Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare

I do not believe I would read this book on my own initiative to just "learn", for the authors' style simply does not work with my style of reading and comprehending. That said, this book is absolutely invaluable for research on major Renaissance authors. The bibliographies and sources cited within his essays are also utterly helpful should more sources be needed for the project at hand. I will admit that at times I find the essays to ramble on a little, but I have always been a to-the-point writer. Those same endless sentences also make wonderful cited quotations, so I cannot complain too much. Perfect for any student of Renaissance literature, or the Renaissance intellectual.

OK. So maybe I'm biased. I took a course from Greenblatt when an undergard at U.C. Berekely, and he then directed my dissertation when I took my Ph.D. From U.C. Berkeley as well. But I am not alone in regarding this book as a masterpiece, exteremely well-written adn insightful. This book transformed not only the study of the Renaissance but of English literature in general. Moreover, it has influenced historians such as Natalie Daivis and anthropologists. After 17 years, Renaissance Self-Fashioning totally stands up. The chapters on Wyatt, Tyndale, More (truly stellar), Spenser, and Shakespeare remained unsurpassed. Readers may quibble, but though whose do have never written and will never write a book anywhere remotely near the excellence of Greeblatt's. It is truly inspired and deservedly influential.

I admire this book greatly and give it 5 stars for the way it made me reread important renaissance writings. Greenblatt's stories are engaging and his writing all things considered is good for an academic. But New Historicism suffers from the disabilities of all of the new "isms"--it dispenses with evidence or rather decides what counts as evidence. Rather like the man who went to a psyciatrist claiming he was dead. "Do dead men bleed?" asked the psychiatrist "Of course not" said the patient wherupon the Psychiatrist poked him with a needle and drew blood. "What do you know" said the patient "Dead men DO bleed!" Karl Popper argued that if an argument cannot in principle be proved wrong it is not an argument. This is Greenblatt's problem