Doing the Swerve with Stephen Greenblatt

Any scholar who writes a coherent sentence deserves a medal, and a scholar who can string together a few paragraphs deserves his own holiday. That's why Stephen Greenblatt's 70th birthday deserves our adoring attention. A professor at Yale and one of the founders of something called New Historicism, Greenblatt has a knack for taking long-dead authors and bringing their worlds to life through the curiosity and careful research one should expect of any proper professor.

His most recent book is probably his most endearing: The Swerve: How the World Became Modern. Greenblatt begins with a brief personal account of his own college days, when the ancient poet-philosopher Lucretius caught his eye from the bottom of a used-book sale bin. From there, he proceeds to a long discussion of the ancient philosopher's surprisingly modern thoughts and how their rediscovery changes our world to this day. An interesting book in its own right, I can't help but feel the love of an undergrad for a newfound world of thought.

Greenblatt's most famous work might be Will in the World: How Shakespeare became Shakespeare. A bestseller when it came out, it goes into excruciating detail to explain the myriad influences that seeped into Shakespeare's work. As well as a solid piece of literary criticism, the sheer detail of the book puts to shame any suggestion that Shakespeare's plays might've been written by anybody else.

But as far as I'm concerned, I owe Stephen Greenblatt and all the other editors of The Norton Shakespeare a debt of thanks, not only for giving me everything Shakespeare wrote, but also for including more explanations and footnotes than I could possibly bear to read.

As a final bonus, it introduced me to the finest stage direction in all of theater:

Happy Birthday, Stephen Greenblatt!