Stephen Greenblatt

• 1. Introduction

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  Stephen Greenblatt once recalled the moment he realized the term "New Historicism" had taken on a life of its own. When he heard that American universities were advertising academic positions specifically requesting experts in the field, his first reaction was disbelief. "You've got to be kidding," he said. "You know it was just something we made up." That confession captures something essential about the man who, almost by accident, reshaped how scholars and students read literature across the English-speaking world.

  Greenblatt was born on the 7th of November, 1943. He grew up in Newton, Massachusetts, the grandson of Lithuanian Jewish immigrants who had crossed the Atlantic in the early 1890s to escape Czarist conscription. From those roots, he would travel to Yale, to Cambridge on a Fulbright scholarship, through nearly three decades at Berkeley, and eventually to a named professorship at Harvard. Along the way he won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, put a Shakespeare biography on the bestseller lists, and co-founded a journal that became a flagship for a new way of reading the past.

  How did a man who described his founding term as "not particularly deeply thought-out" become, in the words of Shakespeare scholar Jonathan Bate, the driving force behind the most influential strand of literary criticism of the last quarter century? And what does it mean to read a play written by someone who, as Greenblatt himself put it, "crumbled to dust long ago" as if it were addressed personally and intimately to you?

• 2. Roots and Formation

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  Greenblatt's paternal grandparents came from Kaunas and his maternal grandparents from Vilnius. They left Lithuania during the early 1890s because the Czarist government was pursuing a Russification campaign designed to conscript young Jewish men into the Russian army. That history of displacement and survival sits quietly behind a scholar whose life's work has been to understand how power shapes the stories a culture tells about itself.

  After Newton High School, Greenblatt earned a bachelor's degree from Yale in 1964. He then went to Pembroke College, Cambridge, as a Fulbright Scholar, completing a second undergraduate degree there in 1966. He returned to Yale for his doctorate, which he completed in 1969. Those years of moving between American and British academic traditions gave him a comparative vantage point that would later inform how he thought about Renaissance culture as a whole rather than as a fixed, isolated text.

  His teaching career began at the University of California, Berkeley, where he held the Class of 1972 Professorship and became a full professor in 1980. He stayed at Berkeley for 28 years. In 2000, Harvard named him the John Cogan University Professor of the Humanities, a position he has held ever since. He has also lectured at institutions as far apart as Kyoto University and Peking University, and was a resident fellow at the American Academy in Rome.

• 3. Inventing New Historicism

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  The year 1982 marks the moment Greenblatt first put the phrase "New Historicism" into print. He used it in his introduction to a collection called The Power of Forms in the English Renaissance. His example was pointed: he drew on Queen Elizabeth I's sharp reaction to a revival of Shakespeare's Richard II on the eve of the Essex rebellion, using it to illustrate what he called "the mutual permeability of the literary and the historical."

  The core argument was that a literary text cannot be understood apart from the web of institutions, beliefs, and social pressures that produced it. New Historicism also insisted, crucially, that any critic's reading of a text is colored by that critic's own beliefs, social position, and historical moment. Many scholars working in the tradition began critical essays by explaining their own backgrounds and prejudices before turning to the work itself. This was a deliberate break from New Criticism, which had insisted on reading a text in isolation from everything outside it.

  Critics attacked the new approach from several directions. Some said it collapsed the distinction between literature and history; others argued it denied human agency or was somehow anti-theoretical. A few observers noted, with a degree of irony, that New Historicism was "neither new nor historical." Defenders countered that it was best understood not as a rigid theory but as a collection of practices, a set of tools for achieving a more comprehensive understanding of literature by treating history itself as something shaped by the present moment in which it is studied.

  Jonathan Bate's assessment, that the approach had become "the most influential strand of criticism over the last 25 years," captures just how far the idea traveled from Greenblatt's somewhat improvised coinage. The journal Representations, which Greenblatt co-founded in 1983 and which is based at Berkeley, became a primary venue for new historicist work and continues to publish in that tradition.

• 4. Shakespeare, the Renaissance, and Power

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  Renaissance Self-Fashioning, published in 1980, was the work that announced Greenblatt's critical ambitions before he had even named the method behind them. The book had, by his colleagues' account, a transformative impact on Renaissance studies. Its argument, put plainly, was that individual identity in the sixteenth century was not a private, internal matter but something constructed through, and constrained by, the institutions and symbols of power.

  Greenblatt has written on Shakespeare's engagement with ghosts, purgatory, anxiety, exorcism, and revenge. In his essay "King Lear and Harsnett's 'Devil-Fiction'," he argued that Shakespeare's self-consciousness is bound up with the institutions and symbolology of power that his plays anatomize. The claim is not that Shakespeare was merely a mouthpiece for Tudor ideology, but that even the greatest works of imagination are embedded in specific life-worlds and yet somehow pull free of them. Greenblatt has called this tension the core of his "deep, ongoing interest."

  His work on the Norton Shakespeare, which he edited (the 2015 edition is the current version), has been described as his most influential piece of public pedagogy. As general editor he shapes how Shakespeare is taught to students across multiple continents. The 2018 book Tyrant: Shakespeare on Politics grew directly from anxiety about the 2016 US presidential election. Though it does not name Donald Trump, literary critics reading it in leading newspapers treated it as a commentary on the Trump administration.

• 5. Will in the World and The Swerve

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  Will in the World is a biography of Shakespeare that reached readers far beyond the academic world. It spent nine weeks on The New York Times Best Seller list, a rare achievement for a work rooted in Renaissance scholarship. The book's approach is characteristic of Greenblatt: it places Shakespeare's imagination in contact with the specific social and material conditions of Elizabethan England rather than treating the plays as self-contained monuments.

  The Swerve: How the World Became Modern took a different subject, tracing the rediscovery of a classical text and its long ripple effects through Western intellectual history. The book won the National Book Award for Nonfiction in 2011 and the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction in 2012. It also won the James Russell Lowell Prize from the Modern Language Association in 2011, the second time Greenblatt had received that prize; the first was in 1989 for Shakespearean Negotiations.

  Apart from strictly literary subjects, Greenblatt has written on travelling in Laos and China, on storytelling, and on miracles, a range that reflects the breadth of what he means by "cultural poetics." His collaboration with playwright Charles L. Mee on a work called Cardenio premiered on the 8th of May, 2008, at the American Repertory Theater in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Critical response was mixed, but audiences responded positively, and the piece was later adapted for performance in ten countries.

• 6. Honors and International Reach

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  Greenblatt received his first Guggenheim Fellowship in 1975 and a second in 1983, an unusual distinction. The honors that followed trace a career that was recognized as much outside the United States as within it. He received honorary degrees from Queen Mary College at the University of London and from the University of Bucharest in Romania, both in the early 2000s. The Wilbur Cross Medal from Yale came in 2010.

  In 2016, he was awarded the Holberg Prize, given to outstanding scholars in the arts, humanities, social sciences, law, or theology. In 2024, he received the Pour le Merite for Sciences and Arts, one of the oldest and most prestigious German civil orders. He has also been elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1987, the American Philosophical Society in 2007, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2008, and has served as president of the Modern Language Association.

  His lecture invitations have ranged from the Clarendon Lectures at Oxford in 1988 to the Adorno Lectures at Goethe University Frankfurt in 2006 and the Mosse Lecture Series at Humboldt University in 2015. At Harvard, he co-chairs the university's branch of the Scholars at Risk program, an international network dedicated to defending academic freedom and the human rights of scholars worldwide.