Shakespeare's Freedom

Stephen Greenblatt is the John Cogan University Professor of the Humanities at Harvard University. He is the author of Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare, Hamlet in Purgatory, and the groundbreaking Renaissance Self-Fashioning, the last published by the University of Chicago Press.

"Stephen Greenblatt is one of America's most elegant and inventive literary critics. He writes with panache as he spins intriguing yarns from surprising materials. He has a gift as a reader of Shakespeare for noticing details that others have tended to overlook and using them as a prism to refract the plays in new ways." (New Statesman) "It is good, at a time when there is danger of seeing Shakespeare too exclusively as an entertainer, to find an acknowledgement of the intellectual powers that pervade his work, and Greenblatt brings his formidable critical expertise to bear on the writings in this deeply thoughtful study." (Times Literary Supplement) "In this short collection of essays, Stephen Greenblatt's analysis of both Shakespeare and the Renaissance is informative and often original. He argues that Shakespeare's genius lay in embracing and subverting the norms of his age.... Yet, the book's real lesson is Shakespeare's awareness of the human condition in all its complexity." (Financial Times)"