Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare

Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare | Plot Summary

Plot Summary

Chapter 1: Primal Scenes

Greenblatt borrows the title of the first chapter of Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare from psychiatrist Sigmund Freud. However, unlike the deeply intimate "primal scenes" of early childhood described in Freud's psychoanalytic theory, the scenes that Greenblatt considers are the very public spectacles that Shakespeare would have been exposed to in his rural hometown of Stratford-upon-Avon. As a student, Shakespeare would have read and...

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