SoS #34 | Stephen Greenblatt: Shakespeare, Adam and Eve, and Lucretius

Thomas Dabbs speaks with Stephen Greenblatt of Harvard University about Greenblatt’s recent work on Shakespeare, the Bible, and Lucretius.

Transcript

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Thomas Dabbs  0:05  
This is speaking of Shakespeare conversations about things Shakespearean. I'm Thomas Dabbs, broadcasting from Aoyama Gakuin University in central Tokyo.  This talk is with Stephen Greenblatt, Cogan University Professor of Humanities, Harvard University. Stephen is the author of 14 books, three of which we will focus on in this talk, "Tyrant Shakespeare on Politics," "The Rise and Fall of Adam and Eve," and "The Swerve: How the World Became Modern." Among many, many honors, his more recent include the 2016 Holberg Prize from the Norwegian parliament, the 2012 Pulitzer Prize and the 2011 National Book Award, both for "The Swerve." The Modern Language Association has awarded him the James Russell Lowell prize twice. He has been elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the American Philosophical Society, the Italian literary Academy, and he is a fellow of the British Academy. This series is funded with institutional support from Aoyama Gakuin University, and also with a generous grant from the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science. 

Steven, we are absolutely delighted to have you join our program today and surely wish that things were such that we could have had you visit us in Japan in person.

Stephen Greenblatt  1:48  
That would have been a great pleasure I adore visiting Japan.

Thomas Dabbs  1:52  
Well, we still can't at this time, but maybe in the not so distant future. But I would like to start anyway, with your book "Tyrant." It still seems very, very new. This is in part perhaps because the pandemic has caused some kind of time warp in our minds and 2018 seems closer in time than a year or a year and a half ago. But I think really the reason is that this book, like your other books, largely because your other books seem new to us, largely because you tend to choose topics that are of enduring interest, and elemental through our lives and experiences. Now, following Shakespeare's own example, the book, "Tyrant" manages to resonate current things unnerving things about our times, without directly talking about them, by telling fictional stories set in distant times and places, in your case, Shakespeare and Shakespeare's case many other places, but you point to one small place in Shakespeare, where Shakespeare lets down his guard, with a fairly direct and poorly timed reference to Essex. You do not let down your guard, I cannot find a place in your book where you do. But we get a strong feeling that we were reading an allegory of such of sorts, particularly in key descriptive moments. Now let's start with maybe a working definition of a Shakespearean tyrant. And why you think Shakespeare was so drawn to depicting these types of characters and, and what makes them so interesting to us. 

Stephen Greenblatt  3:23  
I think Shakespeare thought that the tyrant was an authoritarian ruler. But that was no surprise because virtually all rulers in the age were authoritarians, but an authoritarian ruler who didn't have his realm, his people at the center of his interests, but had his his own desires, wishes his ego, his or her desire for grandeur and power independent of serving any larger Commonweal. So, the combination of authoritarianism and arbitrary rule was, I think, all he needed. I think, you didn't need the kind of complicated theoretical account, they there were some available to him of what a tyrant was, but he meant something more. The Greeks of course, had the term tyrant, but it really meant a kind of new ruler who didn't depend on the existing oligarchical order of things. And he has some of that sense, too. But it's a it's a more vicious vision that he has of a rule.

Thomas Dabbs  4:46  
Yeah, I expected when I purchased a book, I expected it to go straight into "Julius Caesar," and you save that to the end and now after finishing after I finished the book, I realized why because Caesar is the tyrant who wasn't, and you started with the tyrants who were. And thankfully, yours went straight into "Henry the Sixth" series, which many of us in Shakespeare study. So they those elements get a little bit rusty in our minds over the years if we don't teach it 

Stephen Greenblatt  5:17  
 Yes, for all of us. It it is a case of that, in the case of Caesar. Shakespeare was thinking, as you say, rightly, the tyrant who wasn't Shakespeare was thinking about various alternative ways of avoiding this disaster. One of which, of course, it comes to mind, it's always come to mind, one of which is to assassinate, kill, kill, the serpent in its shell, as Brutus says, kill the tyrant before he has the power to do the harm that he'll do. But Julius Caesar, and of course, one had dreams of that. I mean, like a dream about that in the case of Hitler, or Stalin, or lots of other miserable characters. But in the case of Julius Caesar, at least Shakespeare plays out the hypothesis. And it turns out to be a disaster. Right. It's an interesting thought experiment. Yeah, you had a James Shaprio on your, on your program. and he has written wonderfully about that production at the Delacorte theater in which in which this became very much a moment in the present.

Thomas Dabbs  6:38  
Yeah. And people who were disturbed by that particular--the production at the Delacorte, who did not think it through, right that the the people who carried out the assassination, things did not end well I think is the way he put it, they did not end well for those people. If you're going to assassinate a ruler, even a tyrant. They're, they're just well may be hell to pay. I enjoyed what I really enjoyed was your focus on Jack Cade, at the beginning, toward the beginning of the book, and I'll be honest with you, Stephen, I, I never was that interested in Cade and his rebellion and you sort of, yeah, I was awakened to this interesting character that you, you really probe into and give us some, you know, almost a classic operational model of how the high school bully rises to power, right, through deception and lies and his own bravado.

Stephen Greenblatt  7:46  
I mean, Shakespeare seems to have thought of, of him as a kind of catspaw for York. In other words, he, not only does he not, he does a lot of damage and harm, but he doesn't ultimately hold on to power. And he's in the fact he though is not clearly aware of it, but he's actually doing work for someone else in the background, someone much more powerful .

Thomas Dabbs  9:23  
Yeah, and there's a there's another rebellion later and I'm trying to remember a Reynolds I believe, is where they were, they were protesting and enclosures and things like that which would have been more of a instead of a the fury of kind of what I guess now we would call a right wing populist populism. I think the Reynolds rebellion was more of what we might consider a working class. What these guys are out filling up ditches and, and and doing things to resist and in fact, they are Not exactly on Shakespeare's side of the economic...

