Shakespeare's Secret Path to the Upper Class | Harvard's Stephen Greenblatt

[@bi.johnathan]

Instead of ad reads, my channel is funded directly by people passionate about the Great Books. Help me keep making more episodes with a paid subscription: johnathanbi.com * Full transcript: open.substack.com/pub/johnathanbi/p/transcript-for-interview-with-stephen-greenblatt-on-shakespeare-social-ambition * Join my email list to be notified of future episodes: greatbooks.io Companion lectures and interviews: * Lecture on Shakespeare's Julius Caesar: kzbin.info/www/bejne/rYW5dJqkpNd9fKc * Stephen Greenblatt on Shakespeare's views on Love: kzbin.info/www/bejne/rGrac2mIedGUbpI * Stephen Greenblatt on Shakespeare's literary genius: Coming soon. Professor Greenblatt's book: * Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare, amzn.to/3O6W27c (affiliate) TIMESTAMPS 00:00 0. Introduction 03:34 1. Coat of Arms 15:13 2. The Profession of Acting 32:31 3. Shakespeare's Motivations 38:33 4. Double Consciousness

[@syedaliraza1494]

Having explored this wonderfil channel is one of the best events lately. Sending you a big applause from Pakistan.

[@celsoffigueira]

Very interesting conversation. Watching from Angola 🇦🇴

[@bi.johnathan]

I need to visit!

[@SphiweTHULISA23]

I see John Bi I click, I like. You never disappoint ❤💯👌🏾

[@bi.johnathan]

Thanks for the continued support 🙏

[@hardywolv742]

Thank you Proof for the great content ive enjoyed all your works this December

[@BrandonStewartCS]

Thank you for the intellectually engaging discussion.

[@raymondmorun662]

subscribed for the attire and ensemble

[@bi.johnathan]

mute the video and just watch the hand gestures

[@jimimased1894]

​@@bi.johnathan the aesthetic does not suit the topics frankly. the most beautiful minds have known suffering, in turn that is why their work is so great & universal. Wearing loafers & these fancy backdrops shouts loudly to us plebs that this is not the place great creative contemporary minds reside, to the extent your fans & dullard commentators state that shakespeare must have been an aristocrat in disguise. lol. the Authenticity of our ancestors message that we enjoy today deserves a bit more respect & the true source of their insight & wisdom too. x

[@james5375]

hello Jonathan all the way from the heart of Melbourne Australia! Please come visit Melbourne. You’re absolutely brilliant! Thank you for all your work👌

[@bi.johnathan]

It's on my bucket list!

[@ChrisOgunlowo]

Fascinating

[@gabrieljacobs6090]

Honey wake up, new Johnny B!

[@LindaLinda80Linda]

Shakespeare loved puns and there are so many in most of his plays. He must have had a great sense of humor.

[@jokasmoka9114]

Hi, Good Work. It was a very intellectually stimulating interview as are all your videos. However, I think you should have released this video before the one on Caesar.

[@bi.johnathan]

agreed, i wanted to time the Caesar one with the election though

[@johnnyragadoo2414]

Ah, intellectual discourse. Hope I'm not crashing a private party. I was unable to resist subscribing.

[@LindaLinda80Linda]

Shakespeare’s father had had so many successes and failures in his life, could that be where he got the idea?

[@james5375]

Johnathan *😊

[@SenpaiAustin]

Back for my daily brain feed

[@bi.johnathan]

Open up for the chu chu train

[@SenpaiAustin]

@ I started reading about John Dee and the history of the British empire from 1500-1600. From this video I learned Shakespeare was from the same era. Very interesting period

[@Blinkerson55]

What % of commenters believe Edward de Vere was S?

[@Jeffhowardmeade]

When they provide a link on their FB page and suggest everybody go pile on, the numbers become distorted. In the grand scheme of things, they are a tiny fringe group that is schizming yet again and dying off faster than they are recruiting.

[@king_cobra5492]

Movie stars are not "high status" people, they are simply rich people for the most part.

[@roseschneier5788]

You're a Litvak, Dr G? That explains a lot...

[@JessicaK4-mj8hc]

@2:50 I want that in my biopic, good Lord, it is what every person I believe desires

[@LadyVTavora]

💚

[@thegreatestpursuit]

Is Jonathan Bi?

[@samwst56]

Sort of like being in English class again.

