Excerpt of Stephen Greenblatt & James Shapiro on William Shakespeare

An Evenings with an Author featuring James Shapiro and Stephen Greenblatt discussing William Shakespeare. (Filmed on 04/04/2022 with a live audience both in person and on Zoom.)
From the collected works on Abraham Lincoln’s White House desk, to the Public Theater’s incendiary 2018 production of Julius Caesar, Shakespeare has long been adopted as the voice of the cultural moment. Two figures qualified to speak on this phenomenon are Stephen Greenblatt and James Shapiro, celebrated Shakespeare scholars and authors of multiple books on the Bard.
In his 2020 book Shakespeare in a Divided America, Shapiro considers the many uses and abuses of Shakespeare in American history; from issues of race and democracy, to liberty and marriage, Shapiro highlights Shakespeare’s presence at the heart of the American cultural imagination. In his 2019 book Tyrant: Shakespeare on Politics, Greenblatt demonstrates the similarities between Shakespearean tyranny and power in the current age: unstable leaders, crumbling faith in institutions, and a public more interested in the spectacle of politics than participation. This April at the Library, the two authors will discuss Shakespeare in relation to the pandemic, racial justice, the climate crisis, arguing, in a moderated conversation, for Shakespeare’s role as an eternal mouthpiece of the present.
About the speakers:
Stephen Greenblatt is an author, literary historian, Shakespearean, and the John Cogan Professor of the Humanities at Harvard. He is General Editor of and a contributor to The Norton Shakespeare and The Norton Anthology of English Literature, and is a founding editor of the literary-cultural journal Representations. The author of fourteen books, he was awarded the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction and the 2011 National Book Award for Nonfiction for his work The Swerve: How the World Became Modern (2011).
James Shapiro is an author and Larry Miller Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. A specialist in Shakespeare and the early modern period, Shapiro has published a number of books on topics ranging from the Shakespeare authorship question to Shakespeare’s legacy in American history. Shapiro was inducted into the Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2011.
This conversation was co-sponsored by Columbia Global Centers | Paris, and the Institute for Ideas and Imagination as part of the Entre Nous conversation series. #entrenous #entrenousseries
Evenings with an Author is sponsored by GRoW @ Annenberg.

[@mikesnyder1788]

Two of the best Shakespeare scholars writing today! Greenblatt's "Will in the World" and Shapiro's "1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare" are absolutely first rate and I highly recommend both books.

[@rstritmatter]

Really? Why do you recommend them so highly? Shapiro is one of the most dishonest people in academia.

[@vetstadiumastroturf5756]

"Will in the World" literally actually and go check on it yourself begins with the words "Let us imagine."

[@Richardwestwood-dp5wr]

​@rstritmatter how dishonest? I don't know him personally but I'd like to know about his art of spinning tales out of thin air.

[@ZZSmithReal]

If these two had any b-lls they would debate the best of the Oxfordians. I read 1599 and enjoyed it - as a work of history. Because that's all it's good for - recounting the history of the year. The Shakespeare part? Rank speculation. Shakespeare must have done this, he probably did that, etc. The deeper I read into the book I was like, is there ever going to be something specific tying Shakespeare to what he did that year as opposed to hypothesizing? Answer, no.

[@NickDiasOuttaMyLeague]

The Oxfordians are wrong and don’t deserve the time of day. I believed Shakespeare wasn’t Shakespeare for a decade… and then I looked outside the internet and found the undisputed scholarly facts and realized that the man from Stratford obviously wrote the plays. Especially the masterpieces that computer science, looking at the syntax, has proven one man wrote them (and it wasn’t De Vere or Marlowe etc.) The Oxfordians conveniently leave out certain valuable information when making their case for anyone other than William Shakespeare being the author.

[@jayare2620]

Hello McFly-----There literally ISN"T any factual information relating Shakespere as being the author of ANYTHING.

[@rstritmatter]

I wish they'd debate us also. They are both cowards defending the indefensible, and Shapiro both a coward and a bully, so undoubtedly they will not do so.

[@rstritmatter]

@@NickDiasOuttaMyLeague Your name describes your condition! Aren't we confident in our ignorance! Please do some research.

[@vetstadiumastroturf5756]

@@NickDiasOuttaMyLeague It's like a I always say: If you can't beat them, then ignore them. IF you can't ignore them, laugh at them. If you can't laugh at them...assert that they don't deserve the time of day and then go back to ignoring them (but in a scholarly way). Also, it's good to claim that you have valuable information that you never actually reveal. And say the word "science;" because that is always very convincing. Authorship Question solved!

[@franciscojlobaton]

For me it is unthinkable that such learned scholars, specially Shapiro, put the stress in understanding Shakespeare in the center. If you ignore that Shakespeare was a group of top notch intellectuals and poets leaded by Bacon, you are missing a lot. You can work with their classic grecolatin puns with some difficulty, but if do not know anything about the alchemic and hermetic side of them (and later Newton and Boyle, the best English brains ever, probably) you're just not getting it. No matter how many books you read about middle England rural life. Shakespeare is full of astrological and mystic stuff. Starting buy Hamlet and the constellation anomalies, which is a homage of Tycho´s, the danish scholar, supernova. And I could go on and on and on. Shakespeare was a pen name representing Minerva or Pallas Athena. Even in the First Folio is clear in Ben Jonson poems.

[@Jeffhowardmeade]

Or maybe they just aren't hallucinatory.

[@CallmeTomorrow65]

Wow.