Stephen Greenblatt  10:05  
In the case of the crowd, who's stirred up by Cade, what Cade appeals to keep appeals to a set of things, including rage at not simply rage at literacy, though that is rage and literacy, that to say he, he attacks the creation of schools because people who talk about nouns and verbs, he says, I mean that, that that is our it's played for laughs but it's not very funny. It's not very funny to contemporary ears, that attack on education, the educational system, but but lurking somewhere behind that attack is the fact that as people who study the period, you will know and I know that being literate was a huge advantage in the legal system. Because if you weren't literate, and you committed a crime, a felony that was a capital offense, they presented you with a text from the Psalms. They call it the neck verse, if you could read it, you were remanded to the ecclesiastical courts, which didn't have the death penalty. If you couldn't read it. You're a dead man. You could see that that would make the illiterate rather angry. Yeah. Shakespeare is, in some deep sense, mocking hostile to the crowd around Cade, they're terrifying. They're horrible. It's a horrible phenomenon. But he's also even they're early in his career. He's alert to why why this is going on? Why a large number of people would follow someone so obviously, ridiculous. I'm going to you can have as much beer as you want. I mean, I'll pay for it and for all the rest of the crazy talk. Because they, they have to know them to lie. The end. In fact, they do know that's a lie. They make fun of him as he's talking. He says that, that, you know, whatever. He's the Plantagenet. They laugh about this, or he was a Lacy, he says, yeah, your mother made laces that day, and so forth. That's his followers who say that. So Shakespeare thought about this very strange phenomenon, which God help us we understand. How is it possible for people to know they're being lied to? And still support a populist leader? That's an extraordinary aspect of our lives. And yeah, I think Shakespeare thought deeply about it. Not just at the beginning of his career, but all through his career. I think he was a profound thinker about this strange phenomenon of believing something even though you know, you're being lied to. 

Thomas Dabbs  13:09  
Yeah, he was. I think, now, you're good on this, and I tried to do this: not to talk too much about intentionality. Like we do not know, these actual historical figures what their motivations were. Shakespeare, we were not sure what motivations are, but over and over again, in his plays, there is this sense since that. I don't want to call it a house of cards, but there's this sense that things can fall apart very quickly, if you stir up the masses, and the masses are easily stirred up. So it's in the Cade part is certainly in Julius Caesar. But it's in Hamlet with Laertes, you know, it seems absurd that Laertes could come back in and that the people would start screaming Laertes ,let him be king. But that does echo the Essex rebellion, although Essex would have been from a noble family and might have had some kind of claim to the throne. But this this was a possibility, along with being vulnerable as Denmark is in Hamlet to foreign invasion. Right. So I think that's very strong and Shakespearean. He does not come out very strongly or the plays down on the side of the masses.

Stephen Greenblatt  14:30  
I mean, it's complicated, it's rich and interesting issue, Tom, because Shakespeare was one of the great, maybe the greatest master in stirring up the masses. He had 3000 people in his theater in an afternoon. The very, very few occasions in Renaissance England in which that many people came together were allowed to come to you other outside of the cathedral, as it were, Shakespeare is fascinated by the power that he possesses and frightened by it, at the same time, or frightened, may be too strong, but he's fascinated by what he can do. And what people who are masters of his rhetorical skills can do. And he thought that there was a a link, a complicated link, one that disturbed him, I think, between his special skill and what he identifies in at least some of his figures like Antony, Richard, the Third, Cade, people who can stir up. I mean, as he's also fascinated by his relationship to, to characters like Iago, or Aaron, the Moor. These are in some very complicated way, self portraits, critical self portraits by a someone who also or in any case, who sees deeply into what he can do. And and there's something else, which is, what is what happens when you go to the theater? What is your contract, when you go to the theater? What when you've paid your penny, you've paid your penny to be entertained with fictions that, you know, are fictions, but you respond to as truths. And you experience them. You even experienced them viscerally. As truths. You get your heart beats fast. You you break out into a sweat, you shout and cheer you cry. And Shakespeare's fascinated by that, you know, that fiction? But let's do it that way. And again, he thinks about the relationship between that, and and the way in which his countrymen, perhaps he himself, are processing things that they know aren't true, but experiencing them as true. And willing to live and die for those things?

Thomas Dabbs  17:15  
Yeah. Yeah. Whether someone plucks a white rose off a branch or a red rose off the branch and, and and that not being a matter of whose team you pull for, which the same sort of thing happens very frequently in sports, where people will get on one side or the other. But where people will say, Okay, I'm on this side now, and I will die for it. Heavy price,

Stephen Greenblatt  17:39  
I don't know what I actually don't, I can't decide. And I don't know where you are in this is how far this goes in Shakespeare. That is to say, whether it goes all the way down to the very bottom as I believe, for example that it did for his contemporary Christopher Marlowe. Let's say I think that Marlowe, the Marlowe, who wrote Tamburlaine and the Jew of Malta had ceased to believe in anything. And thought that was fascinating that that he could manipulate people, for example, into applauding for this mass murderer. Tamburlaine kills his son, kills the virgins of Damascus, so forth. So I think Marlowe was fascinated that he could do it. And I think Shakespeare was fascinated that Marlowe could do it. I think what I think Shakespeare in 1587, probably came to London. And saw Tamburlaine and said, oh, my God, because you can see that Shakespeare's plays are haunted by Tamburlaine at the beginning of his career, and he keeps playing with and thinking about until he finally tries to exercise it in Pistol in Henry the Fifth. Jade's of Asia, but I mean, that's because he, the lines were in his head. So I think that they, I mean, the question is, Where did where did it stop for Shakespeare? Did it stop for Shakespeare? Are there things that he he holds on to and I do think there are things but I, I think unlike Marlowe and I think, but I think they're difficult to define ideologically.

