In LEARNING TO CURSE, Stephen Greenblatt presents a collection of his essays on the works of Shakespeare, Spencer and other authors of the 16th century. The book takes it's title from his first essay, an examination of "The Tempest" by Shakespeare.

Greenblatt asks if one can understand a work of art without reference to the artist, his audience, and the social context of period within which the artist worked. He also asks if different audiences in different periods have had similar reactions to the work or even if different people in the same audience in the same period have had the the same reaction. Does a work of art have an intrinsic value that transcends the individual experience over time?

On the other hand, Greenblatt says that while the historical context within which the work of art was created is important, it is critical the scholar realize history is not fixed. Using ideas gleaned from the "new historicism" as well as ethnographic and sociological notions, Greenblatt provokes the reader to rethink the idea of 'historical context'.

He says his critical approach has been concerned with recovering "as far as possible the historical circumstances" of aesthetic production without viewing history "as a stable prefabricated background against which literary texts can be placed." Instead, he sees the historical context as a "dense network of evolving and often contradictory social forces."

The essays in this little volume investigate and interpret a series of literary works by authors from Shakespeare to Martin Luther and Thomas Moore. Greenblatt has included a interesting essay on the case of Martin Guerre in 14th Century France in which he explores the ideas of crime and capital punishment in association with the theft of personal identity in the Middle Ages.

Writing today a book that still has something to say about Shakespeare is hard on our days. This is the reason why one can consider this book outstanding. Nonetheless, I have read many recent books about Shakespeare and I consider that behind the interesting concept of social energy lies an excessively skeptic version of Shakespeare. I can agree that Shakespeare's preeminence in the canon is largely due to the circulation of social energy, but I think that many of the richness of Shakespeare is too reduced to this factor. The book is an excellent reading for anybody interested in Shakespeare but requires some balancing. My recommendations would be the heterodox book by Rene Girard and the passionate and excessive approach of Bloom. This triad gives an excellent approach to contemporary theses on Shakespeare with complete counterarguments that neutralize the radical points of view of the three authors.

Although Greenblatt as received a good deal attention for his interest in critical practice and for his coining of the terms "New Historicisim" and "cultural poetics," his real strengths ahev also ben doing close readings of literary and historical texts. In Shakespearean Negotiations, Greenblatt offers typically brilliant and engaging readings of some of Shakespeare's major plays. His book is of interest to a wide audience beyond an academic one. The man is an exceptionally gifted writer and storyteller. It's a pity that so few other literary and cultural critics even come close to matching him. Perhaps only Stephen Orgel and Stanley Fish have equally brilliant prose styles and analytical powers.

Published over a decade ago, this book has become not only a classic in Shakespearean study but also the exemplary of the "new historicism." Even nowadays it does not lose its refleshing power, and never fails to stimulate controversies (e.g. the issue of subversion and containment) that still continues well into the new millenium. Greenblatt has been criticized for homogenizing the history and sacrificing the complexity of the text (for an alternative model of new historicism, one can refer to Louis Montrose's articles and his book "The Purpose of Playing: Shakespeare and the Cultural Politics of Elizabethan Theatre"), but still he has successfully made a strong case for his major argument, namely that Shakespeare, far from a single-handed isolated individual genius coming from nowhere, heavily drew upon the cultural resources and "social energy" circulating among various domains beyond the boundaries of theatre and literature. Greenblatt is very deft in reconstructing the historical and ideological context that enriches the Shakespearen play. Time and again readers feel that the historical anecdote Greenblatt talks about even eclipses the play itself with its magic power of invoking wonder, which might make even those sympathetic readers like Frank Kermode complain that the part on Shakespeare in this book is less interesting than the part on history. But isn't this refocusing of interest not exactly part of demystifying the notion of genius and his sacred writing in order to appreciate Shakespeare more as a negotiator in the marketplace who purchases and exchanges symbolically? The last chapter on "Tempest" is especially highly recommended for its skillful intermingling of the issues of ruling strategy by means of inciting anxiety, colonial (counter)history, the space of theatre and finally the institutionalisation of literature.

This early example of Stephen Greenblatt's literary reading practice agrees with his theory is general. Often labeled an adherent of the new historicism (a literary theory that ascribes the authorship of books to communities and communities to books), Greenblatt shirks that title here in favor of his own phrase "cultural poetics." He explores Renaissance works, from obscure spiritual pamphlets to Shakespeare's "Othello," showing how each text is not authored by a single, coherent authorial consciousness, but is rather the product of complexly intertwined social forces, almost like an insect caught in a spider's web.

Greenblatt boldly asserts that there is no individual genius behind Shakespeare's plays, an example of the end toward which his brand of reading techniuqes are directed. Early on, he claims that his technique is not a "theory" per se, but a reading "practice," a set of approaches to literature. This claim is not fully convinving, though, and while his assessment of how people create books and books create people is thoughtful, it is hard to accept his claim that his position is free from the totalizing assumptions of every other theory.

OK. So maybe I'm biased. I took a course from Greenblatt when an undergard at U.C. Berekely, and he then directed my dissertation when I took my Ph.D. From U.C. Berkeley as well. But I am not alone in regarding this book as a masterpiece, exteremely well-written adn insightful. This book transformed not only the study of the Renaissance but of English literature in general. Moreover, it has influenced historians such as Natalie Daivis and anthropologists. After 17 years, Renaissance Self-Fashioning totally stands up. The chapters on Wyatt, Tyndale, More (truly stellar), Spenser, and Shakespeare remained unsurpassed. Readers may quibble, but though whose do have never written and will never write a book anywhere remotely near the excellence of Greeblatt's. It is truly inspired and deservedly influential.

