But if Shakespeare himself is maybe about meaning and truth, I don't
know, then he is certainly about pleasure and interest, we start with
pleasure and interest, but maybe eventually it gets to meaning and
truth.
Stephen Greenblatt
First of all, Shakespeare is
about pleasure and interest. He was from the first moment he actually
wrote something for the stage, and he remains so.
Stephen Greenblatt
First of all, there was a volcano of words, an eruption of words that
Shakespeare had never used before that had never been used in the
English language before. It's astonishing. It pours out of him.
Stephen Greenblatt
I believe in broken, fractured, complicated narratives, but I believe
in narratives as a vehicle for truth, not simply as a form of
entertainment, though I love entertainment, but also a way of conveying
what needs to be conveyed about the works that I care about.
Stephen Greenblatt
I believe that it is a whole lifetime of work on Shakespeare's part
that enabled him to do what he did. But the question is how you can
explain this whole lifetime in such a way to make it accessible and
available to us, to me.
Stephen Greenblatt
I believe that nothing comes of nothing, even in Shakespeare. I wanted
to know where he got the matter he was working with and what he did with
that matter.
Stephen Greenblatt
I think the writing of
literature should give pleasure. What else should it be about? It is not
nuclear physics. It actually has to give pleasure or it is worth
nothing.
Stephen Greenblatt
I wanted to hold onto and
exploit the power of narrative. This is not only a book about a great
storyteller, but there have to be stories about the storyteller.
Stephen Greenblatt
I'm not spitting in my own soup, I love having spent my life thinking
about these things-but you don't have to know anything about his life,
even though I've just written a biography!
Stephen Greenblatt
I've been at this for 40 years. And, as an academic, I've been content
with relatively small audiences, with the thought that the audience I
long for will find its way eventually to what I have written, provided
that what I have written is good enough.
Stephen Greenblatt
It is not that Shakespeare's art is in technicolor and fancy, and that
real life is black and white and tedious. The life that Shakespeare was
living was the only life he had, and he had to use it to create what he
was doing.
Stephen Greenblatt
No special writing rituals. And my desk is usually cluttered.
Stephen Greenblatt
Now a Protestant confronting a Catholic ghost is exactly Shakespeare's
way of grappling with what was not simply a general social problem but
one lived out in his own life.
Stephen Greenblatt The Shakespeare that Shakespeare became is the name that's attached to these astonishing objects that he left behind.
Stephen Greenblatt
Well it is certainly the case that the poems - which were in fact
published during Shakespeare's lifetime - are weird if they began or
originated in this form, as I think they did, because the poems get out
of control.
Stephen Greenblatt
What I wanted to do was to get that sense of being in touch with this
lost world while holding onto what draws readers and audiences there in
the first place.
Stephen Greenblatt
What matters here are the works - finally without them his life would
be uninteresting. What matters, that is, are the astonishing things that
he left behind. If we can get the life in relation to the works, then
it can take off.
Stephen Greenblatt
What we know is that Shakespeare wrote perhaps the most remarkable body
of passionate love poetry in the English language to a young man.
My
father who in this case was an obsessive life-long storyteller, and by a
very peculiar trick of my father's. My father would tell a very, very
long story, and the punch line would be in Yiddish.
Stephen Greenblatt Read more at
http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/s/stephen_greenblatt.html#vgZmwem33M3tLRGx.99
