Shakespeare, the inventive conservative
A new book by Stephen Greenblatt, the Shakespeare scholar who wrote the celebrated 2004 biography “Will in the World,” probes topics that the Bard pushed to their limits: beauty and the cult of perfection, murderous hatred, the exercise of power, and artistic autonomy. Greenblatt observes in “Shakespeare’s Freedom” that the playwright’s linguistic inventions are a testament to his remarkable aesthetic autonomy. Indeed, Greenblatt notes, “Hamlet” alone contains 19 new words and 372 words already in circulation that had never been used in precisely that way. Yet, at the same time, Shakespeare seems to wrestle with the question of whether the artist — or anyone else — can truly be autonomous. “There are boundaries,” said Greenblatt, the John Cogan University Professor of the Humanities. “Now, Shakespeare may have encountered those boundaries much less than ordinary mortals, but there are things you want to say and things you can’t.” Greenblatt acknowledges that while the book...