[@apokalupsishistoria]

Too bad Shakespeare is such an illusive figure, and would contest much of his work could be a cadre of writers. It's a shame we don't have letters or his common place book or anything to tie the works with the thoughts of the man himself. Please explain the early Henslowe Diary entries of those like "King Lier/Lear", Troilus and Cressida, Taming of A Shrew, and a host of others - which we are told we can't compare because we don't have those plays! Convenient? How much is common place or multiple hands at work? You're better off looking into Philip Sidney - a true nexus point for this conversation. And of course Greenblatt dislikes Nietzsche - he's a dirty Shakespeare doubter! I would read the section on WHO Nietzsche compares Shakespeare with.

[@Nullifidian]

_The True Chronicle History of King Leir_ and _The Taming of a Shrew_ are both extant, and I've read them both. You have just little enough knowledge of early modern drama to get yourself into a muddle, but not enough initiative to answer your own questions. There are probably two lost _Troiluses_ (including one by Henry Chettle and Thomas Dekker), but that's hardly surprising since there were an estimated 10,000-15,000 plays written in the period up to 1642 while there are only approximately 540 early modern plays extant. We know that there was a _Caesar's Fall_ co-written by Michael Drayton, Thomas Middleton, Anthony Munday, and John Webster, which presumably covered the same subject matter as _Julius Caesar_ , which we know to have been performed earlier because it was seen by the Thomas Platter at the Globe in 1599 and because John Weever drew on it (and on _Henry IV, Part 2_ ) for his _Mirror of Martyrs_ , published in 1601. When one company had a successful play, it was often the practice for another company to commission a play that imitated it, sometimes to the point of directly copying the subject matter. And if you want to know how much of the Shakespeare oeuvre is "multiple hands at work", then I suggest that you consult any scholarly text on collaborative authorship (e.g., _Shakespeare, Computers, and the Mystery of Authorship_ by Hugh Craig and Arthur F. Kinney [eds.]). The upshot of which will be that a minority of Shakespeare's plays appear to be co-authored with other men of the Bankside playwriting community (George Peele, Thomas Nashe, Thomas Kyd, Christopher Marlowe, Thomas Middleton, George Wilkins, and John Fletcher), mostly consisting of those works that Shakespeare wrote early and late in his career. This is consistent with a kind of "apprenticeship" system where young playwrights were paired with experienced dramatists to learn as they were working. When he worked with Peele, Kyd, Nashe, and Marlowe, he was the up-and-comer, and then he was the experienced playwright working with Middleton, Wilkins, and especially Fletcher, who succeeded him as the King's Men's house playwright, and whose three collaborations with Shakespeare were probably a kind of on-the-job training. Sir Philip Sidney died in 1586 at Zutphen before _any_ of William Shakespeare's plays were written. And I wouldn't give a toss for Nietzsche's opinions about Shakespeare, since they don't trump the available documentary and testimonial evidence, all of which establish William Shakespeare as the author of his own works.

[@bi.johnathan]

one more interview with greenblatt incoming that addresses this point (that his work is actually from multiple hands)

[@chancecolbert7249]

