Stephen Greenblatt

Dark Renaissance is the thrilling story of the writer who transformed culture in Elizabethan England, bringing it out of the darkness and into the light. Poor boy. Dark star. Spy. Transgressor. Genius. From one of the greatest writers on the Elizabethan era, Dark Renaissance is the thrilling and subversive life story of Christopher Marlowe—Shakespeare's inspiration and rival, who helped to...

A riveting, exemplary tale of the great cultural "swerve" known as the Renaissance. WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE FOR NON-FICTION 2012 Almost six hundred years ago, a short, genial man took a very old manuscript off a library shelf. With excitement, he saw what he had discovered and ordered it copied. The book was a miraculously surviving copy of an...

A powerful exploration of the human capacity for renewal, as seen through Shakespeare and Freud "A compellingly readable and intelligent book. . . . Both authors write with impressive energy."—Rowan Williams, New Statesman In this fresh investigation, Stephen Greenblatt and Adam Phillips explore how the second chance has been an essential feature of the literary imagination and a promise so...

In repressive Elizabethan England, artists are frightened into dull conventionality; foreigners are suspect; popular entertainment largely consists of coarse spectacles, animal fights, and hangings. Into this crude world of government censorship and religious authoritarianism comes an ambitious cobbler’s son from Canterbury with a daring desire to be known—and an uncanny ear for Latin poetry. A torment for most schoolboys, yet...

In Hamlet in Purgatory, renowned literary scholar Stephen Greenblatt delves into his longtime fascination with the ghost of Hamlet's father. His daring and ultimately gratifying journey takes him through surprising intellectual territory, yielding an extraordinary account of the rise and fall of Purgatory as both a belief and a lucrative institution—along with a capacious new reading of the power of...

Renaissance Self-Fashioning is a study of sixteenth-century life and literature that spawned a new era of scholarly inquiry. Stephen Greenblatt examines the structure of selfhood as evidenced in major literary figures of the English Renaissance—More, Tyndale, Wyatt, Spenser, Marlowe, and Shakespeare—and finds that in the early modern period, new questions surrounding the nature of identity heavily influenced the literature of...

A powerful exploration of the human capacity for renewal, as seen through Shakespeare and Freud. "A compellingly readable and intelligent book... Both authors write with impressive energy."—Rowan Williams, New Statesman In this fresh investigation, Stephen Greenblatt and Adam Phillips explore how the second chance has been an essential feature of the literary imagination and a promise so central to our...

Dark Renaissance is the thrilling story of the writer who transformed culture in Elizabethan England, bringing it out of the darkness and into the light. Poor boy. Dark star. Spy. Transgressor. Genius. From one of the greatest writers on the Elizabethan era, Dark Renaissance is the thrilling and subversive life story of Christopher Marlowe - Shakespeare's inspiration and rival, who...