WGBH Radio; The Callie Crossley Show

Finalist ANSTEAD sitting in a hotel across Li This is the Cali crossing the William Shakespeare lived 400 years ago. He's still one of the most relevant writers and arguably the most influential writer in the Western tradition and standards. Shakespeare was an overnight sensation becoming one of the most famous writers in England. From bawdy comedy to profound poetry. He wrote for everyone appealing to popular sensibilities and cultured tastes. This hour we're going to the Bard's brain with scholar Stephen Green Black leading the way. His new book is Shakespeare's freedom examines the world of absolutes in Elizabeth and times from the Cult of Perfection to murderous hatred takes on themes Shakespeare confronted on his quest to find moral ethical and artistic freedom. Up next Is that a scholar I see before me. Stephen Green Shakespeare. First the news. From NPR News in Washington I'm Lakshmi Singh. The White House is touting

progress from its meeting today with bipartisan members of Congress the first since the midterm elections. President Obama says he is willing to work toward finding common ground with a newly empowered GOP leadership. The American people did not vote for gridlock. They didn't vote for unyielding partisanship. They're demanding cooperation and they're demanding progress and they'll hold all of us. And I mean all of us accountable for tax cuts to expire at the end of this year among the most divisive issues between the White House and congressional Republicans presumptive House Speaker John Boehner. It is the view of 100 percent of Senate Republicans and a number of Senate Democrats as well that the tax rates should not be bifurcated in other words that we ought to treat all taxpayers. The same. The Obama administration had opposed making permanent tax cuts for households that make at least $250000 a year. A new report shows consumer confidence hitting a five month high in November amid more

optimism about jobs. We have more on this from NPR's Scott Neuman. The November boost in the consumer confidence index could translate into a decent holiday shopping season for anxious retailers. The private sector Conference Board's monthly snapshot hit fifty four point one higher than it any time since June. But it was still well short of the 90 on the index that indicates a healthy economy. A separate measure of how Americans think the economy will fare in six months was also improved. Another reason for the more upbeat CCI a brighter outlook on employment. The Conference Board says more Americans think jobs will be added in the coming months. Scott Newman NPR News Washington. The EU's foreign policy chief says nuclear talks with Iran will resume early next week in Geneva. NPR's Peter Kenyon in Istanbul reports Iran's president says his country's right to enrich uranium is not negotiable. The first high level talks in over a year come at a delicate time for both Washington and Tehran.

The Obama administration is in urgent damage control mode after the release of sensitive diplomatic cables. Many of which focus on fears that Iran is seeking to acquire nuclear weapons. Iran is facing its own problems including a computer worm that President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad says did cause damage to Iranian centrifuges. Iran's nuclear chief is also see the NG over the murder of one nuclear scientist and the wounding of another in twin bomb attacks yesterday. The international negotiators including the US three European countries and Russia and China want Iran to cease enriching uranium. But Iran insists it won't be pressured into giving up what Ahmadinejad calls an inalienable right. Peter Kenyon NPR News. At last check on Wall Street the Dow Jones Industrial Average was down 30 points at eleven thousand twenty three Nasdaq down 19 to 25 06. This is NPR. China is hosting talks with its reclusive North Korean ally as tensions escalate on the Korean Peninsula. Japan also plans to send an envoy to China. North

Korea is under diplomatic fire for shelling a South Korean island last week. Four people died from the attack it's unclear how recently leaked diplomatic cables about Chinese North Korean relations will affect today's talks. Classified materials released by the whistleblowing group wiki leaks reveal Beijing's growing frustration with young new dietary guidelines from the Institute of Medicine recommends slightly higher doses of vitamin D than current standards. NPR's Richard Knox reports scientists believe there is no proof that mega doses will prevent cancer or other illnesses. Many including doctors and nutritionists think it's important to take extra vitamin D. It's common for people to take supplements containing a thousand 2000 even 4000 units a day. The Institute of Medicine panel says this isn't necessary and may be harmful. Doctor Joann Manson of Harvard is one of the 14 panel members. Many people are being treated with high dose vitamin D supplements

unnecessarily. An important principle is that more is not necessarily better. The new recommendations say children and most adults need 600 units a day while people over 70 need 800. The panel rejects claims that high doses of Vitamin D can prevent cancer heart disease flu and other disorders. It is necessary for healthy bones. Richard Knox NPR News. Dow's fallen 13 at eleven thousand forty. I'm Lakshmi Singh NPR News in Washington. Support for NPR comes from the George Lucas Educational Foundation creator of Ed utopia a source for what works in education more and more ad ed eutopia dot org. Good afternoon I'm Melissa ANSTEAD sitting in for Cali Crossley and this is the Kelly Crossley

