Shakespeare & Possibility, Part 3: The Tragedy of Hamlet and the Sistine Madonna

The ThinkND Podcast

Shakespeare and Possibility continues with the 13th Annual Notre Dame London Shakespeare lecture, delivered by Margreta de Grazia, Emerita Rosenberg Professor of the Humanities at the University of Pennsylvania. Her books on Shakespeare have drawn attention to the belatedness (and inadequacy) of concepts that have been key to the study of Shakespeare (and literature more generally). These range from the apparatus of the modern editorial tradition (Shakespeare Verbatim [Oxford, 1991]), to the psychologizing of Hamlet (Hamlet without Hamlet [Cambridge, 2007]), to the chronologizing, periodizing and secularizing of the Shakespeare canon (Four Shakespearean Period Pieces Chicago, 2021]). Her most recent book, Shakespeare without a Life (Oxford, 2023), focuses on our current preoccupation with Shakespeare’s biography, an interest not shared -- as her book argues – by the first two centuries of Shakespeare’s readers. She has also co-edited two Cambridge Companions to Shakespeare with Sir Stanley Wells, 2001 and 2010.

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