English 135 - Shakespeare

Adam Gopnik, in the September 13^th issue of the New Yorker, reviewed Stephen Greenblatt's new biography of Shakespeare, Will in the World (Norton; $26.95). I'd recommend the whole Greenblatt book, actually, but reading the Gopnik piece will give you an excellent window into Greenblatt's argument and will, itself, lead you to an appreciation of Shakespeare that is entirely consistent with the tenor of our conversations in the class. Here, for instance, is an excerpt from the review:

Greenblatt ends his book with an evocation of the ordinariness of Shakespeare, now seen as a willed ordinariness, a determination not to be wild like the cavaliers or snobbish like the wits, but to see the world as it is. This ordinariness, which runs through all the portraits, is what makes him unique among reigning poets. To have Dante as your reigning poet is a noble but not exactly a daily sort of thing, while Racine and Molière, splitting the honors between them, help give French literary culture its neatly bifurcated shape. Shakespeare's normalcy is not philistine or easy—in his plays, people lose hands, eyes, wives, minds, lives—and it entails a conservative obeisance to the common order: he believes in kings, bosses, authority. But he does not believe too much in those things, and in this lies the beginning of sanity.