Shakespeare’s Freedom Pdf Summary
Shakespeare lived in a world of absolutes—of claims for the absolute authority of scripture, monarch, and God, and the authority of fathers over wives and children, 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 absolutes and constantly probed the possibility of freedom from them. Again and again, Shakespeare confounds the designs and pretensions of kings, generals, and churchmen. His aversion to absolutes even leads him to probe the exalted and seemingly limitless passions of his lovers.
Greenblatt explores this rich theme by addressing four of Shakespeare’s preoccupations across all the genres in which he worked. He first considers the idea of beauty in Shakespeare’s works, specifically his challenge to the cult of featureless perfection and his interest in distinguishing marks. He then turns to Shakespeare’s interest in murderous hatred, most famously embodied in Shylock but seen also in the character Bernardine in Measure for Measure. Next Greenblatt considers the idea of Shakespearean authority—that is, Shakespeare’s deep sense of the ethical ambiguity of power, including his own. Ultimately, Greenblatt takes up Shakespearean autonomy, in particular the freedom of artists, guided by distinctive forms of perception, to live by their own laws and to claim that their creations are singularly unconstrained.
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.
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Shakespeare’s Freedom Review
5.0 out of 5 stars This book is so good that Prof.Greenblatt should also pitch for the Yankees…
Reviewed in the United States on May 16, 2016
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Dr. Greenblatt should be declared a national treasure. He loves Shakespeare as I do, and so I read everything he writes. In this book, he drags out every humane and little known activity which the Bard ever did, Greenblatt even tells us that the Bard ‘s last visit to a pub was enjoyed with his friends. Ben Jonson and Michael Drayton, (whose great great great great great etc. grandson lives on Long Boat Key and goes by a first name of Drayton).
Musing that the poet Shakespeare and playwright Will started out in life Catholic but had to slip away from home to escape persecution as a Catholic into wicked old London, Greenblatt does not say but suggests that the writer probably hid in plain sight by playing a a youth the roles of women. Greenblatt intimates that this experience adds a dimension of truth to the women of whom Shakespeare writes. Greenblatt points out without saying it that the Denmark of Hamlet must have shown in the play taken place before Erasmus was born, or at least before Henry the VIII beheaded Anne Bolelyn an thus ws excommunicated and before Henry 8 assumed the role of Head of the Church of England.
Also, if Denmark on stage was supposed to be a stand-in for England, and if Hamlet a stand-in for the helpless young Elizabeth, the “Get thee to a nunnery ” lines refer not only to interpreting the girl as a doomed lover, but also as a doomed Catholic girl living in a castle writhing with sub rosa tension between Catholics (who will lose their footing), and as yet undeclared Protestants, to say nothing of the troubles Denmark had with the extant Hanseatic League which treated Denmark like a poor sister. There already was political unrest in Denmark for real. Reread the lines about the nunnery and you thus may find a third meaning not just two.
The first is uttered when Hamlet has not yet decided to do anything except to take the first step towards finding out who killed his father. He advises Ophelia to” Get thee to a nunnery” –perhaps at this point, not to save Ophelia from death, nor because the Prince as yet distrusts her, but because all hell may break n loose in the castle and Hamlet will be the one to cause i. Therefore the first ‘nunnery’ could mean ‘Look lovely girl,Go there for political asylum and I will come and get you out when this is all over and justice has been done. BUT IN THE MEANTIME GET OUT OF THIS PALACE!”
The other two such lines with the same words might then mean, (the second time he says it, he precedes it with his question, ‘Are you honest ?”–” his subtext meaning, baby,’If you say yes, I don’t believe you anymore, so ‘Get thee to a nunnery,’ (a bordello), because now you are lying.”
While the third, when Hamlet is convinced Ophelia is still a baby, he realizes he has outstripped her, he had passed her in intellectual seven league boots ,he dooms her with the third utterance: it is the killer, “get thee to a nunnery, I loved you not, I gave you caught, you are a daddy’s girl, you are not for me, get out of my sight.” He kills her hopes.