Show. We're listening to Leonard Bernstein is prologue to West Side Story to set the tone for today's conversation about William Shakespeare. I'm joined by scholar Stephen Green. He's the John Cogan University professor of the humanities in the English Department at Harvard University. He's also the author of the bestseller will in the world and his new book is Shakespeare's freedom. Stephen Green welcome. Thanks Alicia nice to be here. We're delighted to have you and before we jump into a discussion of your new book Let's look back a little bit in time. Give us a few highlights of Shakespeare's life help us brush up our Shakespeare if you will. Well Shakespeare was born in the middle of the 16th century. Fifty sixty four he was the son of a middle class provincial family a country boy not an aristocrat not a important powerful gentleman but much more ordinary fellow his father was a glover made fancy gloves and Stratford upon Avon. That's one thing to think about when you

think about Shakespeare Another thing is that he didn't go to university. We have fairly good records of who went to Oxford in Cambridge and which were the two English universities in the time and he didn't go. So he had a quite a good education locally in the what they called the grammar school would go up to a high school level and probably a lot more intense in certain fields than our grammar school but that and our high schools but then he didn't go on to university. And then the surprise is that from this modest provincial background country fellow he went on to become enormously famous and also very wealthy in his own time through the most unlikely means which was the theatre fairly new art form. He made a lot of money. He's practically the only one in the age who made money at doing such an unlikely thing then as now it is not something to go into if you want to get rich. But Shakespeare evidently did want to get rich and did get rich and was also very widely recognized in his own lifetime as the amazing

stupendous artist that he of course is are the contemporary corollaries entrepreneurs or the current contemporary corollaries artists or filmmakers maybe. Well it's a good question. I would say both both in a special sense. Shakespeare First of all and first and foremost is an incredible artist a literary artist I mean the equivalent of someone who. It is magnificent. Screenwriter and director. But the important thing is that it was also producer entrepreneur Lisa producer and what we would call a producer that is to say and even more than that we also own the theater I mean he's a very odd multiple relation to all of us so we're not very much a small businessman entrepreneurial relation he owns us share of the theater he owns a share in the company. He was an actor in the company and then he was its principal playwrights So multiple levels of involvement but definitely someone who had his eye on the cash box as well as

his artistic ambitions which were enormously high. You remind me of what the economy has forced arts presenters and creators to do these days which is to have to fill all those roles again so we may have gone through a splintering of that over the last 400 years but our recession has forced us back into playing all of those roles. I mean you've you've written an imaginative history of Shakespeare with your book will in the world which was published in 2004 and it's filled with scholarly speculation and facts and historical extrapolation in the best sense of all those phrases. How did you allow your own imagination to fill in those gaps. Well it's a necessity in this case because Shakespeare though as I said he was actually widely celebrated in his own time as a great artist left very few biographical traces. Why is that. I mean other people have lots of records from those days and times you would think that that would be available social class was the principal factor he flew below the radar of

social curiosity and being an artist did not in itself generate the kind of curiosity that leads people to collect biographical information about people in the 16th or early 70s century. And he wasn't from the right background unlike let's say is contemporary. Marvelous writer so Philip Sidney about whom we have a whole biography an elaborate account. He just no one was interested no one thought that saving letters from him saving documents in his hand and so forth would be an interesting thing to do including Shakespeare himself. You may also have been rather private I think probably was but it didn't evidently occur to him let alone to anyone else that actually holding on to the documents themselves. For example his drafts. It would be an exciting and important thing let alone his love letters our psychiatric records. Well of course there was no Google then and it does strike me that it was a time where you not only had more privacy available to you but given the tensions around religious beliefs and the Queen or the king

that maybe it was better to keep parts of your life quite private. That's possible too. There was no particular advantage in other than showing off in having one's intimate life displayed to the world. And in Shakespeare's case it's possible that he was born at least to a Catholic family at a time of severe persecution of Catholics by entrenched Protestants in England so that he may have been reasons in his upbringing why he learned to. Lie low stay quiet about himself and he had a lifelong aversion to winding up in jail. You never as far as we know most Renaissance artists at one time or another got in tremendous trouble with the law and Shakespeare. He was very visible never seems to have triggered that even though his work is often quite daring in relation to its social commentary. Tell us why artists would get in trouble with the law during that time.