I admire this book greatly and give it 5 stars for the way it made me reread important renaissance writings. Greenblatt's stories are engaging and his writing all things considered is good for an academic. But New Historicism suffers from the disabilities of all of the new "isms"--it dispenses with evidence or rather decides what counts as evidence. Rather like the man who went to a psyciatrist claiming he was dead. "Do dead men bleed?" asked the psychiatrist "Of course not" said the patient wherupon the Psychiatrist poked him with a needle and drew blood. "What do you know" said the patient "Dead men DO bleed!" Karl Popper argued that if an argument cannot in principle be proved wrong it is not an argument. This is Greenblatt's problem

This book was written by the president of the MLA (this used to stand for Modern Literature Association but is now the acronym for the Marxist Literature Association). As such, Greenblatt is like one of the Jews in the concentration camps who were used to gas other Jews, and for this service, were allowed to prolong their own existence. Greenblatt, like the entire MLA, is devoted to destroying western culture. The family is destroyed in favor of gay couples, the idea of liberalism is destroyed by Marxism, the notion of the individual is replaced by the notion of race, gender, and class.

That Greenblatt should happily respond to his duties to dig a grave for western culture before his own people are shot and made to lie in it is no surprise. What's surprising is his alacrity, and his absolute lack of suspicion! He loves what he is doing, and this comes through in clear, smart prose, and book after book after book.

In his own way, Greenblatt is as much of a traitor to his own people as Stephen Walker Lindt.

Greenblatt argues throughout this text that western culture has destroyed every culture it has come in contact with. However, the truth is that every culture that has come into contact with the west has benefitted from hospitals and real health care rather than mumbo jumbo, a real sense of democracy, rather than the divine right of sorcerer-kings, the idea of journalism, and rights for women. Western imperialism destroyed rotten cultures all over the world. But if they weren't rotten to begin with, they would have survived. When the sunlight of the west, and Christianity, touched these infected dismal worlds, they vanished, the way that demons vanish before an exorcism.

Greenblatt is implicitly arguing that just any culture is on an equal footing with the west. If this is so, then why is the misery index of all these other countries so high? Why is it that people are dying to get out of cesspools of corruption such as Haiti and Cuba and Mexico and Nigeria?

If it was up to the Marxist Literature Association, we would all be living in Greenblatt's imagination. This has been tried before in the Soviet Union, in Cuba, in Mao's China. GReenblatt's sense of history fails to understand that there is a real world that will never correspond to human dreams of utopia.

The utter inanity of Greenblatt and the Marxist literature Association is equal to its parallel in the Soviet Union under Zhdanov. Any kind of national socialism leads to hooliganism of thought and action. We must stop thinking about race, gender, and class, and start thinking about individuals again. We must stop thinking about perfection, and deal with the gritty reality of a world in which evil is an active force that is not limited to one race, gender, or class. Greenblatt can't be expected to change: he's too well-paid. But his way of thinking is pernicious, foolish, and has a bad track-record.

Stephen Greenblatt, literary critic, research scholar, and professor at Berkeley shines the spotlight on various historical documents, and speculates that what accounted for the appropriation and colonization of the New World was the fact that Europeans had print literacy. The ethos projected by Greenblatt is a likeable one--a scholar who likes blues bars in Chicago and who was captivated by stories as a child. He weaves his own literacy narrative into his analysis of historical writings produced by the likes of Columbus, Jean de Lery, and others who were at the forefront of colonization. Ultimately, Greenblatt makes the point that the ways in which "wonder" and the "marvelous" circulated in European discourse become the strategies for colonizing practice. To tell his version of the ways in which peoples were conquered, Greenblatt uses the writing that tells of events, focusing especially on anecdote, feeling as he does that anecdote, though sometimes not valued in our fact-laden world, does the lion's share of the work, functions somewhere between what occurred and the formalized history that gets told. The book is a strong argument that "wonder" and more especially, written "wonder" functioned to elevate certain peoples and demonize others. It makes the equally strong point that writing, though in some cases works to the detriment of peoples and cultures, can also be the liberating force as well.

Texts that would work well in conversation with Greenblatt's would be Mary Louise Pratt's Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation. Also useful would be Walker Percy's essay, "The Loss of the Creature," and Clifford Geertz's essay on Balinese cock-fighting.

This book contains four very good essays -- one on the works of Evelyn Waugh, one on George Orwell, one on Aldous Huxley and a final one on the common threads running through the works of all three authors. The essay on Evelyn Waugh's works is particularly good. It points out alot of symbolism and motifs which I had missed (but which now seem obvious). This essay focuses primarily upon Waugh's use of architecture as a symbol of social values. However, it only covers Waugh's first four novels (Decline & Fall, Vile Bodies, Black Mischief and Handful of Dust). Similarly, the essay on Huxley only discusses his first two novels(Crome Yellow and Antic Hay) and Brave New World. Both authors continued to write brilliant satire throughout their lives (Huxley's After Many a Summer Dies the Swan comes to mind as an example). I wish the Greenblatt had expanded his study to include a representative cross-section of Waugh's and Huxley's works.