​@@Nullifidian​@Nullifidian So these are all fun "facts" available on wiki or Folgers, but the muddy elephant in the room is that these ideas are less consensus than folks like you like to believe. Lots of "probably's" and "must have's" and "maybe's." Here's the thing--Shakespeare's Troilus has a bunch of lines from Dekker and Chettle. See Patient Grissil, Hoffman, Lust's Dominion et al. And here's the thing: we don't have a copy of Dekker/Chettle's T&C. We have no idea whether it is the same play or not. Folger's lists a description of another T&C play--but we don't know if that is referring to Dekker and Chettle or an earlier version of the play. So what the previous commenter is bringing up is certainly not impossible--though it bucks against the current grain of thought. The same exact thing can be said of Caesar. Webster/Dekker could easily have brought it with them to LCM as they wrote for LCM too. It's telling that John Webster has been then only viable alternative for Hand D other than WS. Telling also that Webster collaborates with both Fletcher and Middleton (only 2 late collaborators of WS--Wilkins is the dumbest attribution of the entire era, Wilkins didn't write plays, he wrote crummy pamphlets.) But your reply largely reminds me of the Michael Bolton clone in Good Will Hunting. Do you have any of your own thoughts or does Folgers have to think them up for you? And I don't mean to be mean, love the love for WS, but none of what you listed above precludes any of the comments the above commenter made. Also, I notice Sir Thomas More's writers didn't make your co-writer list. I wonder why? Maybe because that includes Dekker and Chettle? Are we being selective for any particular reason other than cherry-picking? You wouldn't happen to be privy to a 1570 horoscope by John Dee perfectly predicting Philip Sidney's death 16 years ahead of time would you?? (Fun Fact: this a real thing.) You probably also are not privy to folks like Alwin Thaler who shows that WS pilfers from Sidney and Spenser ad nauseam. Check out his monograph "Shakespeare and The Defense of Poetry," (Thaler is an orthodox scholar from the 1950's). Also consider the difference between Leir and Lear is the injection of the Arcadia. Also consider that LLL's Berowne is named after Giordano Bruno, as the play quotes several Neapolitan and Florentine sources--none of which were translated into English. Sidney was Bruno's patron. Several other scholars have tied Sidney to LLL in other ways, I.e. comparison to Four Foster Children of Desire, Lady of May. I'm not necessarily pitching That Sidney is Shakespeare by any means, but your rote, stale consensus stuff does nothing with any of this information. As such scholars like Penny McCarthy have come to believe that WS must have worked for the Sidney's/Herbert's and was part of the so-called Wilton Circle. And indeed Marlowe and Daniel both seem to come up through the Sidney and Herbert households, so even if Penny is wrong, she's not far off. One doesn't have to be a WS doubter, but quit acting like we know all there is to know. The entire era is veiled in uncertainty and our whole picture of it to date is beyond ramshackle. This is not limited to WS either. Marlowe's entire canon needs to be disintegrated. Kyd's canon is yet to be defined. Drayton is still missing from the records. Webster is sorely overlooked and woefully absent in WS attribution, which is real problem. Peele, Greene and Lodge are catch-all's for apocryphal plays who can't be too well distinguished from each other. Lyly's chronology is still a complete mess, whether folks realize it or not. Folks also don't seem to notice or to care that plays like Caesar and Pompey are not wholly written by Chapman (same can be said for Ben's Catiline's Conspiracies, Ben only seems to add to an earlier version--which both of those plays indeed DO have earlier version and were likely all part of a trilogy, ending in Caesar, of which, Henslowe's Fall of Caesar/WS's Caesar are the final part.) Shoot, y'all still have no idea why or how Daniel pops up so visibly in WS in R2 and other mid 90s plays, like R&J, KJ, MND. I don't think y'all are going to get this figured out. Then there's the massive amount of question marks for the poetry of the era, all the anonymous sonnets. The confusion over attributing poems in commonplace books...did WS really only write 5 poems in Passionate Pilgrim? The confusion over Funeral Elegy, is this Ford or WS? If it is Ford--why the hell does it have WS? I digress. Thanks for the video!

[@chancecolbert7249]

​@@NullifidianNeitzsche, Freud, Hemingway, Twain, Bierce, Whitman, Dickens, James, Chaplin, Welles, Max Perkins, Robin Williams to name some more.

[@chancecolbert7249]

​@@NullifidianAlso, I have irrefutable proof that R&J 1597 Quarto is backdated and must be written after 1611--which doesn't give Stratford much time to have written it as he is completely incapable of physically writing by 1612. (Fun fact: those are NOT his signatures, this has been proven.)

[@seanomaille8157]

"Aristocracy - qu'est - ce que ? nothing , doesn't exist . empirically , notionally or otherwise. What makes an aristocrat an aristocrat ? Years ago an ancestor clobbered some luckless peasant and nicked all their pigs and chickens. Or some pederast groom was knighted for shovelling the shit of the kings horses. All starts with commerce and servility. Was and is no such thing as aristocracy. Sons of thieves and stewards. Kings are the same." Robert MacLiam Wilson. Ripley Bogle.

[@10010error]

This comes after “ don’t recommend “

[@michaelmarchese3567]

did you know that Shakespeare is the pen name of Francis Bacon, one of the greatest kabbalists of all time, who also developed multiple alphanumeric gematria ciphers and complied/encoded the King James Bible, the most significant occult text in the world. VERY busy guy.

[@MikeGeorgeC0619]

Okay, buddy...

