Harvard Book Store; WGBH Forum Network; Stephen Greenblatt: Shakespeare's Freedom

How can we restructure to try to think about how in the course of his career Shakespeare grappled with across all of his works across his poems across his plays with with what I take to be recurrent preoccupations in this case beauty and hatred authority and freedom. And I want to try to think about it as I in the course of writing the book I try to think about these these grappling. First of all which interested me because they have a cut again and I take to be a kind of a larger human claim a human reality one that crosses over from the late 60s early 70s century to our own times. But also I try to think of them in relation to Shakespeare's ongoing grappling with the limitlessness. And the reason for that is that. I take Shakespeare as a kind of embody ment of what it is to have as far as we can tell no limits the feeling that one.

That it's possible for grown people to have about Shakespeare Borges for example that Shakespeare was God is a feeling that comes from the absolute nature of the work that remains to me quite astonishing and moving and incomprehensible that we're almost wherever one is he was somehow in touch with and thinking about in a serious and sustained ways in the course of what was after all a very finite and local life I don't understand how he did it. It goes without saying it's has to do with whatever genius is but that genius is just the standard P.C. you don't understand what it is and that it seems to me amazing. I mean it's an amazing gift. It's at every level it's at the level of a fantastically daring political speculation and philosophical speculation and unbelievable limitless feeling about human desire

and so forth and so on that sense that nothing can stop in my teaching of course this tragedy this.