Stephen Greenblatt

Stephen Greenblatt’s most recent book is Hamlet in Purgatory. He is working on a biographical study of Shakespeare.

Letter

One Sex or Two

8 November 1990

Poor Thomas Laqueur! According to Michael Mason’s review of his book Making sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud (LRB, 8 November), Laqueur was once a respectable scholar whose work on Victorian Sunday schools produced a ‘plausible insight about our ancestors’ – but then, alas, he came down with a disease. What is this ‘new and potent intellectual virus’ that has already ravaged...

They rudely stare about: Thomas Browne

Tobias Gregory, 4 July 2013

It is still often proposed that religion and science need not conflict. Stephen Jay Gould held that they occupy ‘non-overlapping magisteria’: science deals with questions of fact,...

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As I was reading Stephen Greenblatt’s biography of Shakespeare on the train there was a woman sitting near me doing a deal on the phone. She was getting agitated. ‘But I have to...

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New historicism was a 1980s thing, a literary critical movement that took shape on the West Coast, becoming established there and elsewhere as what one could talk about after having talked for...

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Elegant Extracts: anthologies

Leah Price, 3 February 2000

Anthologies attract good haters. In the 1790s, the reformer Hannah More blamed their editors for the decay of morals: to let people assume that you had read the entire work from which an...

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Point of Wonder

A.D. Nuttall, 5 December 1991

‘Greece, having been subjected, subjected her wild conqueror and introduced culture into boorish Rome.’ The poet Horace, himself a Roman, can take a stylish pleasure in describing the...

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Hail to the Chief

Frank Kermode, 10 January 1991

As befits an undisputed chef d’école, Stephen Greenblatt includes in this latest collection an account of his own ‘intellectual trajectory’, which features a decisive...

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Like sociology and anthropology, the study of art and literature, especially the art and literature of the Renaissance, seems to be taking a historical turn in the Eighties. To a historian like...

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