"Shakespeare's world was not that of the 'Renaissance Pleasure Fair.' It was a world of oppression, spying and betrayal, mass executions, censorship. But understanding how we got something precious from that should be part of what strengthens our grasp of what we have received from the past."
The great literary scholar and Shakespeare expert Stephen Greenblatt is here for a discussion about The Bard--- his plays, his influence, and how one goes about teaching Shakespeare. Themes that have come up before on this show reappear here, notably what does one do with the uncomfortable, sometimes disturbing content of The Taming of the Shrew, Othello, or The Merchant of Venice? What is a college class supposed to make of all this in America in 2021? How does Greenblatt take lessons from the history of world art and culture and funnel them through Shakespeare to his students, to the readers of his books? Also included here is a deep dive into Verdi's Otello-- what Greenblatt believes to be a profoundly moving treatment of one of Shakespeare's great masterpieces.
Stephen Greenblatt is Cogan University Professor of the Humanities at Harvard University. He is the author of fourteen books, including Tyrant: Shakespeare on Politics; The Rise and Fall of Adam and Eve; The Swerve: How the World Became Modern; Shakespeare's Freedom; Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare; Hamlet in Purgatory; Marvelous Possessions; and Renaissance Self-Fashioning. He is General Editor of The Norton Anthology of English Literature and of The Norton Shakespeare, has edited seven collections of criticism, and is a founding editor of the journal Representations. His honors include the 2016 Holberg Prize from the Norwegian Parliament, the 2012 Pulitzer Prize and the 2011 National Book Award for The Swerve, MLA’s James Russell Lowell Prize (twice), Harvard University’s Cabot Fellowship, the Distinguished Humanist Award from the Mellon Foundation, Yale’s Wilbur Cross Medal, the William Shakespeare Award for Classical Theatre, the Erasmus Institute Prize, two Guggenheim Fellowships and the Distinguished Teaching Award from the University of California, Berkeley. Among his named lecture series are the Adorno Lectures in Frankfurt, the University Lectures at Princeton, and the Clarendon Lectures at Oxford, and he has held visiting professorships at universities in Beijing, Kyoto, London, Paris, Florence, Torino, Trieste, and Bologna, as well as the Renaissance residency at the American Academy in Rome. He was president of the Modern Language Association of America and a long-term fellow of the Institute for Advanced Study in Berlin. He has been elected to membership in the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the American Philosophical Society, the Italian literary academy Accademia degli Arcadi, and is a fellow of the British Academy.
