Stephen Greenblatt

Stephen Greenblatt (born November 7, 1943, Boston, Massachusetts, U.S.) is an American scholar who was credited with establishing New Historicism, an approach to literary criticism that mandated the interpretation of literature in terms of the milieu from which it emerged, as the dominant mode of Anglo-American literary analysis by the end of the 20th century. He is considered to be among the preeminent scholars of Renaissance literature in the late 20th and early 21st centuries and is particularly noted for his analyses of William Shakespeare’s works.

Greenblatt, the son of a lawyer and a housewife, was raised in Newton, Massachusetts. He attended Yale University, graduating with a bachelor’s degree in English in 1964. His undergraduate thesis was published as Three Modern Satirists: Waugh, Orwell, and Huxley (1965). A Fulbright scholarship enabled him to attend the University of Cambridge, where he earned a further bachelor’s degree (1966) and a master’s degree (1969). Greenblatt then returned to Yale, where he completed his doctorate in English (1969). His thesis was published in expanded form as Sir Walter Ralegh: The Renaissance Man and His Roles (1973). Following his graduation, Greenblatt became an assistant professor at the University of California at Berkeley, where he eventually attained a full professorship in 1979. The next year he published Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare, a treatise on the creation of identity in opposition to cultural factors. In 1982 he cofounded Representations, a wide-ranging journal of culture.

The prevailing mode of literary analysis during Greenblatt’s early years in academia, largely under the lingering influence of New Criticism, pointedly divested literary works of their historical context, instead exhorting formal analysis of the works themselves. However, influenced by, among other factors, lectures given by French philosopher and historian Michel Foucault that emphasized cultural explanations for ostensibly monolithic concepts such as “love,” Greenblatt began to articulate an approach to literary criticism that accounted for external cultural and historical factors. In a 1982 essay he deemed this approach “new historicism” (using a phrase coined by Wesley Morris in 1972). He later expressed a preference for the term “cultural poetics.” Greenblatt continued to expound on that approach in Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England (1987)—in which he famously asserted his desire to “speak with the dead” authors he studied. Further publications included Learning to Curse: Essays in Early Modern Culture (1990) and Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World (1991). In 1997 Greenblatt became Harry Levin Professor of English at Harvard University, which three years later named him John Cogan University Professor of the Humanities.

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In Practicing New Historicism (2000), Greenblatt and coauthor Catherine Gallagher mounted a rigorous defense of New Historicism in response to charges that it lacked definition, casting it as an empirical means of interpretation rather than a dogmatic theory. Greenblatt’s Hamlet in Purgatory (2001) delved into Shakespeare’s representations of ghosts against the background of the Protestant rejection of the Roman Catholic concept of purgatory. He documented the life and times of Shakespeare in Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare (2004), and he assessed the influence of the 1417 rediscovery of On the Nature of Things, a poem by Lucretius (1st century bce) containing early suggestions about atomic structure, in The Swerve: How the World Became Modern (2011). The latter work received particular acclaim and won both a National Book Award and a Pulitzer Prize. The Rise and Fall of Adam and Eve (2017) focuses on the biblical origin story. In 2018 Greenblatt published Tyrant: Shakespeare on Politics.

Greenblatt replaced M.H. Abrams as general editor of the Norton Anthology of English Literature for its eighth edition (2005); he vastly increased the number of female writers included in the compendium. He was also general editor of The Norton Shakespeare (1997; 2nd ed. 2008). He edited numerous other compilations and anthologies, including Cultural Mobility: A Manifesto (2009).

In 2003 he collaborated with playwright Charles Mee on Cardenio, a play that reimagined a lost work by Shakespeare with that name (known only from historical references). The play then became the basis of a project whereby translated versions were interpretively staged and performed by theatre companies worldwide. The original version was staged in 2008 at the American Repertory Theatre in Massachusetts.

Greenblatt was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1987) and the American Academy of Arts and Letters (2008). He served on the executive council of, and was vice president (2000–01) and president (2002) of, the Modern Language Association. In 2016 the Norwegian government awarded Greenblatt the Holberg Prize in honour of his body of work.

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