Abstract: Stephen Greenblatt's Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare demonstrates the author’s new concept of life writing for Shakespeare. It is apparent that Greenblatt puts priority on the interpretation of the subject, thus featuring the hermeneutic tradition of Western life writing. In fact, his interpretation of “how Shakespeare became Shakespeare” is based on imaginations and speculations. His narrative discourses imply circulating interpretation resulted from self-subverting and intertextual methods, blurring the boundary between life writing and other genres to a great extent and subverting biographical truth, the essence of lifewriting. Thus, his postmodernist concepts and methods are not an innovation but a deconstruction of life writing.

Key words: Stephen Greenblatt; Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare; imaginations and speculations; deconstruction

Yuan Qi, Ph. D., is an Associate Professor at School of Liberal Arts of Yangzhou University,   and adjunct research fellow of SJTU Center for Life Writing, specializing in Western literary criticism and life writing studies. His recent book is A Dialogue with Freud and Shakespeare: Norman Holland’s New Psychoanalytic Criticism (Social Sciences Academic Press, 2014).