Stephen Greenblatt
Stephen Greenblatt
Stephen Jay Greenblattis an American thinker, Shakespearean, literary historian, and Pulitzer Prize winning author. He is John Cogan University Professor of the Humanities at Harvard University. He is the editor of the The Norton Shakespeareand a contributor to The Norton Anthology of English Literature...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionTeacher
Date of Birth7 November 1943
CountryUnited States of America
american-critic claim compelling life work
But I wanted to make a claim: the claim here is that life is actually compelling and that Shakespeare's life is what he principally had to work with.
american-critic holding learned moment pieces quite revelation together trick
But the trick of holding off and having all the pieces come together at the moment of the revelation was something I must have learned quite early.
accessible became prose shakespeare
Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare ... animated, accessible prose and ... resonant panorama of Elizabethan England.
legacy warfare force
Compared to the unleashed forces of warfare and of faith, Mount Vesuvius was kinder to the legacy of antiquity.
reading literature ghost
Through reading literature we can make ghosts speak to us, and we can speak back to them.
firsts moments pleasure
First of all, Shakespeare is about pleasure and interest. He was from the first moment he actually wrote something for the stage, and he remains so.
names left-behind behinds
The Shakespeare that Shakespeare became is the name that's attached to these astonishing objects that he left behind.
volcanoes firsts eruption
First of all, there was a volcano of words, an eruption of words that Shakespeare had never used before that had never been used in the English language before. It's astonishing. It pours out of him.
dirty reflection knights
A comparably capacious embrace of beauty and pleasure - an embrace that somehow extends to death as well as life, to dissolution as well as creation - characterizes Montaigne's restless reflections on matter in motion, Cervantes's chronicle of his mad knight, Michelangelo's depiction of flayed skin, Leonardo's sketches of whirlpools, Caravaggio's loving attention to the dirty soles of Christ's feet.
phrases world enough
In short, it became possible - never easy, but possible - in the poet Auden's phrase to find the mortal world enough.
father long would-be
My father who in this case was an obsessive life-long storyteller, and by a very peculiar trick of my father's. My father would tell a very, very long story, and the punch line would be in Yiddish.
american-critic began case certainly fact originated poems published
Well it is certainly the case that the poems - which were in fact published during Shakespeare's lifetime - are weird if they began or originated in this form, as I think they did, because the poems get out of control.
american-critic exploit great hold onto power stories
I wanted to hold onto and exploit the power of narrative. This is not only a book about a great storyteller, but there have to be stories about the storyteller.
american-critic life love spent thinking though written
I'm not spitting in my own soup, I love having spent my life thinking about these things-but you don't have to know anything about his life, even though I've just written a biography!