Shakespeare lived in a world of absolutes - the absolute authority claimed for God over the world, for the holy scriptures over the faithful, monarchs over subjects, fathers over wives and children, men over women, the old over the young, and the gentle over the baseborn. With the elegance and verve for which he is well known, Stephen Greenblatt, author of the best-selling "Will in the World", shows that Shakespeare was strikingly averse to such absolute claims and constantly probed the possibility of freedom from them. Greenblatt explores this rich theme by addressing four of Shakespeare's preoccupations across all the genres in which he worked: beauty, hatred, authority, and autonomy. He considers Shakespeare's challenge to the cult of featureless perfection, his sense of the inherent limits of murderous hatred, his awareness of the ethical ambiguity of power, and his doubt that artists, guided by distinctive forms of perception, were at liberty to create without constraints of any kind. A book that could only have been written by Stephen Greenblatt, "Shakespeare's Freedom" is a wholly original and eloquent meditation by the most acclaimed and influential Shakespearean of our time.

About the Author
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.

Reviews
"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)"



Book Information
ISBN 9780226306674
Author Stephen Greenblatt
Format Paperback
Page Count 168
Imprint University of Chicago Press
Publisher The University of Chicago Press
Weight(grams) 198g
Dimensions(mm) 22mm * 16mm * 1mm