Well this is a world with severe censorship with no idea of artistic freedom or freedom of speech or subjects to the king are not citizens in a free state and certain things particularly on religious issues but also. Political issues would have been visited with ferocious attention by the authorities if they could get hold of it they were people's government spies in taverns and INS who were writing reports there. Shakespeare's contemporary exact contemporary Christopher Marlowe The other great playwright of Shakespeare's time was much more transgressive personality and winds up with a dad with a knife stuck in his brain. Through his I probably was thought by in a tavern brawl but only in the twentieth century was it discovered that all of the people who were in the tavern room at that moment who killed him were working for Queen Elizabeth secret police.

This is as you point out in your work. I don't want to let you get out of here with too much privacy either Stephen. Tell us a little bit about your early entry as a reader and then as someone who specifically was drawn to to Shakespeare. I've heard you say in other interviews that your mother said to you when you were a boy Stevie put down that book and come watch I Love Lucy. That is true. My family. Like most of the American families that I knew in the 900 50s was obsessed with television and I have my own share of pleasure with it but I was always a bookish So a kid. My parents were concerned that it might be bad for my eyes. And I am wearing glasses even to this day that said listen to your parents. I probably would have been very glasses anyway. We now know. Anyway. I'd love to read but I can't say that I love to read Shakespeare. I love

lots of things that every kid loves and in fact I do. My first experience of Shakespeare which was as far as I can remember in junior high school when Miska less be in Newton a big lecture in high school tried to teach us as you like it was an extremely unpleasant one I hated it. I remember thinking this is the worst thing I'd ever experienced in my life. But subsequently I had in the fantastically gifted teacher a man named John Harris when I was at school and he was one of those amazing people that exists throughout our country who just magically were alert and attentive to what children need and want and their relationship to burgeoning relationship to literature and expression and he taught King Lear in the course of a which is a very difficult play in the course of. Musta been a semester or perhaps it was a whole year but I remember it as one of the great thrilling experiences of my life for all these many years later. I was raised Catholic Stephen and all those Sundays in Mass where there were performers

on stage sometimes including me and a participatory audience plus music and poetry. I feel that it prepared me for my own work in theatre and in the arts. Is there some sidestepping event in your family life in your neighborhood in your religious upbringing that is an academic that you think may have settled in somewhere in your psyche to make you more open to Shakespeare. There's nothing that I can think of of the kind that you describe and that is what you describe is fascinating because it's probably the case that that Shakespeare's theatre the Elizabethan Theatre in its origins came out of Catholic religious practice out of what they call the quick period is where is he little playlet that they was to do in church. But in my case no I was a at if there is an equivalent I was just myself a ham. You know that manifested itself I used to prance

around at home with my brother and we're always friends putting on plays and then in time our excise call I was quite caught up in high school theatricals performances and my triumph was Mr. Murgatroyd the villain of a of a melodrama. So we're not talking about high art but it gets to you. Secular Britain Sullivan I don't think so I think this is nothing as impressive as Gilbert and Sullivan something that was floating around. Would you have done Shakespeare in high school. We didn't we. The closest we came I remember was the medieval play every man which when I was in high school we did and that I was in anyway I loved that whole world and I still I'm quite taken with. Both of course with the big world of live theater but also with the small world of live theatre that that in Boston or any other city or town in the country this huge amount of theater is you know that it is not immediately visible.

It's a it's like grass in the cracks of the sidewalk it just comes up people even if there's no money in it there's not much public attention you don't get any credit for it. But it is something that people thrill to and do it and by the hundreds of thousands in our country and all over the world. And of course your position as a professor would put you in a nonfiction acting position every time you step into a classroom. That's absolutely right. We're going out on Tchaikovsky's Romeo and Juliet fantasy overture. I'm Alicia and stand in for Kelly Crossley. We're talking about William Shakespeare this hour with Harvard scholar Stephen Green Blatt his new book is Shakespeare's freedom. We'll be back after this break to talk about it. Stay with us. Thank. Support for W.. She ph comes from New York and from Boston Private Bank and Trust

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Dream. Of a militia ANSTEAD guest host in the Cali Crossley Show if you're just tuning in my guest is Steven Greenberg. He's a professor of English at Harvard and a bestselling author. His new book is Shakespeare's freedom. We were just listening to Petey cue Bach's funeral oration for Julius Caesar by the venerable Peter shakily. Stephen you wrote Shakespeare's freedom as it began as a series of lectures you first presented at the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt and later at Rice University and as with your earlier book Renaissance fashion in which you describe the effect of the political foment happening around you during your Berkeley days you seem to be aware again of issues that have preoccupied American society in recent years 9/11 torture radical Islam and how this might affect our readings or performances of Shakespeare.

