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
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.
phrases world enough
In short, it became possible - never easy, but possible - in the poet Auden's phrase to find the mortal world enough.
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!
american-critic audience eventually good provided relatively written
I've been at this for 40 years. And, as an academic, I've been content with relatively small audiences, with the thought that the audience I long for will find its way eventually to what I have written, provided that what I have written is good enough.
american-critic finally left life relation works
What matters here are the works - finally without them his life would be uninteresting. What matters, that is, are the astonishing things that he left behind. If we can get the life in relation to the works, then it can take off.