In the meantime, Queen Eliz I is watching this play, either at the Globe or on her own stage at the Palace. The mention of nunneries as a destination for Ophelia now prove to Queen Elizabeth that Shakespeare has not broken her new law, stating that royalty (her family) is not to be pictured on the stag. Also, under Henry VIII her father, most Catholic nunneries were plundered and destroyed so the Queen may have been thinking something like this:” Well, if Shakespeare meant this to be a fake England on Stage, my audience would laugh for my father Henry VIII has plundered and burned all the major monasteries, biggest churches and major convents in England. This storybook Hamlet cannot send his storybook Ophelia to a nunnery for any reason if located in England: Father made sure that the nunneries are no longer there. The play does not break the new law, the characters cannot represent my English royal family, living or dead, because English nunneries do not exist any longer; one can only assume that Prince Hamlet is at home in DENMARK. With these nunnery lines, Shakespeare has thrown ice all over steaming hot potatoes,the ice settles and right in front of the Queen, he adds a little cream and he has has concocted vichyssoise. The play continues to exist through fire, through brimstone. …and Prof Greenblatt continues to write.
Again and again, the reader’s consideration of what state this “Denmark’ is IN, in real life, makes one understand why Shakespeare chose Denmark for his masterpiece, Yes it is the same size country, yes earlier their was a Dane on the throne of England for a while, yes, the Magna Carta and Wm the Conqueror just before 1066 threw out the Danes, but yes,there was also that new Elizabethan law making it illegal to portray any living royalty on the London stage, (nobody in her family), and that included when the players played in the Palace which they did 13 times, so to keep the theatre running, Shakespeare sets the play in Denmark, but he “steals” applicable attributes of all the English Kings, Queens and courtiers of the previous 150 years to distribute as needed among the characters in Hamlet the play and then gives these pastiches of people the life-like dialogue that the play, their world, becomes a well-observed, drenched in logic and observation and artistry tragedy. It is matched only by Long Day’s Journey into Night, Streetcar named Desire and a few pre-World War II dramas roiling off the European continent …None of which come anywhere close to the picture in verse of seeing the re-presentation of a handsome, brilliant, young and good man’ s life sliding down a severe and but self-chosen path to self-destruction in order to avoid civil war in Denmark and to try to right the way so clearly that the next heir may be crowned without military intervention. Hamlet takes what he perceives to be his only chance to resurrect his country. We slide down with the tragedy of Hamlet, still safe in our seats. I do thank you for making it possible for me to air my thoughts on this masterful book by Greenblatt and thus, in turn, by Shakespeare. Thank you again. GK
About Stephen Greenblatt Author Of Shakespeare’s Freedom pdf Book
Stephen Greenblatt (Ph.D. Yale) Author Of Shakespeare’s Freedom pdf Book, is a Cogan University Professor of English and American Literature and Language at Harvard University. Also General Editor of The Norton Anthology of English Literature, Eighth Edition, he is the author of nine books, including Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare; Hamlet in Purgatory; Practicing New Historicism; Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World; Learning to Curse: Essays in Early Modern Culture; and The Swerve: How the World Became Modern. He has edited six collections of criticism, is the co-author (with Charles Mee) of a play, Cardenio, and is a founding coeditor of the journal Representations. He honors include the MLA’s James Russell Lowell Prize, for Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England, the Distinguished Humanist Award from the Mellon Foundation, the Distinguished Teaching Award from the University of California, Berkeley. He is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society. He lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and in Vermont.
Stephen Jay Greenblatt is a Pulitzer Prize winning American literary critic, theorist and scholar.
Greenblatt is regarded by many as one of the founders of New Historicism, a set of critical practices that he often refers to as “cultural poetics”; his works have been influential since the early 1980s when he introduced the term. Greenblatt has written and edited numerous books and articles relevant to new historicism, the study of culture, Renaissance studies and Shakespeare studies and is considered to be an expert in these fields. He is also co-founder of the literary-cultural journal Representations, which often publishes articles by new historicists. His most popular work is Will in the World, a biography of Shakespeare that was on the New York Times Best Seller List for nine weeks.
Shakespeare’s Freedom pdf, Paperback, Hardcover Book Information
- Publisher : University of Chicago Press; Illustrated edition (November 15, 2010)
- Language : English
- Hardcover : 160 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0226306666
- ISBN-13 : 978-0226306667
- Item Weight : 12 ounces
- Dimensions : 5.5 x 0.5 x 8.5 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #973,317 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #440 in Renaissance Literary Criticism (Books)
- Customer Reviews: 4.6 out of 5 stars 30 ratings
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