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Poems are difficult to silence.

Stephen Greenblatt (via observando)

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“I think the writing of literature should give pleasure. What else should it be about? It is not nuclear physics. It actually has to give pleasure or it is worth nothing.”

Stephen Greenblatt (via bibliophilebunny)

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"At any given time, the distinction between the theatre and the world might be reasonably clear and the boundaries might assume the quality of self-evidence, so that the very cataloguing of distinction might seem absurd - for example, of course the theatre audience could not intervene in the action on stage, of course the violence could only be mimed. But one can think of theatres that swept away every one of the supposedly self-evident distinctions, and more to our purposes, Renaissance players and audiences could think of such counter-examples."

Stephen Greenblatt, Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England

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"Language, like other sign systems, is a collective construction; our interpretive task must be to grasp more sensitively the consequences of this fact by investigating both the social presence to the world of the literary text and the social presence of the world in the literary text."

Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare , pp.5

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Interview with Professor Stephen Greenblatt as part of the Experience series.

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…I encountered “As You Like It” in Miss Gillespie’s eighth-grade class — and it seemed like the worst, most boring thing I ever read in my life. I can still remember the shudder with which I received the words “Sweet my coz, be merry.” I just didn’t get it at all. So it’s not like I awakened as a child to the wonders of Shakespeare.

- Stephen Greenblatt. Source.  (via shakespearenews)

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"I was aware...of the extent to which my identity and the words I utter coincide, the extent to which I want to form my own sentences or choose for myself those moments in which I will recite someone else's."

Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare , pp.256

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"Like "ideology" (to which, as a concept, it is closely allied), "culture" is a term that is repeatedly used without meaning much of anything at all, a vague gesture toward a dimly perceived ethos: aristocratic culture, youth culture, human culture. There is nothing especially wrong with such gestures - without them we wouldn't ordinarily be able to get through three consecutive sentences - but they are scarcely the backbone of an innovative critical practice. How can we get the concept of culture to do more work for us?"

Stephen Greenblatt, "Culture"

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"I had dreamed of speaking with the dead, and even now I do not abandon this dream. But the mistake was to imagine that I would hear a single voice, the voice of the other. If I wanted to hear one, I had to hear the many voices of the dead."

Stephen Greenblatt, Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England

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Language is violence, and language is the alternative to violence.”

Stephen Greenblatt, Introduction to Much Ado About Nothing from The Norton Shakespeare: Comedies (via ascopeforimagination)

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"I believe that nothing comes of nothing, even in Shakespeare. I wanted to know where he got the matter he was working with and what he did with that matter. And so the broad inquiry that had come to focus more and more on one figure in a single play spread out once again to encompass a dauntingly large field."

Stephen Greenblatt, Hamlet in Purgatory , pp.4

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An Introduction to Hamlet

In-turquoise asked me for an introduction to Hamlet, so I thought I’d post my favorite, by Stephen Greenblatt, from The Norton Shakespeare (W. W. Norton, 1997).

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"Who’s there?" Shakespeare’s most famous play begins. The question, turned back on the tragedy itself, has haunted audiences and readers for centuries. Hamlet is an enigma. Mountains of feverish speculation have only deepened the interlocking mysteries: Why does Hamlet delay avenging the murder of his father by Claudius, his father’s brother? How much guilt does Hamlet’s mother, Gertrude, who has since married Claudius, bear in this crime? How trustworthy is the ghost of Hamlet’s father, who has returned from the grave to demand that Hamlet avenge his murder? Is vengeance morally justifiable in this play, or is it to be condemned? What exactly is the ghost, and where has it come from? Why is the ghost, visible to everyone in the first act, visible only to Hamlet in Act 3? Is Hamlet’s madness feigned or true, a strategy masquerading as a reality or a reality masquer­ading as a strategy? Does Hamlet, who once loved Ophelia, continue to love her in spite of his apparent cruelty? Does Ophelia, crushed by that cruelty and driven mad by Hamlet’s murder of her father, Polonius, actually intend to drown herself, or does she die accidentally? What enables Hamlet to pass from thoughts of suicide to faith in God’s providence, from “To be, or not to be” to “Let be”? What was Hamlet trying to say before death stopped his speech at the close? Hamlet, as one critic has wittily remarked, is “the tragedy of an audience that cannot make up its mind.”

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"Wyatt and Shakespeare express in literary works more powerful than any produced by their contemporaries the historical pressure of an unresolved and continuing conflict."

Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare , pp. 8

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Prof G be chill

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When I first conceived this book several years ago, I intended to explore the ways in which major English writers of the sixteenth century created their own performances, to analyse the choices they made in representing themselves and in fashioning characters, to understand the role of human autonomy in the construction of identity. It seemed to me the very hallmark of the Renaissance that middle-class and aristocratic males began to feel that they possessed such shaping power over their lives, and I saw this power and the freedom it implied as an important element in my own sense of being. But as my work progressed, I perceived that fashioning oneself and being fashioned by cultural institutions - family, religion, state - were inseparably intertwined. In all my texts and documents, there were, so far as I could tell, no moments of pure, unfettered subjectivity; indeed, the human subject itself began to seem remarkably unfree, the ideological product of the relations of power in a particular society. Whenever I focused upon a moment of apparently autonomous self-fashioning, I found not an epiphany of identity freely chosen but a cultural artefact. If there remained traces of free choice, the choice was among possibilities whose range was strictly delineated by the social and ideological system in force.

Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare , pp.256