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University Of Chicago Press
November 2010
On Sale: November 15, 2010
152 pages
ISBN: 0226306666
EAN: 9780226306667
Hardcover
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Non-Fiction
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 probed 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 but seen also in
the character Bernardine in Measure for Measure. Next
Greenblatt considers the idea of Shakespearean
authority—that is, Shakespeare’s deep sense of the ethical
ambiguity of power, including his own. Ultimately,
Greenblatt 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 and
eloquent meditation by the most acclaimed and influential
Shakespearean of our time.
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