Hamlet in Purgatory

Hamlet in Purgatory
Author: Stephen Greenblatt
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Total Pages: 347
Release: 2013-10-06
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1400848091

In Hamlet in Purgatory, renowned literary scholar Stephen Greenblatt delves into his longtime fascination with the ghost of Hamlet's father, and his daring and ultimately gratifying journey takes him through surprising intellectual territory. It yields an extraordinary account of the rise and fall of Purgatory as both a belief and a lucrative institution--as well as a capacious new reading of the power of Hamlet. In the mid-sixteenth century, English authorities abruptly changed the relationship between the living and dead. Declaring that Purgatory was a false "poem," they abolished the institutions and banned the practices that Christians relied on to ease the passage to Heaven for themselves and their dead loved ones. Greenblatt explores the fantastic adventure narratives, ghost stories, pilgrimages, and imagery by which a belief in a grisly "prison house of souls" had been shaped and reinforced in the Middle Ages. He probes the psychological benefits as well as the high costs of this belief and of its demolition. With the doctrine of Purgatory and the elaborate practices that grew up around it, the church had provided a powerful method of negotiating with the dead. The Protestant attack on Purgatory destroyed this method for most people in England, but it did not eradicate the longings and fears that Catholic doctrine had for centuries focused and exploited. In his strikingly original interpretation, Greenblatt argues that the human desires to commune with, assist, and be rid of the dead were transformed by Shakespeare--consummate conjurer that he was--into the substance of several of his plays, above all the weirdly powerful Hamlet. Thus, the space of Purgatory became the stage haunted by literature's most famous ghost. This book constitutes an extraordinary feat that could have been accomplished by only Stephen Greenblatt. It is at once a deeply satisfying reading of medieval religion, an innovative interpretation of the apparitions that trouble Shakespeare's tragic heroes, and an exploration of how a culture can be inhabited by its own spectral leftovers. This expanded Princeton Classics edition includes a new preface by the author.

Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare (Anniversary Edition)

Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare (Anniversary Edition)
Author: Stephen Greenblatt
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Total Pages: 441
Release: 2010-05-03
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0393079848

Named One of Esquire's 50 Best Biographies of All Time The Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award finalist, reissued with a new afterword for the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death. A young man from a small provincial town moves to London in the late 1580s and, in a remarkably short time, becomes the greatest playwright not of his age alone but of all time. How is an achievement of this magnitude to be explained? Stephen Greenblatt brings us down to earth to see, hear, and feel how an acutely sensitive and talented boy, surrounded by the rich tapestry of Elizabethan life, could have become the world’s greatest playwright.

No Island is an Island

No Island is an Island
Author: Carlo Ginzburg
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Total Pages: 160
Release: 2000
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 9780231116282

From the author of "The Cheese and the Worms" comes a quartet of luminous explorations into English literature, from Sir Thomas More to Robert Louis Stevenson. 14 illustrations.

Shakespeare's Freedom

Shakespeare's Freedom
Author: Stephen Greenblatt
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 163
Release: 2010-11-15
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0226306682

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.

Tyrant: Shakespeare on Politics

Tyrant: Shakespeare on Politics
Author: Stephen Greenblatt
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Total Pages: 200
Release: 2018-05-08
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0393635767

"Brilliant, beautifully organized, exceedingly readable." —Philip Roth World-renowned Shakespeare scholar Stephen Greenblatt explores the playwright’s insight into bad (and often mad) rulers. Examining the psyche—and psychoses—of the likes of Richard III, Macbeth, Lear, and Coriolanus, Greenblatt illuminates the ways in which William Shakespeare delved into the lust for absolute power and the disasters visited upon the societies over which these characters rule. Tyrant shows that Shakespeare’s work remains vitally relevant today, not least in its probing of the unquenchable, narcissistic appetites of demagogues and the self-destructive willingness of collaborators who indulge their appetites.

Hamlet's Choice

Hamlet's Choice
Author: Peter Lake
Publisher: Yale University Press
Total Pages: 239
Release: 2020-06-02
Genre: History
ISBN: 0300247818

An illuminating account of how Shakespeare worked through the tensions of Queen Elizabeth's England in two canon-defining plays Conspiracies and revolts simmered beneath the surface of Queen Elizabeth's reign. England was riven with tensions created by religious conflict and the prospect of dynastic crisis and regime change. In this rich, incisive account, Peter Lake reveals how in Titus Andronicus and Hamlet Shakespeare worked through a range of Tudor anxieties, including concerns about the nature of justice, resistance, and salvation. In both Hamlet and Titus the princes are faced with successions forged under questionable circumstances and they each have a choice: whether or not to resort to political violence. The unfolding action, Lake argues, is best understood in terms of contemporary debates about the legitimacy of resistance and the relation between religion and politics. Relating the plays to their broader political and polemical contexts, Lake sheds light on the nature of revenge, resistance, and religion in post-Reformation England.

Shakespearean Negotiations

Shakespearean Negotiations
Author: Stephen Greenblatt
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Total Pages: 226
Release: 1988
Genre: Drama
ISBN: 9780520061606

Stephen Greenblatt has been at the center of a major shift in literary interpretation toward a critical method that situates cultural creation in history. Shakespearean Negotiations is a sustained and powerful exemplification of this innovative method, offering a new way of understanding the power of Shakespeare's achievement and, beyond this, an original analysis of cultural process.

Hamlet, Globe to Globe

Hamlet, Globe to Globe
Author: Dominic Dromgoole
Publisher: Open Road + Grove/Atlantic
Total Pages: 374
Release: 2017-04-26
Genre: Travel
ISBN: 0802189687

A New York Times Notable Book: “A loving testament to the enduring ability of Shakespeare’s play to connect in myriad ways across countries and cultures” (Pop Matters). For the 450th anniversary of Shakespeare’s birth, the Globe Theatre undertook an unparalleled journey: to take Hamlet to every country on the planet, to share this beloved play with the entire world. The tour was the brainchild of Dominic Dromgoole, artistic director of the Globe, and in Hamlet: Globe to Globe, Dromgoole takes readers along with him. From performing in sweltering deserts, ice-cold cathedrals, and heaving marketplaces, and despite food poisoning in Mexico, the threat of ambush in Somaliland, an Ebola epidemic in West Africa, and political upheaval in Ukraine, the Globe’s players pushed on. Dromgoole shows us the world through the prism of Shakespeare—what the Danish prince means to the people of Sudan, the effect of Ophelia on the citizens of Costa Rica, and how a sixteenth-century play can touch the lives of Syrian refugees. And thanks to this incredible undertaking, Dromgoole uses the world to glean new insight into this masterpiece, exploring the play’s history, its meaning, and its pleasures. “The Shakespearean equivalent of Bourdain’s TV series, Parts Unknown. . . . [Dromgoole’s] aesthetic principle, or unprincipled aesthetic, makes him a natural tour guide for global Shakespeare . . . A comic epic.” —The Washington Post

Hamlet and the Vision of Darkness

Hamlet and the Vision of Darkness
Author: Rhodri Lewis
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Total Pages: 390
Release: 2020-04-14
Genre: Drama
ISBN: 0691204519

'Hamlet and the Vision of Darkness' is a radical new interpretation of the most famous play in the English language. By exploring Shakespeare's engagements with the humanist traditions of early modern England and Europe, Rhodri Lewis reveals a 'Hamlet' unseen for centuries: an innovative, coherent, and exhilaratingly bleak tragedy in which the governing ideologies of Shakespeare's age are scrupulously upended.