Thomas Dabbs  19:35  
Yeah, they are. And you see in Marlowe, you know, with Tamburlaine. These types of people are supposed to have their comeuppance and I've seen it argued where Tamburlaine has his because we need the rise and fall. But no, he dies in the end. 

Stephen Greenblatt  19:53  
 Yes, everyone dies.

Thomas Dabbs  19:56  
 He's powerful all the way through, and Hamlet when you're down with in the city with those bones and those speculations about what, what the end is with that direct physical evidence. You go well, okay, well, that doesn't seem any talk of resurrection of a, you know, your body being put back together and getting your heavenly body and so forth. But in the next scene with Horatio, he does have that line about the fall of the sparrow, you know, that there, everything has meaning. And there does seem to be a kind of reconciliation with what we might vaguely consider a, a Christian view of, you know, how to face your own death. Or maybe it's just a nobleman's view.

Stephen Greenblatt  20:39  
I mean, it's not ruled out, it's dangled before us. Let's put it that way. I don't think it's very, I don't think it's underscored. I don't think that it is presented as a as a doctrinal belief at all. And I suspect that Shakespeare was actually rather skeptical about doctrinal beliefs in general, I think he thought that cruelty was, was disgusting, and evil. And I don't think I'm not sure Marlowe thought that I think Marlowe had actually say, a more Nietzschean attitude toward it. But I think Shakespeare had certain things that he, he thought, no, no. I do think that he, he thought that the that the evil characters would prey upon themselves like the monsters of the deep that in the long run. They  are,as Edgar says, in King Lear, when you get to the very bottom, there's a return to laughter. But you might have to wait a long time.

Thomas Dabbs  21:56  
Yeah. Well, I guess we have to cross reference the fact that Shakespeare hadn't done what would, if Shakespeare had died at the same age Marlowe died, there wouldn't be a lot for us to celebrate now, and so he had a chance to grow older. And Marlowe didn't. He still was pretty much an angry young man and angry genius, young man, phase and he knows how to get an audience into theater. He knows how to do the spectacle. And he gives you know, he pulls out all the stops, there's no doubt about it. And he he knows you can just I've never I've never read poetry like that in any other English poet, and many great ones. I've never read something so stirring. He just knew he had it. And

Stephen Greenblatt  22:43  
 AndI think Shakespeare knew he Marlowe had it as well. Yeah, that you can watch early Shakespeare acts of tracking and trying to figure out what he can do. What he can do with with tambling and he tries to do and does in many ways in well, I won't say Henry the Sixth because I think he probably collaborated with Marlowe on Henry the Sixth but he does it more and Richard you can get glimpses of it elsewhere. I think really Titus but what he can do with Jew of Malta he tries to do with Merchant of Venice what he could do with, what he does with Richard the Second you can watch him and maybe most impressively in a certain way what Marlowe fabulously does in Hero and  Leander. You can see Shakespeare experimenting and Venus and Adonis. So anywhere that you can, stops. And then by by the middle of the career, you feel that the haunting he gets Shakespeare I think gets more interested in his own early career and replace certain things the way he'd be placed a fellow in Winter's Tale. But I think, but it's no longer Marlowe, who's the who's the figure sitting on his shoulders.

Thomas Dabbs  23:59  
Right. Right. And I do I agree with you. I particularly see it and John of Gaunt speech was the beginning of Richard Richard the Second, where he's talking about how he will not you know, he's going to die while his son's in exile. And I wish I could remember the lines but is just stirring, and it goes dark. In a way that Marlo,we Marlowe. Yeah, at one point it becomes a bit funny. You can have these virgins killed and hoisted onto the walls and then he turns around and delivers his wife a sonnet about how beautiful she is. And then it admonishes himself for becoming too effeminate, you know,

Stephen Greenblatt  24:39  
 It's hard to say. Are you are you supposed to? I mean, a little bit to our to our ears. It's like hearing Hitler talk about how moving Eva Braun's smile is to him. I mean, he's killed a whole bunch of people in town. But it's hard to know what they thought hard to know what what Marvel thought he was up to. It's hard to know what the audience in 1587 except that they thought that Edward Allen the actor was the best thing they've ever seen. And that the verse is you said the verse was just overwhelming. I mean, like, for them, like hearing Beethoven, like hearing something just fabulously strong.

Thomas Dabbs  25:24  
Well, I'll give you an example. I have graduate students who are Japanese, they're in a second language. So this is super tough stuff for them. But we were watching it at one of those old BBC versions of Edward the Second. And my students were getting it, we had subtitles, but that prose, it isn't as knotty as Shakespeare, Shakespeare can lose, you will lose me in a moment. Because he does get a bit. I don't know if the words Baroque. But you know, he's knottyness and he'll string two Proverbs together, known proverbs and work it out over about what, six, eight lines, and you have to keep the first thought in your mind as you go through. Whereas Marlowe doesn't tend to do that it's pretty much straight on. Well, we, we've moved away a little bit from tyrants, and I like this, but we haven't because I noticed in tyrants that you there's a kind of return to Shakespeare. And, and I know you've been doing editing and Shakespeare, you had those involvements all the way through, but in terms of direct Stephen Greenblatt reading Shakespeare, it there's a kind of return there. And I think it was provoked by certain changes in our political climate in the States, and also globally, and certainly in Europe, and, and in various countries across the world where we were we were, we were unnerved, we were shaken a bit.

Stephen Greenblatt  26:52  
It's hard. If you're someone like me, I won't speak for you or your students. But if you spent your life as I have, inside, with your head inside these plays, then actually the world you begin to look at the world through them. So that that when I see this was well, after I wrote, "Tyrant," but when I see a certain leader sitting at a polished, white table, alone, 3030 feet 10 meters away from the person he's talking to, I think, what, and I think I get it, I get it through Shakespeare. I I understand what that when I see that same figure talking to his intelligence chief, and bullying him in a kind of shocking way. I, I say that, that scripted it straight out of Richard the Third? And so forth. I mean, it's hard not to think that way. If you are me. We're, we've spent as many years as I have doing this, I don't think it covers the whole ground. I mean, no one does. But I do think it covers a lot of the ground.

