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
Stephen Greenblatt quotes about
accessible became prose shakespeare
Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare ... animated, accessible prose and ... resonant panorama of Elizabethan England.
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.
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 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.
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 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 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 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 pleasure true
But if it doesn't have pleasure and interest, then it does not have life. And the same must be true about writing about literature.
entered heads london spoken
the heads on the pikes may have spoken to him on the day he entered London - and he may well have heeded their warning.
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.
house world firsts
What I wanted to do was to get that sense of being in touch with this lost world while holding onto what draws readers and audiences there in the first place.
art real black-and-white
It is not that Shakespeare's art is in technicolor and fancy, and that real life is black and white and tedious. The life that Shakespeare was living was the only life he had, and he had to use it to create what he was doing.
phrases world enough
In short, it became possible - never easy, but possible - in the poet Auden's phrase to find the mortal world enough.