The book relies on the most challenging biography of Shakespeare - provided by Joyce in the library sequence of Ulysses - while missing the point. To engage in the battle of popular culture is honourable to fall at the first hurdle foolish. We are offered the psychology and prose of Hello!. There is no attempt to light up Othello by considering the cultural origins of Western European love in Moorish Spain, nor a reading of The Merchant of Venice that reflects on Protestantism as Christianity's renewed engagement with Judaism. The handkerchief or the pound of flesh, the 'Do I not bleed?' or 'I have done the state some service', crystallise centuries of conflict and occasional illumination. Shakespeare's genius was to take the figure of the Moor or Jew and dramatise encounters with Christian society. What we get here is a Europe without Islam or Judaism. The engagement with Foucault or Derrida, Althusser or Lacan, was made in the name of an emancipatory understanding that would engage with the Eurocentric focus of the profession. It is a curiosity of intellectual history that three decades of theory in the American university result in this. Many assume we know little of Shakespeare, but the traces of his economic being - the transformation of a penurious son of a Stratford glover to a gentleman with landed interests - are exceptionally well documented. It serves as a magnificent digest of our knowledge and a good guide to the history and politics of the period. Will in the World will be immensely valuable to anyone interested in Shakespeare.

Indeed, there has not been for more than a century a biography of Shakespeare more steeped in our historical knowledge of Elizabethan and Jacobean England. But this charge cannot be levelled at Greenblatt, who has illuminated Renaissance thought with wide historical reading for a generation. It has been well said that New Historicism is old historicism minus most of the ideas. The jacket of this book tells us that Stephen Greenblatt is 'the founder of the school of criticism known as New Historicism'.

Greenblatt will in the world