Thomas Dabbs  28:07  
Well, I have to say, this point I learned from you two things from you, years ago. And the first thing was, I can do what I want to do. There was a daring there that, you know, in my generation coming from the American South, we were still treating literature in a Cleanth Brooks sort of way. And I have an enormous amount of respect for Cleanth Brooks

Stephen Greenblatt  28:32  
 He was one of my teachers. 

Thomas Dabbs  28:33  
Yeah, I was wondering, I was cross referencing and

Stephen Greenblatt  28:36  
 He and Robert Penn Warren, both.

Thomas Dabbs  28:38  
What, what a stirring, I mean, and they, you know, they were people who said that they were New Critics say that they don't want to face up to the history of their own past and that sort of thing. But they were very historical also. But they were extraordinary people. I got to meet Cleanth Brooks once and he was just such a gentleman. And, and just a wonderful guy, but we were taught in that kind of new critical way. And we were discouraged unless we wanted to go into bibliography which that was only for people who couldn't, couldn't do criticism, right? You know, you have to go to the scholarly right route. And then you come along here and you're saying, Okay, no, we can do this. We can attach things, to, to historical events, and we in a way must, it is incumbent to do this sort of thing, to, for us to be able to understand the dramatic tensions that we're seeing here. If there's if there's a ghost in Purgatory, there's a whole bunch of people out there who are being told there is no Purgatory and that ratchets the whole thing up and people who believe in purgatory or maybe under suspicion

Stephen Greenblatt  29:54  
 You're right that I mean, I won't claim much for myself but but I do claim for my particular moment, my generation I was absolutely saturated with wonderfully saturated with new critic new criticism at Yale in the early 1960s That my teachers were Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren Maynard Mack. Yeah, these were the Giants before the flood of new criticism. And then I went to England as a Fulbright. And I was completely, the French would say knocked over by someone named Raymond Williams, my tutor for a while and I went to lectures by him and they, they had a relationship to how shall we say reality as I was thinking of it in the mid 1960s, with the war in Vietnam, beginning to heat up and the the kind of generational insurrection taking place in which I was part I just thought, I can't simply stay inside the text any longer this way. You know, when I went back to Yale for graduate school, I had read, Sir Walter Raleigh, in when I was in England, Raleigh's poetry. It was a very small body of poetry, but quite interesting. And I was amazed by it, and partly because it to me, it sounded like T. S. Eliot. And I thought, How is this possible that he was writing this way? And given his life, a monopolist conspirator, an explorer, a colonial, historian, a skeptic, a crazy set of things. And so I went, when I was when I wanted to do my dissertation, I went to actually remarkably wonderful, brilliant man, Jeffrey Hartman. And I asked him, if he would be my, my tutor, my advisor, dissertation advisor, and I described what I wanted to do, which was to talk about how someone with that kind of life could have written these poems. And he looked at me, like I had, I won't say it, I mean, like, I had done something very offensive. And he said, If you want to do that kind of dissertation, you have to do some textual scholarship, you should. So exactly as you say, Tom, and I understood that I was being he was suggesting that I moved to the hydroelectric plant. And I wasn't, I wasn't fooled by this suggestion, I understood what he meant. And so I said, thank you very much. And I found somebody else to direct my dissertation. I mean, so because I couldn't, I couldn't stay inside the box anymore. Even though the box was wonderful, I loved it. I'm so glad that I was trained that way.

Thomas Dabbs  32:57  
They trained you how to read. And they were exactly right on close reading. It's just that it doesn't have to be within the parameters of this play. And the more we learn about these plays, of course, three, three, early versions of Hamlet and so forth. Well, where are we? When are we inside or outside the play, and it's always leaking. And if you're reading, what, Faustus you have to know something about the, the Holy Roman Empire, and what was going on there with the slapstick comedy in the middle of that play in the image of I think, Frederick Barbarossa, the kind of inversion of an of an image there.

Stephen Greenblatt  33:42  
 But for me, Tom, all everything to say it's absolutely true. And I believed it. I still believe it passionately. But I also wanted to be in touch with the here and now with who I am, right now in this place with what's going on around me. So that, that what, to me is fascinating. I mean, what what has been fascinating, for now decades, is somehow having in play both the historical past, the past and in 1603, or the past, and that's being referred to back from 1403 in the in the 1603 play, but also to have right now, and not to pretend that I'm living in some kind of weird, abstract place in which that doesn't count. If I'm anxious about what's happening in Ukraine, I can't block it out. When I'm reading Troilus and Cressida And pretend that it's,

Thomas Dabbs  34:47  
yeah. That play

Stephen Greenblatt  34:49  
 Figure out how to how to use my anxieties, my fears, my desires, how to use those in understanding, say, Troilus and Cressida, but also how to use drugs and Cressida to understand what's happening now. I don't write about drugs, you know, but as an example.

Thomas Dabbs  35:12  
No, but Hector, and that speech there, they're in court and Priam is presiding, and they're giving all the reasons why not to do it. And they're very, and it's exactly, and at the end, that should be kind of, okay, we can fight these people. And they say, Okay, let's go. Because they know, they know the whole time, you know, that they're going to go fight they have to, that's what they're born to do, apparently, right. So just amazing stuff. I am, I am to this day, still amazed at the number of people, though, who very strongly are opposed to historical understanding of old texts, Shakespeare in particular, that there still is, as I remember, you know, 30 years ago or more, that a very strong push back, you know, there was a, these were well wrought urns, and they were not to be tampered with in these ways. But it's still out there.

