Thursday Seminar: Shakespeare and the Shape of Life

Speaker: Stephen Greenblatt (I Tatti / Harvard University)

The subject of this seminar is extreme old age, a state that does not seem to have been part of the original plan of human existence as depicted in Genesis.  It will range from the Bible’s Adam and Eve story and the apocryphal Vita Adae et Evae to contemporary evolutionary biology.  The central focus will be on King Lear, where Shakespeare focuses his astonishing powers of attention on the aspect of senescence that is least relevant to the biological processes of life history: that is, to the consciousness of an aging figure fitfully aware that his mental as well as physical powers are waning and anxious about the support he will receive from his offspring as they are entering their own reproductive lives.  This consciousness has no claim on the attention either of the Biblical narrator of the evolutionary biologist; it is, like the non-reproductive bodies of the very old, a kind of meaningless leftover.   But for Shakespeare – and for literature – the leftover is the thing itself.

Stephen Greenblatt is Cogan University Professor of the Humanities at Harvard University.  He is the author of fifteen books, including Dark Renaissance: The Dangerous Times and Fatal Genius of Shakespeare’s Greatest Rival; Tyrant: Shakespeare on Politics; The Rise and Fall of Adam and Eve; The Swerve: How the World Became Modern (winner of the 2011 National Book Award and the 2012 Pulitzer Prize) and Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare.  He is General Editor of The Norton Anthology of English Literature and of The Norton Shakespeare, has edited seven collections of criticism, and is a founding coeditor of the journal Representations.  He was named the 2016 Holberg Prize Laureate.  His honors include the MLA’s James Russell Lowell Prize, the William Shakespeare Award for Classical Theatre, two Guggenheim Fellowships, and the Distinguished Humanist Award from the Mellon Foundation.  He served as president of the Modern Language Association of America and has been elected to membership in the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the American Philosophical Society, the Italian Accademia dell’ Arcadia, and the British Academy.

Image: Duomo di Siena. Seven Ages of Man (Leopoldo Maccari [1865] based on Antonio Federighi [1475])

Add event to calendar