On 4th February, the final of three Holberg Prize events in India with Laureate Stephen Greenblatt will take place.
This public lecture is co-organised with Ashoka University. At the event, Holberg Prize Chair Jørgen Sejersted will offer welcoming remarks, before Professor Jonathan Gil Harris introduces Holberg Laureate Stephen Greenblatt, who will give a public lecture entitled “The Master’s Books”.
Abstract
At the time of his murder, at the age of 29, Christopher Marlowe was the greatest writer of Elizabethan England. In a country that had recently built the first free-standing theaters since the Roman Empire, he had written, among other plays, the spectacularly successful Tamburlaine, The Jew of Malta, Edward II, and Doctor Faustus. (His exact contemporary William Shakespeare at that point had co-authored Titus Andronicus and the three parts of Henry VI.). In a culture devoted to recovering the ancient classics, he was the first English translator of Ovid’s erotic poems, the Amores, poems deemed so scandalous that the authorities ordered all copies his translation to be burned. In a literary environment that generated splendid lyrics, he was the author of the lyric poem most widely celebrated by his contemporaries– “Come live with me and be my love” – a song whose words were ceaselessly memorized and imitated and parodied. And in an age of love poems, he was the author of the most wonderful love poem of them all, Hero and Leander. What sparked such an astonishing career? My lecture will propose a surprising answer.
Stephen Greenblatt
Stephen Greenblatt (photo: Marit Hommedal, NTB Scanpix / The Holberg Prize).
Stephen Greenblatt is an American literary historian and author, and the 2016 Holberg Laureate. He has served as the John Cogan University Professor of the Humanities at Harvard University since 2000. Greenblatt is the general editor of The Norton Shakespeare (2015) and the general editor and a contributor to The Norton Anthology of English Literature. He is one of the founders of new historicism, a set of critical practices that he often refers to as “cultural poetics”. His works have been influential since the early 1980s when he introduced the term. Greenblatt’s many books include Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare (2004), and The Swerve: How the World Became Modern (2011).