[@Nullifidian]

No, I don't know that and neither do you, because things that you cannot prove with substantiating documentary or testimonial evidence are fancies and not facts. We know the names of every man who was on the six translation teams that wrote the King James Bible and Francis Bacon was not there in any capacity. We know that every contemporary who spoke on the subject and every piece of relevant documentary evidence establishes that William Shakespeare wrote his works. We have Bacon's entire extant oeuvre and there's not a hint anywhere in it that he was a Cabbalist. Trying to turn the founder of scientific empiricism into a cloth-headed mystic is as silly as trying to argue that Napoleon was a pacifist.

[@michaelmarchese3567]

bacon is not a kabbalist?. he is known for developing gematria ciphers with the idea that a divine cipher would be revealed by god.. this doesnt make him not an empiracist. as far as the kjv, do you know of other texts with that style of English before kjv/ shakespeare? and do you understand that the kjv is encoded with gematrical correspondences?

[@michaelmarchese3567]

@@Nullifidian and the 6 translation teams.. consisting of '47' scholars... like if you take that at face value you dont know anything about the occult in my opinion. but yea its possible that those guys are all actually responsible and its just conjecture that bacon was involved and is the real shakespeare. but just mull it over

[@Nullifidian]

​@@michaelmarchese3567 "bacon is not a kabbalist?. he is known for developing gematria ciphers with the idea that a divine cipher would be revealed by god.." No, he is *NOT* known for doing anything of the sort. He created ciphers that were *NOT* based on gematria and *NOT* for religious reasons but reasons of statecraft and espionage. "as far as the kjv, do you know of other texts with that style of English before kjv/ shakespeare?" Yes I do. The Tyndale Bible influenced the Great Bible, which was the first authorized English-language Bible in the Church of England, produced under Henry VIII in 1538. It also influenced the Geneva Bible (released in editions of 1560 and 1599), which though not authorized by the Church of England was popular with the Protestant English as a Bible for home use. Elizabeth I authorized the creation of another Bible translation, known to posterity as the Bishops' Bible. The King James Bible took on all of these influences, but particularly the Tyndale Bible, the Geneva Bible, and the Bishops' Bible. And the "style of English" you're referring to is early modern English, and the answer to your question is that _everything_ written in early modern English reads like that. Admittedly, Shakespeare is a bit more poetic than most early modern playwrights, but nevertheless you will see a family resemblance between his works and those of any of his contemporaries if you bother to look at them. There's an excellent, if old, anthology titled _Elizabethan Age_ edited by Harry T. Moore (part of the Laurel Masterpieces of World Literature published by Dell). Its editor explicitly excluded works by Shakespeare on the principle that they were omnipresent everywhere else, so if you read it you will see that there is nothing singular about the language of the King James Bible or the works of Shakespeare. Alternatively, you could read _Elizabethan Plays_ edited by Hazelton Spencer, which is in the public domain and free on Internet Archive. Or you could read specific examples of early modern literature like _The Faerie Queene_ by Edmund Spenser or _Arcadia_ by Sir Philip Sidney. You could also read Francis Bacon's _Essays_ to see where his interests _truly_ lay. Shakespeare's works and the KJV just happen to be the two most widely read examples of early modern literature that exist today, but that doesn't mean that the works of their contemporaries were manifestly different. "and do you understand that the kjv is encoded with gematrical correspondences?" No, I do not "understand" it because there is no evidence that these "correspondences" were placed _into_ the text, rather than being the result of an overactive case of pareidolia on the part of the modern people supposedly 'finding' them. The Bible Code has been debunked; it was shown that any sufficiently lengthy text can yield the same results. " like if you take that at face value you dont know anything about the occult in my opinion." There is nothing to be known about the "occult". It's just another word for ignorance. If you know what actually happened, then you can use a more precise word.

[@chancecolbert7249]

Crap like this is why undergrads hate Shakespeare: Watch Foppish Yuppy and Prof. Dad Jeans play imagination as they pat themselves on the back. Wish I liked Greenblatt. When he's not speculating of fictitious biography and actually talking about the content in the plays, he can be mind blowing. But this romanticization of the Stratford Man has gone on long enough. I'm leaving.

[@MiyamotoMusashi9]

It's cool bruh ,you father actually loves you he's just embarrassed by you...

[@tonyamartin1425]

I don't agree with that he was finishing what his dad started it could have been about his Dad and not vanity.