Stephen Greenblatt  36:14  
There's something that was in the origins of new criticism, something liberating about precisely that you don't have to spend your life in the midst of the archive, you can experience the well wrought urn and just be yourself right now. I respect that. I just felt that I was suffocating. I mean, if you're not suffocating, if you're happy there. I mean, that's fine. I don't feel belligerent about it in the slightest. I think that and you don't actually have to know about the changes in the theology of the 16th century to enjoy Hamlet, even though the theology that those changes, the change that is marked by the burial service, by the difference between saying, we commend your body to the earth, and instead saying, we commend his body to the earth, everything that's marked by that change from I-Thou relationship to an I-him or it relationship, the closing of the boundary between the living and the dead, the play is saturated with that. But if you don't know that, it doesn't matter, the play is great. The play is fantastic. Without it, I mean, I'm not as they say, I don't want to beat someone over the head with this historical stuff. But I love it. And I'm fascinated by it. And if you if I can do something with it, we can do something with it. If for example, if we're putting on the playu or trying to understand the play, that's great. If we can't, then to hell with it.

Thomas Dabbs  37:49  
Yeah. Well, I'm being a little bit, you know, how we are. You have these successes in your career and so forth. And you go, okay, what are the things won are done. And what you remember, are failures are things of rejections or some, you know, being overlooked or whatever. But I remember one rejection years ago, that the reader said, we're not learning how to read the play. We're not this doesn't show us how to read the play. And I was one, I wasn't talking about how we read the play, I was talking about how the play understands us, understands us, and that is that audience and us and through that, we get an understanding, you know, what is this? How does Hamlet speak to us? Through these, let's say through these bones? What how is he speaking to a society of people who step over, you know, step over bones on their way to work or their way to church? 

Stephen Greenblatt  38:50  
You have to you have to be willing to put up with people saying no, or pushing back. i If I took my shirt off, I'd show you many scars from

Thomas Dabbs  39:04  
Coriolanus

Stephen Greenblatt  39:07  
That's fine. I know the when I published now, a very long time ago, more than 40 years ago, I published the book, "Renaissance Self Fashioning." That might have might have been the longest and most hostile review of my entire life and the TLS from that, that basically said I should be driven out of the profession. I didn't enjoy it. But I you know, took it in stride, you have to take this stuff in stride, otherwise you don't want you wind up just imitating everybody else.

Thomas Dabbs  39:41  
When you hear those voices, you don't hear the silence. And that was a whole generation of us who said, We can do this. Now. We have a path right? And, and I don't like to do this. But I mean, we owe you a lot. We owe you many of us, because you took that you took that heat. And we were after that then journal editors and other editors and also people in in conferences and so forth became more open minded toward the, because there are a lot of people out there who wanted to do it. But probably couldn't, you know, you can't get past the guardians of the gates. And and the gates opened up a good bit. And of course, you know,

Stephen Greenblatt  40:23  
 They opened up a lot. I mean part of that nothing, some of maybe a little had to do with me, but a lot of it had to do with it. The times--there were lots of jobs in those days, there were lots of, there was lots of movement in the profession. There were amazing things percolating and happening in Paris, that were changing our views of things, and so forth and so on. I mean, it was a without, I don't want to sound like Wordsworth. Bliss was at the end to be alive, but it was fun. A lot was happening. And I mean, a lot was unpleasant as well. But the but it all went together. I mean, it was exciting.

Thomas Dabbs  41:04  
It's wonderful stuff. Steven, I could go on and on. I want to kind of pivot a little bit here. Primarily because about 20 years ago, I put it in, I mentioned this in a couple of other talks, but the person who was teaching the Bible at our university, retired. And we had a Miltonist on staff and she did not want to take over the Bible. It was just too much. And she was she wanted to stay with and she came to me and said, Okay, you're from the American South. I said, Well, yeah, I grew up there. And she said, well, so you, you have Christianity down and you do Shakespeare, so the King James Version, it should be no problem. I said, Well, I guess so, you have it. Since she was my senior colleague. This was 20, almost 25 years ago. And it was Japan in fact, yeah. In Japan. Yes. And so I took on this Bible course. And I had no idea what I was doing. I was the worst possible imaginable teacher the first year. Because I thought, okay, let's do Old Testament. First semester, New Testaments is a year long class, second semester, which was idiotic, because 75% of the Bible is Old Testament. And, and I just completely, so I realized I had to retrench. But anyhow, for 20 years, I've been the Bible teacher here. And so you're, yeah, you're working on Adam and Eve has, I was looking at, you know, your, your view of it. And so much of your view, you have this kind of fresh, you know, looking going outside the myth a bit and looking from outside, and historically, and I'm gonna I go into a class of students, maybe half of them, they've heard of Adam and Eve, but they have no, they did not, they don't know the story, most of

Stephen Greenblatt  42:49  
 You are in a very privileged position, because precisely by virtue of being in Japan, I mean, because your your Japanese culture is made plenty of people will know that plenty of Christians and plenty of people who will know the Bible, but many people will not, and it won't be a surprise that they don't. So that's fascinating, under what circumstances that people, large numbers of people take us through what at least appears to be. And what I actually in the case of the story of Adam and Eve no to be fiction. I mean, it's a story that doesn't, in a way conceal its fictionality. It's a story that involves a magical garden, naked people a talking snake that has all the elements of a, of a fiction of a myth, and have no desire to play the village atheists in the story, but I in the book, but I'm fascinated by how it is that this story, which has so many of its fictional elements, right up front became true for millions of people and still true for millions of people. So it has the same fascinating problem that that we started by talking about with Shakespeare with what is the willing suspension of disbelief about. How is it that people can get beyond the disbelief that the story invites you to have?

