Stephen Greenblatt - Shakespeare's Freedom

Shakespeare scholar Stephen Greenblatt discusses his book, "Shakespeare's Freedom," presented by Harvard Book Store. Greenblatt discusses how Shakespeare was averse to the authorities of his time -- religion, monarchs, and social structure -- and how this spirit manifested itself in his work. More lectures at forum-network.org
This talk took place on November 15, 2010.

[@saivarenya9305]

I always dreamt to have Mr Stephen Greenblatt as my PhD guide.

[@justincrawder]

Stephen Greenblatt is such an engaging writer and thinker :)

[@blueladylikeable]

he's so adorable! Hearing him speak is a real delight

[@jackdearden9451]

liked the way it was neatly wrapped ,, the last sentence . they lived in truly terrible times where paranoia and fear were on another level completely. SG talks quite well.

[@MrWilum]

A wonderful and interesting lecture, one that I will return to often.

[@czarquetzal8344]

He combined Foucault, Herder, Clifford Geertz, Levi-Strauss, and others. He nemed it poetic of culture but they changed ut to New Historicism. I like their literary criticism but i often wonder how can my students employ their New Historicism in using fragments to historicize the literary.

[@roniquebreauxjordan1302]

I see why Shakespeare endures

[@JAMAICADOCK]

Bill and Hilary would make great Macbeths

[@edholohan]

So would Donald and Melania.....

[@texasyankee3512]

Thank you Henry Neville (aka William Shakespeare).

[@stevebari9338]

+Texas Yankee Yeah, no

[@ishmaelforester9825]

Why did this bollocks never come up until hundreds of year after Shakespeare died? Nobody questioned the authorship until literally hundreds of years later. People who knew him, and remembered him personally, without question directly attributed the plays to William Shakespeare of Stratford-upon-Avon, for crying out loud. The Neville theory is a steaming crock of shite.

[@stevebari9338]

Because of Bardolotry.. In the 1700/1800s Shakespeare was being raised as the god of English letters and some people rebelled against that idea. So especially on the American side it became a fashionable thing.

[@ishmaelforester9825]

Steve Bari I hate to say this but I think it might be a class thing as well because they always seem to want him to have been some otherwise talentless blue-blood, apart from the Bacon thing which is ridiculous anyway if you have actually read the works of both men. It is like saying Virgil was Cicero or something. But they always seem to want Shakespeare to be some otherwise forgettable noble. It is like a more or less unconscious detestation of the idea that our best poet really was a relative pleb.

[@mikesnyder1788]

I totally agree with your assessment! When I talk to others about Shakespeare's fairly humble (meaning non-elite) upbringing, I point out that Charles Dickens was the son of a government clerk and Christopher Marlowe was the son of a cobbler.

[@CasparLanger]

Charming. But boy is he confused and wrong about the bombing of the only pharmaceutical plant in Sudan on the day Lewinsky had to go and speak to the grand jury...

[@WalterTonetto]

_Clinton became a career criminal! This doesn’t say much, eh, about Greenblatt’s character, eh!_

[@OneRoomSchoolHouse]

can we lose the ahs? eh eh eh a a ah how can he teach at a Harvard when he never learned a, public ah, speaking?

[@TheWhitehiker]

rambles too much.

[@stephenarnold3015]

Must be the more boring Shakespeare lecture ever. Shakespeare with his effortless grace and throwaway fluency, would have found this plodding, dull fellow insufferable. Or maybe he would have made a comic character out of him.

[@ishmaelforester9825]

More interesting to actually watch one of the plays, to be sure. That shit will stay with you,

[@neilbrennan5766]

Yet another of our literatii who can barely speak English.