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

In writing this book I became more and more struck by how intensely Shakespeare feels that the human project depends upon boundaries and upon the understanding of where the boundaries are that there are characters as I say in the chapter on autonomy in this book. And the idea of autonomy is liberty to live after one's own law which is what it how it was for us to find when it first was used as an English word in the 70 century autonomy as is the ability to live after one's own law that that's the slogan for Shakespeare's villains. Not for any one who is the. He ultimately thinks that human being should model themselves after it make their peace with the. Shakespeare. It's not so much as a political idea I mean I think actually Shakespeare associated it wasn't Shakespeare was it was proposing and used at his time a kind of conservative politics he was opposing he was proposing limits in relation to a

crazy claim of of them wasn't the reality in the inn on the ground but the crazy claim of the monarchs that he knew that St. Elizabeth and James to rule without limits they say was that it was an idea against the principal claims of his own authority figures who claimed that they themselves knew no limits and that for that matter they were only imitating the God himself who was precisely a creature who lived who was the very model of living without any limits at all. Shakespeare seems to me as a sensibility much closer to that that you would find. Let's say in the ancient philosopher Epicurus who thought that human pleasure human happiness precisely depended on knowing that boundaries. OK that's the general overarching view of the book and I'll just read you a couple of little pieces of it. Since Ryan mentioned my memorable encounter with it to be memorable and the case with Bill

Clinton I was going to start just by reading that it's the beginning of the fourth chapter in this book.