Thomas Dabbs  44:15  
I don't know, but I do know over years of teaching, you start out with it's okay. It's funny, and there is some humor in the story and I'm not so sure that it is an original kind of intention. You know, we're talking to a bunch of people, most of whom can't read whatever we have here, whatever language and we need to keep them entertained. It's a kind of comic book or manga in Japan, maybe. But then you go say, what is this knowledge tree of the knowledge of good and evil? If you are absolutely innocent, you don't have that knowledge and you don't have any knowledge. Really, right. And so Apple Computer somebody who was brilliant I don't you know what that by computer byte and the bite of the apple, you know, there is a kind of sense of being bad, you know, by getting into the computer and learning more. If there's a strain there that is extraordinarily true about human nature. And you point out the difference in the two myths, you know, the Genesis 1, which carries over to I think it was Geneva editors who put the chapters and I know they I think they did. Yeah, they did chapters, I believe. But anyhow, they carry over the first story, the second chapter, in order, I think, to create a sense of continuity, which there absolutely isn't in terms of how things were created from one chapter one to chapter two,

Stephen Greenblatt  45:41  
Almost certainly to different writers and different times, what what, what interests among many things that interests me, about, I mean it's strange to spend to write an entire book about just a few verses basically, in the Bible, but one of the things that fascinates me is, as I write about that, the earliest trace that survives of the story comes from people--because of what survived in the desert-- people who believe that that the serpent that the snake was the hero of the story, or possible Eve was the hero of the story, because because you shouldn't be ignorant of good and evil, because being kept ignorant is actually not a good thing. And so that that's from 2000 years ago, people thinking, interpreting the story that way, that, to me is completely fascinating.

Thomas Dabbs  46:33  
Yeah, yeah, it isn't all just do what you're told to do, or else, you know, that can't be where we end. And over the years, you know, I used to point out, okay, there are two different, and I have some probably residual resentment of people who preach persistently in the south, tried to convert me to whatever church they're part of, and they were very different takes on it, and and sometimes they got a little bit too, too strong. But there is a God of the cosmos in the first chapter. And in the second chapter, there's a God of Earth. And in his two different ways, even though they may contradict they explained two different things about who those people are, maybe who we are, that we need, they fill in the blanks, you know, what is the cosmos? And what is the earth? And how and why, you know, of course, why do we experience pain? Why do we have to work? Why is life hard? Childbirth,

Stephen Greenblatt  47:31  
  Why do men attempt to dominate women? That's one of the subjects of the, of the curse, as it were, that that God gives as a result of this, that women will be Well, to me, again, totally fascinating, is a piece of thinking that, that the woman will be dominated by the man. And that she will, she will continue to the desire and paradox that that from 3000 years ago, whenever the story originates, that that still has some way of speaking to us now.

Thomas Dabbs  48:15  
It does. And, of course, all of the art, and like, it always just surprises me. She, he says, eat the apple, and she does enhance it to Adam, and he does and it's that fast. And of course, I'm thinking maybe through the prism of Milton, we had to study Milton when I was in school. Milton takes that way out, you know, Adam, you know, thinking it through? Do I want to be with her? Do I want to do God and it just is this raw? Who called it was it? Was it Blake, I don't know the great code. 

Stephen Greenblatt  48:47  
Northrop  Frye

Thomas Dabbs  48:50  
Northrop Frye called it the great code. And called I think Northrop Frye I don't know, if he was quoting someone else, what Revelation the book did either find someone mad or leaves him so. But, but you, you do have to keep it there. But what a fine book now that was a little that was 2017. And it's still right now today. You really made a splash about 10 years ago with The Swerve. And I wanted to let you know that I heard it. Who is it? Glenn Lowry at Brown, who's a economist and kind of socio economists was talking on a major podcast and brought up your book because he was asked about his view of death. Right? And that's, that's where Lucretius just throws this whole thing out. In a way that surprised me. I had to study Lucretius and oh, we don't have to be worried because it is the end. And I thought it was it you know you worried because it is the end. You worry right. He turns out around. I've never been, it's

Stephen Greenblatt  50:03  
interesting that that's fascinating. To be able to get fully, as it were in the spirit of that remarkable claim, I mean, beautiful and powerful claim that Epicureanism makes. I, I sometimes I'm there, but I'm sometimes with with Cicero, who says, of course, you know that Lucretius says that or Epicurus in this case, Epicurus says that, that when you're dead, you're dead. There's no further life. And that's good news. And Cicero basically says, That's good news? That's, that's where's the good news part of it? A little bit, I have some of that sense. In me sometimes that that being told that it's really over. And that you will be redistributed, your atoms will be redistributed, which I believe is the case.

Thomas Dabbs  51:05  
It seems to be yes. Yeah. Yes.

Stephen Greenblatt  51:10  
You know, that it's hard to hold on to that as a very calming revelation, though, that is, it's meant to be somehow to take you to a place in which you're not no longer in the grip of anxiety are no longer in the grip of of the myth mongers is. I mean, as I get older, I tried to achieve that kind of ataraxia that that calm. But it's difficult.

Thomas Dabbs  51:43  
It's difficult, it is difficult, because it's built into our DNA or psyche, or whatever to survive. It is, that is the best instinct, number one. I've never understood suicide. I've just never understood it. You know? On that regard, why would you want to end things?

Stephen Greenblatt  52:03  
I suppose, if only we were, nature has been merciful to us so far, because I suppose it becomes comprehensible of life becomes intolerable, but it's not intolerable at the moment. And then for me, I love I love life, I love my life. And I love life, and I want to hold on to it and intact as long as I can. But when I go, I would like to go accepting, in a way that, that Lucretius urges you to accept that it's actually it's fine. You know, I wrote that book, as you know, now some years ago, but Lucretius is great work on the nature of things and is of course, with an account of the pandemic. And, and it's a way of testing. In effect, I think it's a way of testing the reader to how much you've managed to get the point. First of all, the point being that there are invisible forces that are not being sent by angry gods, that are part of the structure of the, of the atomic structure of the universe, that there are these invisible agents that may make you sick and made make many of you die. And that it doesn't urge you simply to accept it and not put on a mask. But it does, it does urge you not to have to take how shall we say, a theological view of this not to think that you're being punished. But to think that you need to understand that you're living in the universe with other living things, including microbes. And yet to figure out how to protect yourself in this case, 

Thomas Dabbs  53:57  
 Yeah, those microbes can turn against you. 