We're seeing an emergence of 9 11 art now in McEwen Saturday and Nelson's play the guys Donald Margulies time stands still even Jonathan Franzen's Freedom takes on this topic. Is this your 9/11 book. Well I wouldn't put it quite as directly as that Alicia. I would say that for me the experience of literature of Shakespeare here particularly is always necessarily involved with what you're feeling now here. So it's not that I wanted to write a 9/11 book about Shakespeare it's this you cannot write. I think seriously and intensely about let's say the terrible scene in King Lear when the traitor Gloucester is tortured in order to try to make him reveal something blinded actually by his torturers you can't write about that now and not be. Take into into account your feelings about what's

happened in the last over the last decade in our country or and in our international relations and world relations. Or you can do it but you do it at the cost of drying up everything that you want actually to express. You explore four topics in this book. Beauty authority and autonomy. And this book is more academic than will in the world. The tone of it the research of it give us a thumbnail if you would please of these topics these four topics and your thoughts on them if you can give us the condensed Shakespeare version of this condensed version is very simple. It's that Shakespeare lived in a world in a culture that had extravagant absolute desires. And perhaps it's not only his world but always desires for perfect beauty desires to eradicate all of the enemies that whether they were Catholic or Muslim or

Jewish that they could encounter a desire for absolute power. This is not a world this is not a democratic world that Shakespeare lived in but one ruled by a king who claimed first a queen and then a king who claimed absolute power. And indeed a world in which in general authority was understood to be. Lodged in a natural and permanent way in elderly males as it were with the possible exception of the Queen who was counted as a kind of symbolic male for that period and I was interested in Shakespeare's relation to those absolute claims and Shakespeare's own sense of freedom because he is an artist seems to be as much the fulfillment as we could imagine of someone who had absolute power over his own medium in every way. What interested me is the extent to which Shakespeare saw throughout his career but increasingly as his career went on that they had to be limits they had to be boundaries and without the boundaries there was only disaster. And

so I think that his work is an ongoing exploration of the relationship between the longing for something. Absolute and unbounded and the recognition of the necessary boundedness is that why the end of your book looks more closely at prosper and his conclusion in The Tempest. Yes because prosper as many of your listeners will know is a magician who has absolute power. He rules the tiny island to just get himself his daughter and two servants but he's the absolute ruler of that island. He rules it through his magic and he's able to do anything that he wants and he has his enemies in his hands. The people who have exiled him to that island in the first place that's the subject of the play and we know what Renaissance rulers actually did when they had their enemies in their hands and it wasn't pretty. It was the most horrendous form of torture and execution that is imaginable. We like to think we've not seen that before in history you know it's true well we'll never see it again right

we. We are the heirs to it. That particular history and what happened is what happens in Shakespeare's play is that astonishingly Shakespeare stages this absolute ruler giving up his power. And returning to a much more limited much more complicated and much more compromised world you and I have spoken before about A Midsummer Night's Dream and the depiction of the role of the artist as Shakespeare writes about it in the play I think we both of have acknowledged that's one of our favorites among his works. How does the artist fit in to this scheme does the artist also need limitations. I think Shakespeare thought of himself in multiple ways as an artist not just a single way. And it's an ice cream is a perfectly good example on the one hand he very much associates himself all through his career with someone who has the almost unlimited capacity of dreams or of

magic or fairies. In the case of some nice you know I can make you fall in love with anything I want to make you fall in love with by sprinkling a little magic powder on your eyes. Shakespeare was had that magic powder his language which he possessed to an extravagant degree and I think he very much associates his artistic power with that magical quality at the same time precisely in its own extreme he does the what looks like the opposite thing he associates what it is to be an artist with being a carpenter a weaver. With those ridiculous characters lower class characters who he understands that he is in some very important relationship too. They're the performers in the play they are the actors and he it's the shuttling back and forth between those two visions of unlimited magical power and of ordinary ness the ordinary ness of craftspeople who are doing something to try to make a little money that with which he understood at least at that stage of his life. But he's always shuttling between

alternatives of this kind. One of the lines that I love the most from A Midsummer Night's Dream is when Todd says his dream hath no bottom. And I always think of that as where art fits into the world that it has no end. It continues on Shakespeare continues to be relevant it continues to talk to us 400 years later like bottom's dream it has no bottom and I'm sure you would interpret that much more area directly than I just did. Given the thesis of your book and one chapter that is specifically engaged with the Merchant of Venice What do you think about the timing of the Merchant of Venice which start which right now is starring Al Pacino as Shylock on Broadway and was in Central Park this summer and you also wrote a fascinating review of that in the New York Review of Books about a month ago two months ago now. What are you thinking about Shylock is this the right time to do that play. I'm generally of the cast of mind that that you shouldn't ask that question if it's the right time to do the

