Бард і його світ. Як Шекспір став Шекспіром

Stephen Greenblatt, a Harvard University professor, specialist in Renaissance English literature, Pulitzer Prize winner, and a highly talented storyteller, draws connections between the playwright's life and his works. Furthermore, Greenblatt places this interplay of life and vivid creative imagination within the context of the era's changing fortunes — thus, the comedy The Merchant of Venice becomes linked to the execution of Queen Elizabeth's personal physician, while in the tragedy Hamlet, one can observe how ideas about the afterlife shifted during the transition from Catholicism to Anglicanism.

Steven Greenblatt subtly depicts Shakespeare's world and Shakespeare himself as a talented young man from a provincial town who, in a society where social mobility was not yet established, achieved fame and a career beyond his birthplace, all thanks to his talent and mastery of language. Amid revolutionary social change, theater, rather than religion, becomes the key framework that justifies power, life, and death for Shakespeare.

“And the fact that most of us, today's viewers and readers, live in a world of broken rituals under empty skies, trying to find meaning from inherited fragments, makes Shakespeare very relevant," says Iaroslava Strikha, translator of Greenblatt's book.