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
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.
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.
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.
art psychics swerve
Art always penetrates the particular fissures in one's psychic life.
catholic way ghost
Now a Protestant confronting a Catholic ghost is exactly Shakespeare's way of grappling with what was not simply a general social problem but one lived out in his own life.