play that to say you shouldn't choose it for reasons other than the fact that it seizes you and that you need to do it because it seems to you so powerful why you could ask but I would say in the case of that play and several other plays by Shakespeare and not only by Shakespeare that of course there are there are there can be moments in which is ethically compromised. I happen to think the Merchant of Venice is this is not a moment for the Jewish community in the United States in which there are so so so much under threat so fragile that that it would be insane incendiary to stage what is after all in some very important sense as an anti-Semitic play. But of course I can imagine such moments as I could imagine moments in which if you were if for example our culture was engaged in witchcraft prosecutions that putting on Macbeth would not be a timely act but in general I'm against asking that question. I'd like to listen to a short clip of Al Pacino from the current production then come back and hear you talk a bit about how you saw that production.

We had this crisis may. Hinder you may half a million laughter at my last was mocked up by gains on my nation to want to buy bargains. Who are my friends. He did my man amazed. And what's his reason. I never joke. But the other two eyes. That had you haven't forgotten the night Jones. Son says affection patterns fed with the same food. Hurt with the same weapons. Subject to the same diseases cured by the same means. Warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer. As a Christian is if you put us do we not bleed. If you. Tickle us. Do we not laugh. If you poison us do we not die. And if you're wrong just. Shall we not revenge.

If we are like you in the rest we will resemble you in that. That was Al Pacino as Shylock in The Merchant of Venice currently on Broadway Stephen Green but you wrote that in the New York Review of Books that you cited earlier performances by Laurence Olivier and F. Murray Abraham applauded those poor performances in say and you wrote Alpert You know does not belong in this company. Why not. Well I thought performance was quite powerful. So as this is in the larger context of the. There is real force and between those performances I think you could hear in the clip. It's kind of the merchant of the Bronx. Yes the merchant the merchant the Bronx the merchant of a kind of it is a familiar phenomenon of a certain imitation of what you imagine a Jewish accent to be like. And I thought it was extremely powerful but I thought it was powerful

within a very very narrow register. That is to say and I think you could hear it I felt I could hear it occurred and even in the very important and powerful clip that you've just given us this is a it seems to me a single strong note in that you know performance and that is. The rage that has led to his hatred his hatred of Antonio his hatred of the Christian culture of venison he gets that I think quite well. I think he doesn't get a larger human range in Shylocks right. Well for example whatever is conveyed by Shylocks talking about his deceased wife and the turquoise ring or the Shylock that is. That actually feels that he's heated by the same means and warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer. What you get is a certain kind of narrow rhetorical band but wonderfully well done within that band. But I thought

that the Anthonys sure Abraham Henry Goodman Laurence Olivier I've seen a lot of versions that play I think that they all managed to get a broader bandwidth. Well the reviews that were positive about the performance said that the play itself brought everyone. In the cattle cast in the in the in the story to their knees. And yet there were plenty of reviews that agreed with you Slate's headline for its review was what a prick. Safe to hate Shylock again. But you know recently an in your class at Harvard which is about Shakespearean tragedy you talked about the anxiety Shakespeare might have been working out in Anthony Anthony and Cleopatra after having not done so well with Timon of Athens. In your books are you working now issues in your own successes and failures your own moments in your personal life or professional life in the in the red Renaissance Elle Fashion in your finding your

voice through troubled political history and you talk about in your in your Hamlet book that you've been considering the inheritance from father to son. Indeed with your own father at the center of that. What are you working out in this book. If I think if I could give you a very coherent and clear answer to that question I probably couldn't have written the book Alicia that is to say it may be and in fact I hope it is the case that all of me the conscious part of me but also the unconscious part of me is engaged in what I do. I don't want my writing to seem desiccated and merely academic in the negative sense of the term I want to seem like the work of an actual living human being. And that means bringing everything that you are to the table but bringing it to the table in this form in a book about Shakespeare or in any of the things that I've written in my life I think is powerful precisely because you are not making a full declaration of

