by Will Feinstein

Stephen Greenblatt ’60, author of “Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare” and an English professor at Harvard said great teaching at the high school level is crucial.

Greenblatt spoke Tuesday about understanding Shakespeare and his work in the little theatre and at the English department meeting.

Three aspects of his high school years were the most important educational experiences of his own life, he said.

The first was a “set of remarkable teachers who employed tedious but effective methods to teach students how to write,” he said.

“Writing is hugely important in life no matter what you do,” he said.

Greenblatt praised an “unbelievably good English teacher,” the late John Harris, “who cared passionately about Shakespeare.”

Now, he said, it’s “hard to teach anything to students that I don’t find interesting myself.”

Also, Greenblatt said, he participated in theatre performances while he was a student here.

“Throwing myself into the trials, tribulations, glories and pains was extremely important in my life,” he said. “It played a significant part in deciding what to do when I grew up.”

In looking at Shakespeare’s work, people look for correlations with his life, Greenblatt said.

“Shakespeare’s life is a special case because we know so little about it,” Greenblatt said.

Still, even if people knew everything about Shakespeare, seeing how his life relates to his literature would be a problem, he said.

“We would never be able to explain how ‘King Lear’ or ‘Hamlet’ came out of his life,” Greenblatt said.
“With authors like Sylvia Plath and James Joyce, we have their psychiatric records and we still can’t draw the connections.”

Greenblatt also addressed the question of whether Shakespeare’s works are collaborations. Several of his early works and later works were co-written, he said.

“There is overwhelming evidence that the core of Shakespeare’s work is by a single writer,” he said.

“We know that in his lifetime, he was quite famous.

“If there’s a conspiracy, then it would be the biggest conspiracy of all time.”

Another question is whether it is possible that Shakespeare’s life did not influence his work.

“You don’t have to experience anything to write about it,” Greenblatt said. “But, as King Lear said, ‘Nothing comes from nothing.’”

What about Hamlet’s “To be or not to be” speech?

Greenblatt said that Shakespeare did not mind having his work changed.

“The text from ‘Hamlet’ even changed from the original script, which had ‘To be or not to be, aye that’s the point,’” he said.

“He had no stake in doing things exactly the way he wrote it. He was comfortable with people messing around with it.”

Therefore, he said, Shakespeare would have enjoyed adaptations like Baz Luhrmann’s 1996 film “Romeo+Juliet,” which transposed the story into a modern gang-warfare setting.

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