Stephen Greenblatt  53:59  
Yeah, how to protect your society, how to protect your society from falling apart, because that's what it really ends with.

Thomas Dabbs  54:05  
Well, that's it. That's the Old Testament, it was almost a revelation, kind of Pauline type thing when I'm going, Wait a second, this is all about keeping things intact. Because life is short. We don't know. We don't know the hour. But we do know. And I think that we don't have this as much now this absolute, not only our own our own survival, but the survival of our species, let's say our tribe, our group becomes the most important thing. And God is formed for that and rules are formed for that. And for generations after generations, right? And the importance of being the father of a great nation. You know, if God appeared to me and said, You will be the father of many nations, I've got so so what? I'm proud I'm a father. I like being a father. I like Did I, you know, might continue that way.

Stephen Greenblatt  55:03  
But look, Tom, there's, I mean, we're getting it with these are complicated and deep and rich subjects, some of which are definitely above my paygrade. But I would say a couple of things. One is that, that the Bible, not in the form that you put it, but the Bible's vision of multiple generations raises of, I think, a profound question that is with us now, today, which is what is our obligation? What is our ethical obligation to generations that are not yet born? If we are destroying the environment, but we'll be okay. And even our children and maybe our grandchildren will be okay. But some generations further down will not be okay. Yeah. What is our ethical relationship to that, and you can see that the Bible is account. As you say, we just distanced from being the patriarch of this, but the Bible's account raises this, this question in a powerful way. And that the other side, turning it around back to Lucretius. I think there's a real problem and Lucretius that is not resolved. I think that that is a problem that that has been perceived before. Well, certainly in the 20th century, but earlier already in Hume. Yeah. This is a problem. Why should you think if you believe Lucretius Why should you think that life is better than non life? Why should you think that human life is better than the life of the Coronavirus? Yeah, what what is the moral difference on which you're making that judgment? And I think that I don't think Lucretius actually has an answer, or Epicurus has a very clear answer to the question. And it's one of the reasons that I'm how should we say 90% on board with Epicureanism, but not 100%? Yeah. Because I, I want to honor my belief, not that my life is so important, but I want to honor my belief that my beautiful granddaughter's life is more valuable than the life of the Coronavirus. And I won't accept philosophy that doesn't make clear to me that, to honor that feeling.

Thomas Dabbs  57:44  
Yeah, and her granddaughters life also, that's, that's interested me because for years, I've asked students about the they know their fathers, they know their grandfathers and they can say, Well, my grandfather did this job, or grandmother did this job most mostly is through the father because they worked and particularly in Japan. But when you get the great grandfather, nobody knows. I happen to be kind of rare, I know who my great grandfather was, of course, being from the American South, you sometimes don't want to know too much. But the end there lines that branch off from the paternal and the maternal side. And so from the patrician and matrician side, but the the thing is that, that amazes me in the Bible, where there is this extraordinary urge very in ancient peoples to keep a record, however accurate it is to keep the record. And we see it appearing again and Shakespeare bringing back those records because who wants to sit down and read Hall or Holinshed, but if you make a drama out of it, you know, you you, you bring it back into the into the consciousness just like Lucretius was brought back in.

Stephen Greenblatt  59:01  
I want to say by the way, just about your the story you just told about which is fascinating about your students and their grandparents. This is something you wouldn't do in Japan wouldn't make sense to do in Japan. I think these are students but I do routinely in my classes. I asked the students what language their maternal grandmother spoke, or ideally the maternal great grandmother, but I just asked maternal grandmother, usually and there because it's the United States and not Japan, you get this absolutely extraordinary rainbow effect. I mean, just an extraordinary number of different languages and different traditions. So it gets you off the biblical patriarchy where this line is F notes that is it's a whole set of different people's languages, backgrounds, all mixed together.

Thomas Dabbs  59:59  
Yeah. sort of Tower of Babel in reverse the hearing back in viewing my children, it has amazed me of how quickly it's one generation, and certainly two that say flying back to Tokyo and as in my case, sitting beside a young Japanese guy with 90% of the planes is Japanese, and I speak to him in Japanese. And he says, I don't speak in Japanese, I grew up in California, I'm going back. I'm going back to see my grandmother and we can't communicate, but she cooks good food and you know, that sort of thing. So that does amaze me in the Bible, how you can keep a language together for so long. And even. And I think I've read in your biography, you were brought you were Jewish. I was brought up Presbyterian. I think that there are some crossovers in a strange way, in terms of there's this great image in your book of opening your eyes during a kind of Passover event, you know, in the temple, right, and nothing happens.

Stephen Greenblatt  1:01:10  
The blessing at the end of the blessing

Thomas Dabbs  1:01:13  
where yes, you can't look or else.