your personal engagement I do write from time to time about that personal stake as a way of coming clean. But I don't want to swamp the. The book itself. I am interested I think in this book perhaps more than I had been in the past about what it means to attain a certain position in life because at a certain point like all of us you cease to be one of the children you become one of the parents. One of the adults and then you have to think about what that means what it means. I love the experience for many years of feeling I was always on the outside and enjoying that feeling of of marginality. It's liberating but at a certain point you can't. The truth of the matter is you can't teach at Harvard and pretend that you are an outsider. You are and then you have to figure out what it means to be in the big house not outside. It's not a progression to that Shakespeare makes in his own work. Working within the structures of drama and then blasting them open and finding

his his voice in a new way. I think it's true I think that Shakespeare going to compare something now very great to what we were just talking about was very small. I think that the Shakespeare who writes The Tempest thinks. Himself clearly as a great prince with magical powers is trying to think through what it means to have done what he did. But it's worth reminding oneself that almost at the same time that Shakespeare wrote the tempest he also wrote The Winter's Tale where it's reasonably clear that he divides himself into two. He thinks of himself on the one hand as a witch. The character called Pollyanna and on the other hand as a thief the character called out to all of us. And so he's playing even at the end of his career with what it means to think of himself not as a great central figure but as two different versions of what it means to be an outsider a witch and a thief. I think you make the difference between you know a great person so-called great person going through this progression and someone who's not so great going through that

progression but I would argue that that such a human progression whether you're doing it on the stage or in a classroom or in your life out in the world as a postal deliver that there is some sense of growing toward yourself and what you need. Absolutely. Shakespeare couldn't have written that word without that sense that he's sharing in a universal life experience. I'm Alicia ANSTEAD sitting in for Cali Crossley. You're here in Love Fool by the Cardigans from the soundtrack of Baz Luhrmann the 1996 film Romeo and Juliet. We're talking about William Shakespeare with Stephen Green Black whose new book is Shakespeare's freedom. We'll be back with more after the break. As Gertrude said to her son Hamlet I pray thee stay with us. Support for WGBH comes from you and from safety insurance. Working with

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The street. Stem cell. You mean that's the song Romeo and Juliet by the band The Killers. This is Alicia and stone the Cali Crossley Show and my guest is Stephen Green lad who is comfortable talking about Shakespeare on the Corvair report as he is lecturing the undergrads in the hallowed halls of Harvard where he's a professor of English. Stephen we've listened to a number of soundtracks today and most of them have been either Romeo and Juliet or riff on Romeo and Juliet is Romeo and Juliet the most popular of Shakespeare's plays is probably the most beloved of the place I read years ago with that in the old days in the British Museum when they had a huge. Folio of Shakespeare chained to the desk so that people could get up and just look at it in the course of the day if they were writing something else. That the pages that were most well-thumbed

were the pages of Romeo and Juliet. It's a play that people want to return to. Is it the most accessible or are we just suckers for a love story that goes and so well suckers for a love story that doesn't end so I would say that is I don't think it's more accessible than I think. I think the magical power of Shakespeare is that it's almost all accessible when it's on stage. And I think the very large mass audience that thrill to Baz Luhrmann is Romeo and Juliet would have had the same difficulty understanding what's on the page that needed help understanding what's on the page that we all do when we read these four hundred year old place but once they're up on the stage they're completely comprehensible even though the language is the same. Well this may also be a function of the immersion principle and that is that Romeo and Juliet has been so much of our world so much of our iconography that that perhaps we know it in the same way that we know other works out there that are familiar to us just because it's been talked about more and maybe not because we're academics.

Absolutely. It's part of our cultural heritage as is Hamlet as are a number of Shakespeare works and maybe Romeo and Juliet has the special power and poignancy not only of of reflecting the destructiveness. It takes those two lovers to their deaths but on the process of loss that Shakespeare writes so brilliantly about throughout his life throughout his career what it means to come to terms with the fact that you lose that you lose. Shakespeare Shakespeare's case lost his son. You lose eventually your parents you lose your world you lose yourself. OK that's enough. Yeah. Even if you don't die young. Yeah right right right. So I had a conversation with my brother who's a very astute historian before and told him that I was going to be talking to you and he said that's Shakespeare stuff it's just not really for me. And I argued with him that if he had been trained in Shakespeare the way that he was trained to be an outstanding punter

in football and a fabulous tennis player later in life and now a very talented golfer that he he would understand Shakespeare if he had taken the time to train with Shakespeare too. Do you have to have Shakespeare bred into you through training. Can you can you learn it for the first time in your 50s. You certainly can learn it for the first time in the 50s. There is a key distinction here between. Seeing Shakespeare and reading Shakespeare that is to say seeing Shakespeare on stage anyone can do without any guidance at all a difficulty at all it's meant for that. But to understand Shakespeare to reach Shakespeare and take it in fully most people need some guidance partly because the language has changed over the years it's quite difficult. It's written in a very rich and complex poetry. It transforms itself onto the stage perfectly. But it's true that if you're sitting down to read these texts which were these plays that were written such as so

