Leading Shakespeare Scholar Stephen Greenblatt Discussed 'Hamlet' with US Students

On Tuesday, May 19, Pulitzer Prize–winning literary historian Stephen Greenblatt joined eleventh and twelfth-grade students for a virtual conversation about Hamlet, which the entire Upper School read in the 2025-26 school year. 

Greenblatt is the author of fourteen books, and is Cogan University Professor of the Humanities at Harvard University. He has written extensively on English Renaissance literature and acts as general editor of The Norton Anthology of English Literature and The Norton Shakespeare. Among Greenblatt’s books are The Swerve, winner of the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award, and the bestselling Shakespeare biography Will in the World, a Pulitzer Prize finalist.

Earlier this year, English teacher Alex Guevarez reached out to Greenblatt via email to take part in a Hamlet symposia that he was arranging in May. 

“To my great surprise, Greenblatt happily agreed to join the conversation!” Guevarez said. “I’m hoping this rare opportunity to meet one of the world’s leading Shakespeare scholars can be the start of a rich collaboration that puts our students into closer dialogue with critical conversations and debates taking place in higher education.”

Greenblatt joined the students and a group of interested faculty and staff via Zoom, projected onto a screen in an English classroom. His expertise on offer for GFS Upper School created an outstanding opportunity for students to ask questions about anything in Hamlet they had been grappling with while reading it.

Students came prepared with specific and thoughtful questions about the tragic play, including themes of husbandry and caretaking in Shakespeare’s works; what is lost and what is gained when studying Shakespeare so far removed from the time when it was written; and what is behind Hamlet’s “overthinking” in the famous “To be or not to be” soliloquy.  

Greenblatt gave detailed and complete answers to the students’ questions, and engaged them in a larger discussion about the presence of King Hamlet’s ghost in the text. 

“The play is fiendish in its refusal to give us affirmative and clear answers,” he noted. “Shakespeare keeps forcing you to ask questions that you can’t answer.”

Greenblatt is regarded as the pioneer of New Historicism, a trend in American academic literary studies in the 1980s that stresses simultaneously the historical nature of literary texts and the “textual” nature of history. New historicism is interested not simply in the verbal structure of a work, but in the relationship between that work and the world from which it emerged. Throughout the discussion, he urged students to keep in mind the historical and religious context of the late-15th and early-16th centuries when the play was written and performed.

This isn’t the first time Guevarez has invited world-renowned scholars and historians to meet with GFS students. Earlier this year, medievalist and Johns Hopkins University professor Christopher Cannon joined Guevarez’s Directed Independent Study group reading The Canterbury Tales twice for a conversation and a tutorial for reading in Middle English. Specialist of Italian studies Alyssa Granacki also met with students virtually for a discussion of Chaucer’s “Italian” phase as part of the Dante Society of America outreach program. 

“As literary study becomes increasingly interdisciplinary at the university level, I’ve been eager to introduce students to a range of critical approaches with the generous support of some of its living practitioners,” Guevarez noted. “Greenblatt’s participation last week was a thrilling culmination of this yearlong effort.”