Stephen Greenblatt

Stephen Greenblatt (Ph.D. Yale) is Cogan University Professor of English and American Literature and Language at Harvard University.

Also, General Editor of The Norton Anthology of English Literature, Eighth Edition, he is the author of nine books, including Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare; Hamlet in Purgatory; Practicing New Historicism; Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World; Learning to Curse: Essays in Early Modern Culture; and The Swerve: How the World Became Modern. He has edited six collections of criticism, is the co-author (with Charles Mee) of a play, Cardenio, and is a founding coeditor of the journal Representations.

His honors include the MLA’s James Russell Lowell Prize, for Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England, the Distinguished Humanist Award from the Mellon Foundation, the Distinguished Teaching Award from the University of California, Berkeley. He is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society. He lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and in Vermont.

Books in order of publication:

Three modern satirists: Waugh, Orwell, and Huxley. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press. – 1965

Sir Walter Raleigh: The Renaissance Man and His Roles. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press. – 1973

Shakespearean negotiations: the circulation of social energy in Renaissance England – 1988

Marvelous possessions: the wonder of the New World – 1991

Hamlet in Purgatory. Princeton: Princeton University Press. – 2002

Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare. New York: W. W. Norton. – 2004

Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. – 2005

The Greenblatt Reader. Hoboken: Wiley-Blackwell. – 2005

Learning to Curse: Essays in Early Modern Culture. London: Harvard University Press. – 2007

Shakespeare’s Freedom. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. – 2010

The Swerve: How the World Became Modern – 2011

The Rise and Fall of Adam and Eve – 2017

Tyrant: Shakespeare on Politics. New York: W. W. Norton. – 2018

Dark Renaissance: The Dangerous Times and Fatal Genius of Shakespeare’s Greatest Rival. New York: W. W. Norton. – 2025