Transcript for Interview with Stephen Greenblatt on Shakespeare's Creative Genius

Read the full interview transcript.

0. Introduction

What makes Shakespeare so great? What are the sources of his genius? Those are questions that have been hotly debated for centuries, and here's why. Shakespeare was a young man from a provincial town without independent wealth, family connections, or a university education, and yet he went on to become the greatest playwright of all time. He went on to master both comedy and tragedy, to entertain the learned and the unlettered, to accurately depict the lives of peasants and kings. His achievements are so broad and unbelievable that there's a whole cottage industry of wild conspiracies, that it must have been someone else writing in his name, an aristocrat or multiple people, that he must have been a lawyer or a priest, or have served in the army.

My guest today is one of the greatest Shakespeare scholars, Harvard’s Stephen Greenblatt, who's going to give us a much more reasonable and interesting answer for where Shakespeare's genius really comes from. Greenblatt is going to take us into the grimy theatrical world of Shakespeare's England, which is far from what we would consider high culture today. The theater was next to brothels and gangs. It sometimes shared venues with animal baiting, where bears would be blinded and chased around by dogs for sport. We're going to learn how Shakespeare navigated this world, how he trans-morphed the death of his son, Hamnet, into his greatest work, Hamlet, and how techniques we dismiss, like rote memorization, laid the foundation for Shakespeare's genius.

---

Johnathan Bi: You called Shakespeare the greatest playwright, not of his age alone, but of all time. What makes Shakespeare so singular?

Stephen Greenblatt: In a certain way, it is easier to say what doesn't make him good. It's not that he made up plots no one had ever thought of before. For the most part, that's not true. He did transform the medium that he worked in, but the medium existed. He didn't invent a new medium. So the answer has to do with fabulous quality of imagination, limitless power of poetic intelligence and eloquence, some kind of deep human understanding that combines extraordinary intelligence with something that doesn't depend on fancy intelligence, but depends on heart and soul that is open to the truth of things. So all of those and more combined in a unusual mix, unexpected mix. But even as I say these words, I feel almost comical inadequacy of them.

1. The Theater

Johnathan Bi: I see. I want to spend this entire interview trying to unpack this a bit more, to talk about Shakespeare's genius. And I want to start with this theatrical environment that he found himself in in his really late teens and early 20s in London. So, let's begin with geography, because the theater was not in the city center. It was in the entertainment district, in the suburbs. Tell us a bit about this entertainment district.

Stephen Greenblatt: Within city of London, the civic authorities of Shakespeare's time didn't want and like the idea of the theater for a number of different reasons. There's a traffic problem, people arrived, too many people arrived, the theaters are daytime performances, people are taking off from work, crowding in the streets, riding up in their horses or carriages, the streets are jammed with people. Life is not going on as it should go on in a well ordered city. Instead, there are these places with people are taking the afternoon off, and there are whores, and there are pickpockets. The whole thing is a mess, coupled with the public health problems. So every year, almost, London is visited by bubonic plague. Lots of people died. And the public health authorities have the wit to understand that there seems to be a spiking of the death rate if people gather together in large numbers.

That said, they didn't try to stop people from going to church, because they thought God couldn't possibly punish people for going to church. So that wouldn't increase the death rates. But they didn't like the theater to begin with. So if the death rates reach a certain number, they stop them. But they tried to stop the public theater altogether, to get rid of it, but there were certain areas of the city that were out of their control, a small number of areas within the city, and then a large number of areas around the city, but entertainment district, and especially on the south side of the Thames. That's a disadvantage from the point of view of the theater companies because people have to get across the river. They have to take off and work a little bit earlier. They have to pay a boatman to get them across, or they have to walk over to London Bridge and get across. But nonetheless, then they're not controlled by the civic authorities, and they can do what more or less what they want.

Johnathan Bi: Right. What I want to emphasize is when we think about theater today, it's high art, it's high culture. But at that time, especially the entertainment district, the theater was right next to brothels, it was right next to animal baiting, where it's like a gladiatorial arena. And I think this quote that I'm going to read right now from a visitor to London is going to be incredibly revealing just to what type of institution was the theater at the time. So he's describing his visiting of London.

About 100 large English dogs were made to fight singly with three bears, the second bear being larger than the first, and a third larger than the second. After this, a horse was brought in and chased by the dogs, and at last, a bull who defended himself bravely. The next was that a number of men and women came forward from a separate compartment, dancing, conversing, and fighting with each other. Also, a man who threw some white bread among the crowd that scrambled for it. Right over the middle of the place, a rose was fixed. This rose being set on fire by a rocket. Suddenly, lots of apples and pears fell out of it, down upon the people standing below. After this rockets and other fireworks came flying out of all corners. And that was the end of the play.

(Stephen Greenblatt, Will in the World)

They called this a play! So this was the type of institution, to give people an idea, that the theater was in the time.