Time & Perspective Quote by Stephen Greenblatt

Greenblatt is yanking Shakespeare back from the marble pedestal and returning him to the messy, commercial ecology that made him. The opening move, "First of all", is a polite shove: a correction aimed at the pious habits of English departments, heritage culture, and prestige theater that treat Shakespeare as scripture. By insisting on "pleasure and interest", Greenblatt elevates the oldest, least respectable justification for art - that it should be gripping - and demotes the newer ones: moral uplift, national genius, self-improvement, cultural capital.

The phrasing is doing quiet work. "Pleasure" nods to laughter, suspense, erotic charge, verbal glitter; "interest" is craft talk, a playwright's instinct for stakes, pacing, and audience attention. Greenblatt's Shakespeare is not primarily a seer but a working professional who learned, fast, what makes bodies lean forward in their seats. "From the first moment" compresses biography into a claim about method: the origin story is not inspiration but pragmatics. He wrote for the stage, not for the syllabus.

Context matters: Greenblatt, a signature voice of New Historicism, is famous for reading literature inside power, money, and institutions. Here he applies that same demystifying lens with a surprisingly populist payoff. The subtext is almost a dare: if Shakespeare still "remains so", the burden is on us. If we're bored, that's a failure of performance, pedagogy, or imagination - not a flaw in the plays. Shakespeare survives, Greenblatt implies, because he never stopped sounding like he wants you to keep watching.