many centuries ago even if you've been working on it all your life as I have I sometimes have to try to scratch my head and say what does that mean exactly. But that's not what or on film for that matter. Look the world is full of people who have multiple tastes of like somethings and don't like others so I don't feel evangelical about your brother or other people if all of France practically is always despised Shakespear with a very few exceptions. But there are also I think Shakespeare very powerful. Record of almost universal pleasure for very large numbers of people all over the world. And that's the that's the astonishing phenomena it's not astonishing that some people don't like Shakespeare what's astonishing is that as many people of all work walks of life of all ages and thrill to what he did. Your new book Shakespeare's freedom really got me thinking about why Shakespeare is Shakespeare in our collective unconscious. And I

was thinking about this whole notion of branding which you talk about toward the end of this book. Is it as much his brilliance as his branding. I suddenly had a crisis of faith. Well it's true that Shakespeare in his own lifetime people tried to sell plays that Shakespeare hadn't written by putting Shakespeare's name on the title page. So we know that is his name was a brand as it were and at that time it could sell a place and it has been argued of course by academics largely that some of the effect of Shakespeare is the product of academics or other clerkly types who just insist that it's important. But I think there is very powerful evidence experience evidence that that's not true that Shakespeare was Shakespeare doesn't depend on an academic establishment to make on compulsory chapel to make it acceptable. It depends on compulsory chapel it should be given out except as a pleasure for

for we priests in the cult. But that's not how it works it works that elementary school children who've been laugh with it that adults who aren't in school feel deeply moved that people buy the collections of the Sonnets and read them for themselves without anyone guiding them. Now what about the appropriation of Shakespeare in terms of let's just say creating a new language like refuting 8 is that good placement for Shakespeare good brandy and using Shakespeare as as a Twitter analogy as Sarah Pailin did Shakespeare of course love to invent words. So it's hard to think of Shakespeare as exactly analogous to Sarah Palin but the it is the case that Shakespeare didn't feel limited by either the grammar or the vocabulary just like Sarah Pailin Exactly so we could probably more of a connection than I realized.

Let's listen to what Saturday Night Live thought about the refuter moment. Come on dictionary and join the word. You're betting that Sarah Palin's accidental mash up of refute and repudiate and we know it was an accident because pale herself went back and changed the tweet to say refute yet then went back again to Twitter independent or self writing Shakespear like to coin new words to got to celebrate it. Well there are a couple of differences between Shakespeare and Sarah Palin. For one when Shakespeare coined the words it wasn't by accident. You came up with words like submerge and sneak it in just take two words that kind of mean the same thing and then smash them together to make a third word that also kind of means the same thing. When Shakespeare did come up with new words he certainly didn't say you got to celebrate it. In fact I bet you never said that Shakespeare What are you doing at the club just finished Twelfth Night got to celebrate it. So that was Saturday Night Live. A news report from Saturday Night Live. Based on one former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin tweeted that peaceful

Muslims should refute the mosque planned near the World Trade Center site. Do you just hear Shakespeare everywhere Steven out in the world like Sarah Pailin clearly does. Listen your the things that you've played the little musical clips today suggest that Shakespeare is out there everywhere that that it's hard to escape sometimes in very debased form. You see candy being advertised as sweets for the sweet. That's a line from Hamlet and so forth and so on. It's just absorbed into our culture that way so of course it is just part of the air we breathe at this point. Well let's talk about the air that that that you breathe every day we have with a sonnet 65. And let's read the sonnet would you read it for us please Stephen and before you read it let's give let's give our listeners a chance to go online. Kelly Crossley Show Kelly Crossley org SLAs slash WGBH where the sonnet is waiting for you to read along with

Professor Stephen Green bought it sonnet 65. Tell us why you chose this sonnet. Maybe I should say first that that what a sonnet is. It's a little 14 line poem. It is has an elaborate rhyme scheme. Shakespeare came up with a rhyme scheme of his own slightly different from the one that the narrative his lines rhyme A B B A B C D C D E F E F and A B A B C D C D E F E F G G. Sometimes he varies them and it's written in lines of 10 syllables and that rhyme is at the end of the drive and the end of each of the lines so it goes here in this case c. power paly flour de stout decays and so forth you your readers will see when they get to see the poem. As Shakespeare wrote many sonnets it's not clear.

