greatest lines, yet he doesn't walk around spouting iambic pentameter. The story of his relationships with contemporary playwrights, including Kit Marlowe and Ben Jonson, and their alternately friendly and bitterly competitive rivalries is spellbinding, as are the political subplots. However it is the story of Will's relationship with Anne Hathaway, and the way his plays themselves are shown to reflect his growing maturity and his eventual return to his marriage and his "real" life, that is most compelling and profound. Dr. Tiffany gives us a convincing and extremely entertaining portrait of Shakespeare and the personal and cultural context in which he wrote. Read the first few pages on "Look Inside" and you'll be hooked!

Grace Tiffany's WILL is a solid testimony to the rising and flourishing of one of the greatest playwright and poetry in history. The legend of a master began in the library of Will's recusant uncle, whose collection ranged from Ovid's Metamorphoses to Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, greatly enthralled the school-aged Shakespeare. Uncle Edward's adamant denial of the Protestant and his audacious refusal to the Queen's Protestant faith had ineluctably, and inveterately imbued in Shakespeare the staunch conviction to speak against the absurdity of monarchy.

The time was 1588 in London, a dark and grim period in which a plague decimated the city at the backdrop of an imminent war. The Catholic Spain, without its stupendous fleet and navy power, threatened to sail its gunboats up the Thames. Struggling Puritans and papists dared to defy the Protestant Queen Elizabeth who relentlessly executed her enemies and pinned their heads on the pikes of London Bridge to rot. With an amazing gift of words and iambic meter, Shakespeare deftly deflected his mocking against the Queen to his poetry, which he embellished with parodies, nuanced words and satires couched in rich metaphor. It was with the pulchritude of poetry's doubleness and roundness that Shakespeare's jests against the reign was left unnoticed, though many of the lines were no less provocative than the incendiary jests spun by the seditionist. Even if the Queen herself might have sensed that he hovered just out of her sight and whispered those lines to her beneath his breath, she found no evidence of treason in his plays.

The making of a master did not come about without a catch. Whether it was really flesh that had intervened, Shakespeare's tight grip of his dream took a toll on his marriage. Anne was plaintively sure that he did not love her when the plague closed the theaters in London and he never came home to Stratford, but instead went to Southampton to write poetry for earl Henry Wriothesley. His prolonged absence from home put as much a strain on his marriage as in his relationship with three children. His beloved son Hamnet, who had always drawn and held his gaze during his brief stay, died in a mishap that sprang from the child's longing for his father. His daughter Judith, who bore the guilt of the death of her brother, yearned to say the verse in order to seek redemption from her father through speaking on a stage. Midsummer's Night Dream yet again shows the playwright's success is fueled by his private tragedy.

Shakespeare's tour-de-force in writing and his gifts in probing his audience won his a fellowship of players, a band of brothers. This blessing inevitably also invited jealousy, rivalry and feud. The baby-faced Christopher Marlowe was one perfect example. He snobbishly jeered at Shakespeare's lack of a university education and stigmatized him as being a mere dishlicker of learning. A thieving knave on Marlowe's part enraged Shakespeare and caused them to be at enmity with one another. Marlowe had the effrontery to steal Will's tit-for-tat idea and used it in his own play. He even buried bribed Philip Henslowe, owner of the Rose Theater, not to show any of Will's plays to the players. Was it not for the phenomenal success of Henry VI, Will's two comedies that were buried at the bottom of a pile of scripts would never be performed at the Rose.

WILL is well-researched, well-written, engrossing, and beguiling novel of a master in the making during a turbulent time. It is a testimony to how indefatigably a man followed his heart to fulfill his dream with an indomitable passion. He took minor parts when suddenly asked, stayed around the theater to watch the plays even when he wasn't. When he played he completely melted into his part and left no vestige of him. He had a knack to grab accurately and pull his audience's heartstring. WILL enlivens the life of London during Shakespeare's time and etches a portrait of a man whose public success of his plays is fueled by his private tragedy.

A great fictionalized life of Shakespeare, which was interesting reading even if it did not always follow the accepted theories surrounding his life and writings. The explanation of his plays as a reflection of the events in his life was an amazing plot device. I also liked comparing Shakespeare's point of view with his daughter's from Tiffany's My Father Had a Daughter.
The author said she had pare down her book for publication, I would have loved to read the original 1200 pages, the book ended much too soon for me!

Ms. Tiffany has blessed us with a vision of Williams Shakespeare that is very well researched and imaginatively fleshed out. Her Will is full of ambiguity, self-doubt, mistakes, brilliance, desire, and above all - an obsessive need to write the works that we still love.

The joy of meeting Will and so many of his contemporaries made me run back to my bookshelf to re-read the plays. I have used this book in my English classes this year to fire up my students' imaginations and it has worked!!! Our department members enjoyed the book so much we went out and purchased it for the school libary, considering it a must-have!

If you are not a fan of Elizabethan London, reading this excellent work by Ms. Tiffany may make you one. Shakespeare's view of events is both entertaining and believable. More than a study of the man, it is an insightful view into human nature. I look forward to Ms. Tiffany's next book!

The author has some peculiar ideas about Shakespeare, contrary to accepted ideas; she suggests that it was Marlowe who stole good ideas from Shakespeare instead of near-certainty that it was the other way around; the characters think like modern Americans; the coincidences are bizarre; and the writing is stilted.
If you want to learn about Shakespeare, read "Will in the World". If you want a mediocre historical romance, surely you could do better than this. But don't be snookered into believing you will learn anything about the real Shakespeare by this silly tripe. Ain't gonna happen.