As part of my ongoing project to force the rest of the world to revere academics as the rockstars they are, I want to spend a little time shedding light on those individuals who only occasionally reach notoriety outside their own academic spheres. Greenblatt is an exception, having just won the Pulitzer for Swerve. Which, in my unsolicited opinion, is more a credit to the prize than to him.
Swerve, like Will in the World, is a masterful work of what my dear friend and gifted thinker M. Gaffney calls Pop-New-Historicism. Both indulge our desires to rummage around in our favorite versions of the past. Dirty laundry and lost libraries. I won't do either of them justice here, and so refer you to Gaffney's review on the former, which I find both illuminating and excellently crafted.
Greenblatt writes deliciously on Hamlet and whatever else he puts his mind to. When I find myself despairing of the academic condition (and thus my life), sighing balefully and photocopying the Franklin Dickinson, I pick up one of his essays and remember again why I do this. I write and read and dote, cite, compile and quote because I have to—we have to put ourselves into our pasts, our texts, to re-create them. And in that we create ourselves anew.
Three years ago nearly to the day, the person who infected me first with Shakespeare directed me to the OED etymology for the verb "to inspire":
Old French enspirer, inspirer (13th cent.), espirer (12th cent. in Littré), < Latin inspīrāre to blow or breathe into, < in- (in- prefix2) + spīrāre to breathe.
Or, as Greenblatt would say, "I believe that nothing comes of nothing, even in Shakespeare. I wanted to know where he got the matter he was working with and what he did with that matter".
No comments:
Post a Comment