How how much he intended to put these sonnets in a single book together they were published during his lifetime and such a book and they seem to be linked to one another. This is one of many sonnets that's about time and mortality and the reason that I chose it for today in addition to the fact that simply a very beautiful poem is that it gets the quality of that we were talking about a few minutes ago Alicia about about Shakespeare asking what survives when you recognize that everything is subject to mortality everything is going to fade. We haven't Shakespeare really does mean everything Shakespeare does not have to my way of thinking a very shall we say a very religious sensibility that believes that some perfect thing is lying. After our lives that that in another world in heaven or in hell for that matter it's here and now that you have to think about your life. But the here and now is subject to mortality. It's not going to last nothing that we have is going to last or the question is

what to do with that how not simply to be depressed by that. And that yeah I'd like I'd like to not be depressed. Well you can see Shakespeare grappling with it. This is a poem written to the person he loves. And thinking about the fact that the person he loves the beauty of the person he loves is going to fade. This is how it goes. Since brass nor stone nor earth nor boundless sea but sad mortality or sways their power how with this rage filled beauty hold a plea whose action is no stronger than a flower. Oh how shall Somers honey breath hold out against the rack full see each of battering days when rocks impregnable are not so stout nor gates of steel so strong but tying the quays o fearful meditation where a lack shall Time's best jewel from Time's chest lie hid or what strong hand can hold his swift

foot back or who his spoil of beauty can forbid. Oh none unless this miracle have might that in black ink my love may still shine bright. That's lovely thank you for reading that for us so it strikes me that Shakespeare is saying there's a coarseness here that has great power that Beauty doesn't have that it's frail like a flower not like a stone and that the only hope is a miracle of I would say blank black ink is the writer's writing. But I would extend that to the artist's creations and my thinking along the right lines here and there and there are such right lines or wrong lines but the poem seems to be very powerfully saying not only that beauty is like a flower and therefore not as strong as rocks but that rocks also fall apart that all falls apart. It's all going to go away not just the delicate flowers but the brass and

the stone and the sea. He just imagines it's all in the process of decay mortality is as power over all things. This is a universe that even the world itself. Will not remain forever as we now know. We know that's the case. It doesn't. Nothing is going to last forever. So then the question is how if you care about something passionately she cares about the beauty of the young man he's writing about how shall that jewel be protected. How will it not lie in times chest times chest of course as a coffin here as well as a jewel box. And the answer is that they didn't black ink my love may still shine bright and I noticed that the ambiguity of that word love my love may still shine bright meaning both the person he loves whose beauty he'll immortalised imagine it but also his feeling of love is they both coming together in that single word. And look I think Shakespeare

in rational moments and he had many of them would have understood that his poems too are not going to last forever hit the magic of his blanket. But it's not going to last forever but it's 400 years now and these are going to really speak to us. So that's amazing. Right right. You wrote in with Will in the world Shakespeare is Art is a paradoxical art that it's the source of settled and of deep disturbance simultaneously the ageing of civility and the agent of subversion. What does that mean. How are we to think of the call and also the disturbance. I think that Shakespeare had an unusual sensibility in this regard. Not like most of us in many ways he was like most of us he was. He possessed just a larger version of what we possess. But in this regard I don't myself completely understand how he did it. He's simultaneously the most daring of artists the one who's willing to think through much further. The poem that we

just read is written 400 years ago at a time in which everyone in authority said the world is not the world may come to an end but there is a universal timeless realm from which we can escape all of this mortality that's not what Shakespeare is saying. He's living in a world in which he acknowledges everything is going to come to pieces it's a much more radical vision. At the same time he's someone who. First of all doesn't give way simply to the despair that that might suggest but also who has a sense of of knowing who he is feeling a deep in their confidence that has to do with his command of his resources and his command of language. I would love to have that feeling. I wish I did. This is his work in the end. Hopeful. I think it's helpful. I think it's hopeful even in its moments of most despairing tragedy but not hopeful because of something simple like you could take away a little greeting card

but hopeful because the human imagination is the most powerful thing that you have. And he had the most powerful version of it that we've known for 2000 years. Well Stephen Green Black This has been a powerful conversation. Steven Green Blatt is the John Cogan University professor of the humanities in the English Department at Harvard University. His new book is Shakespeare's freedom. We're going out on Cole Porter's brush up your Shakespeare from the original Broadway production of Kiss Me Kate. I'm Alicia and stood in for Kelly Crossley the callee Crossley Show is a production of WGBH radio Boston's NPR station for news and culture and today the arts. I get once more as like you get she says you'll be alright. You know thanks for the power Spock example.