Stephen Greenblatt

Literary Critic/Editor art

Greenblatt is a research scholar at Berkeley who writes on early modern culture. From his book Shakespearean Negotiations (California, 1998):

"[T]he stance [Atheism] that seemed to come naturally to me as a green college freshman in mid-twentieth-century America seems to have been almost literally unthinkable to the most daring philosophical minds of late sixteenth-century England ... I am not arguing that atheism was literally unthinkable in the late sixteenth century but rather that it was almost always thinkable only as the thought of another. This is one of its attractions as a smear; atheism is a characteristic mark of otherness[.]"

--MD

Nota Bene: Greenblatt has left Berkeley, and is currently a Professor at Harvard.