Shakespeare -Stephen Greenblatt interview with Charlie Rose

http://www.charlierose.com/view/content/1155

VIDEO INTERVIEW  ON SHAKESPEARE'S LIFE and WORK

HARVARD PROFESSOR STEPHEN GREENBLATT  



    
Leading Shakespearean scholar.

BACKGROUND FROM WIKIPEDIA
Literary Theory - NEW HISTORICISM

 Greenblatt first used the term “new historicism” in his 1982 introduction to The Power of Forms in the English Renaissance wherein he uses Queen Elizabeth's “bitter reaction to the revival of Shakespeare’s Richard II on the eve of the Essex rebellion" to illustrate the “mutual permeability of the literary and the historical”.^[3] New historicism is regarded by many to have had an impact on "every traditional period of English literary history”.^[4] Some critics have charged that it is “antithetical to literary and aesthetic value, that it reduces the historical to the literary or the literary to the historical, that it denies human agency and creativity, that it is somehow out to subvert the politics of cultural and critical theory [and] that it is anti-theoretical”.^[3] Others praise new historicism as “a collection of practices” employed by critics to gain a more comprehensive understanding of literature by considering it in historical context while treating history itself as “historically contingent on the present in which [it is] constructed”.^[3]