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“... embraced in non-Christian examples: illusion is the domain of spirits. Among Christians (as Stephen Greenblatt has observed) these qualities are more problematic. Mimetic art – especially theatre – has troubled many Western thinkers, Christian or otherwise. Christianity is founded on a series of truth claims – the gospel, the saving act, the ...”

“... from which oracular ruling a hardening tradition has developed. A number of recent commentators, Stephen Greenblatt among them, state that the play was ‘almost certainly’ Shakespeare’s. Others are more confident still. Shakespeare’s recent biographers Park Honan and Katherine Duncan-Jones take it for granted that the play was his. Andrew ...”

“... views is also misleading. In a powerful and ingenious essay entitled ‘Invisible Bullets’, Stephen Greenblatt shows that even an idea as apparently subversive as the ‘atheism’ of the Renaissance – the Machiavellian notion that religion was an instrument of political domination – could serve the English state overseas. Thomas Harriot, a ...”

“... was a class traitor Shakespeare hated the mob Donne sold out a bit later Sidney was a nob. Stephen Greenblatt, living proof that one may share Eagleton’s scepticism towards the institutions of established power but still relish the nuances of literary texts as Bayley does, would doubtless see the election as yet another example of how authority ...”

“... culture’s relations with power. McGann’s manner has none of the sprezzatura of California’s Stephen Greenblatt, based on an entertaining gift for anecdote and ‘off-the-wall’ parallels from other places and times. Where the Californian school endow lectures with the multimedia pleasures of an evening with Tom Lehrer or Jools Holland, McGann’s ...”

“... Protestant family with whom Shakespeare lodged near the Barbican in 1604, and their apprentice, Stephen Belott (who subsequently obliged Shakespeare to testify in a lawsuit over the non-payment of £60 supposedly promised to him as a dowry). Beyond this at once rigorous and imaginative way with the evidence, what Honan’s book principally adds to ...”

“... let alone even the most influential works of criticism. As the founding father of New Historicism, Stephen Greenblatt made his professional reputation with Renaissance Self-Fashioning (1980); but it was Will in the World (2004), his biographical account of ‘How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare’ that won him a huge advance. The established facts of ...”

“... between literature and political change, informed by a continuing irritation that the likes of Stephen Greenblatt should ever have argued that all the apparent manifestations of subversion in Renaissance culture in the end promoted only the interests of an invincible hegemony. Perry wants his book to make the case that the hostile portrayals of ...”

“... conflict. Shakespeare’s omission of these geopolitical contexts are perhaps an example of what Stephen Greenblatt has called his ‘strategic opacity’ – a gap into which we are encouraged to place our own interpretations. But there is more to say about the significance of ignored sources. Editors and critics have tended to think about ...”

“... force or professional local government, could not have been ruled both gently and effectively. Stephen Greenblatt, who, in Renaissance Self-Fashioning, writes so memorably on More and Wyatt, impairs his case by too easily calling Henry VIII a Stalin, for the ambitions and resources of 20th-century tyranny were beyond the imagination of Tudor ...”

“... he has become a central subject in New Historicist approaches to Elizabethan studies, notably in Stephen Greenblatt’s Sir Walter Ralegh: The Renaissance Man and His Roles, the most stimulating modern study of Ralegh. This collection of letters was assembled by the late Agnes Latham, who edited Ralegh’s poems in 1951. It was originally intended as a ...”

“... modern historians. Clifford Geertz’s treatment of the Balinese cockfight as a novel or a play, Stephen Greenblatt’s ‘self-fashioning’ or Foucault’s notion of the Greek Self as a ‘stylisation of freedom’, produced out of an ‘aesthetics of existence’. When Simon Schama, in the overture to The Embarrassment of Riches, finds himself rather ...”