Stephen Greenblatt  1:01:17  
Yeah, I it's not part of the liturgy that you can't look, but it was part of the how she would say folklore, like you couldn't look, you had to close your eyes, bow your head because God was passing through the synagogue, and you would die if you look at God face to face. Yeah. And I steeled myself took me weeks, to force myself to open my eyes willing to die for the sight of God. Yeah. Yeah, I didn't

Thomas Dabbs  1:01:47  
that that moment. It is it is amazing childhood experiences. There is the Well, I think I'm pulling it from something I read historically, in the 16th century, but the notion of the second childhood, that besets people when they get to a certain age, and, and I'm feeling it now, where you, you are more inclined to look back to childhood, and the dynamics of childhood and take it maybe perhaps more seriously. And in in your book returning to Tyrant. There, it almost seems like an elementary or middle school type behavior that it takes over, you know, people trying to develop, there's a child, childishness in the tyrant, and there's the childishness and the complicity, that allows the tyrant to be the tyrant,

Stephen Greenblatt  1:02:43  
or there is a yes, you can, one of the reasons that these, that these works continue to speak to us is that even though the political arrangements have in many ways of all profoundly different than the cultures are different, and so forth, is that there are certain traits, I think that Shakespeare, that also goes back to questions of your the possibility of going back and getting something that you've lost from your childhood, I think Shakespeare was obsessed with that very early on, I mean, already from Comedy of Errors and early play all the way through to a late play like Winter's Tale, we have the possibility of getting something back that you've lost. That's right. The thing that that was once yours, whether it was the mother or father, you've lost, or the wife or the wife, who's lost, meaning that getting it isn't possible to get it back. And that that notion of of a second chance in life is something that it cuts into different directions that, you know, it's an infantile feeling. Yeah. But it's also a mature feeling. It's the desire and not to lose the thing that was at the beginning of your existence, shape when you're young. And I think Shakespeare knew that in himself. When he was when toward the end of his career, I think in a very deep way.

Thomas Dabbs  1:04:10  
Yeah. Well, the evidence we have of him wanting to have a coat of arms, a memorial of some sort, that points to a kind of recreation, you know, he wasn't born to it, but he earned it and you could in his time earn Raleigh earned it. And Drake earned it, you know, and dadgummit I'm the I'm the dramatist. I earned it. You know, I did this

Stephen Greenblatt  1:04:36  
It is ironic about at the same time, and he makes fun of it and winter sale, but he also does it. So, anyway, I think it's true that the before for all of us, I mean, I've always tried to hold on to a feel it's not an old age phenomenon. I've always tried to hold on to some sense of where it came from who I am. This is relevant. I think maybe to perhaps to your you and your, your students who are so remarkable at being able to read Shakespeare in English, you have to have an unbelievably impressive command of English to get to make any sense of it at all, even as a native speaker. But I think that what I tell my students at Harvard and at Berkeley, when I taught for many years, if their student that's why I have that exercise about what your great, great, great what your grandmother spoke, what language is called, hold on to the fact that you're not to the manor born, hold on to the fact and use it, it's important to use it don't don't try to pretend that it's not there, try to exploit it, try to honor it, to understand that your difference is actually part of your skill. It's a gift. Yeah, that for me was acutely important not to be frightened by the fact that my grandparents didn't speak English as their native language. That is important to hold on to, not to be ashamed of, and not to try to erase. You learn this course, as much as you can. You try to become as comfortable as you can, in whatever it is that you're studying. But you don't try to erase your origins. You try to draw upon them. Shakespeare never loses the work for childhood. He, he exploits it, he's writing out of it. At the end of his life, in the Winter's Tale, and in The Tempest.

Thomas Dabbs  1:06:34  
Yeah, well, he noises he did have to go up against Marlowe was Cambridge graduate and a gentleman as a result you had as an estate, when you were I tell my students when you graduate from this university, that's an estate, that's, that's a posession you reach, you know, traditionally a level you have that degree. And Marlowe had it and Shakespeare didn't. And so there were those who did, those who didn't. And I think he probably felt that acutely.

Stephen Greenblatt  1:07:06  
But he didn't. There are ways of feeling and ways of feeling it. And he got the estate, as you say, by getting the coat of arms for his father, but he never lost the boy who grew up in Warwickshire. He never refuted that. And that's actually hugely important.

Thomas Dabbs  1:07:31  
Yeah. Well, we see this all over No, we I, I'm thinking, you know, I would rather be a Shakespeare without the degree in London with these fellows who may be looking down their nose at him. And they were, I think, at first at least, than one of those fellows who found himself in London unemployed, with with these expectations, having graduated Oxford, Cambridge, but these expectations that of course, they would be received as the next great poet or whatever they were dreaming of as young men having to live in poverty, and have that

Stephen Greenblatt  1:08:08  
It wasn't good for your health. No Marlowe dies at  29. Kyd dies at 35 the other dies in his late 30s. Greene dies in his early 30s. There I mean, Nash dies in his early 30s. I think it's it's a very rough trade, and Shakespeare manages at least to make it into his 50s and, and have a longer, more productive life.

Thomas Dabbs  1:08:35  
Stephen, I cannot express how much I appreciate this. But this will go out to my Japanese colleagues, Shakespeare Society of Japan, you've been here before, I think you've you've spoken to.

Stephen Greenblatt  1:08:46  
I said at the beginning, and I'll say again, I mean, Japan is one of, to me the one of the most wonderful places on earth. I've had the I spent a month in Kyoto now, years ago, and, and I could have become Tom Dabbs and just said, I'm gonna stay here forever. I mean, that I just, I was and am amazed by so many aspects of the the unbelievably wonderful food with the astonishing beauty, the complexity and richness of the culture. And I deeply look forward to a time in which I can return my wife and I both had the same experience of awestruck pleasure. I've been multiple times now but not nearly enough. To Japan, I just adore it.

Thomas Dabbs  1:09:40  
Well, the feeling is mutual, and I know lots of people who would love to, to see you and hear you speak and also, you know, if we ever can, again, get together for the joyous moments of the receptions where things actually happen. You know, you you you get to talk with them. You fill in, in the and then they call it the second party in Japan. Sometimes you go from the first party second party, where people are surprisingly honest about things and so forth. But I do miss that myself in over the past two years. What

Stephen Greenblatt  1:10:17  
will happen again, we'll get past this. We always do.

Thomas Dabbs  1:10:22  
We will we, we always do. Now I ask you to stay for just a moment after we finished recording. And, again, thank you so very much. 

Stephen Greenblatt  1:10:31  
Great pleasure, Tom.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai