Stephen Greenblatt has been at the center of a major shift in literary interpretation toward a critical method that situates cultural creation in history. Shakespearean Negotiations is a sustained and powerful exemplification of this innovative method, offering a new way of understanding the power of Shakespeare's achievement and, beyond this, an original analysis of cultural process.

Named One of Esquire's 50 Best Biographies of All Time The Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award finalist, reissued with a new afterword for the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death. A young man from a small provincial town moves to London in the late 1580s and, in a remarkably short time, becomes the greatest playwright not of his age alone but of all time. How is an achievement of this magnitude to be explained? Stephen Greenblatt brings us down to earth to see, hear, and feel how an acutely sensitive and talented boy, surrounded by the rich tapestry of Elizabethan life, could have become the world’s greatest playwright.

"Brilliant, beautifully organized, exceedingly readable."—Philip Roth World-renowned Shakespeare scholar Stephen Greenblatt explores the playwright’s insight into bad (and often mad) rulers. Examining the psyche—and psychoses—of the likes of Richard III, Macbeth, Lear, and Coriolanus, Greenblatt illuminates the ways in which William Shakespeare delved into the lust for absolute power and the disasters visited upon the societies over which these characters rule. Tyrant shows that Shakespeare’s work remains vitally relevant today, not least in its probing of the unquenchable, narcissistic appetites of demagogues and the self-destructive willingness of collaborators who indulge them.

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.

This original study examines how the plays of Shakespeare and other Renaissance dramatists reflect and engage with the early modern discourse of cosmetics.

Shakespeare has never been more ubiquitous, not only on the stage and in academic writing, but in film, video and the popular press. On television, he advertises everything from cars to fast food. His birthplace, the tiny Warwickshire village of Stratford-Upon-Avon, has been transformed into a theme park of staggering commercialism, and the New Globe, in its second season, is already a far bigger business than the old Globe could ever have hoped to be. If popular culture cannot do without Shakespeare, continually reinventing him and reimagining his drama and his life, neither can the critical and scholarly world, for which Shakespeare has, for more than two centuries, served as the central text for analysis and explication, the foundation of the western literary canon and the measure of literary excellence.The Shakespeare the essays collected in these volumes reveal is fully as multifarious as the Shakespeare of theme parks, movies and television. Indeed, it is part of the continuing reinvention of Shakespeare. The essays are drawn for the most part from work done in the past three decades, though a few essential, enabling essays from an earlier period have been included. They not only chart the directions taken by Shakespeare studies in the recent past, but they serve to indicate the enormous and continuing vitality of the enterprise, and the extent to which Shakespeare has become a metonym for literary and artistic endeavor generally.