Shakespeare's Freedom

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 explored 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 and seen in unlimited form in the character Iago. Next Greenblatt considers the idea of authority---specifically, Shakespeare's deep sense of the ethical ambiguity of power, including his own. Ultimately, he 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 meditation by the most acclaimed and influential Shakespearean of our time.

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 latter published by the University of Chicago Press.