Title: Overrated Edwardian-style plod
Product review: Greenblatt used to be an interesting literary critic 20 years ago, but this book is a mere pot-boiler of a kind that might have been written in about 1910. It is often inaccurate, and never interesting, and highly conservative. The only radical idea was in the first edition, which went so far as to claim that the young Shakespeare would have met wild porcupines in English woods, but an embarrassed Greenblatt has now deleted that bit. So there's no fun left anywhere, just a bland vague ramble through the usual stuff. You'd be much better off buying James Shapiro's '1599' or Park Honan's biography instead. You'd even be better off with Jon Bate's 'Genius of Shakespeare.'
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