Daily Inspiration Quote by Stephen Greenblatt

Greenblatt opens with a deflating heresy: even Shakespeare, the patron saint of genius, didn’t conjure worlds from pure inspiration. “Nothing comes of nothing” is a proverb with a side-eye built in, and the sly tag “even in Shakespeare” punctures the romantic myth that great art arrives unsourced, untethered, above history. The line is less an attack on Shakespeare than a critique of how we like to talk about him: as if talent is a meteor rather than a craft.

The intent is methodological and faintly polemical. Greenblatt, a key architect of New Historicism, is staking a claim that literature is made from “matter” - social pressures, political anxieties, borrowed plots, street talk, court gossip, colonial encounters, theatrical conventions. “Matter” is a deliberately physical word: not “themes” or “ideas,” but raw material. He wants to track provenance (where it came from) and transformation (what was done to it). That second clause matters more. The point isn’t to downgrade Shakespeare into a recycler; it’s to watch how recycling becomes alchemy.

The subtext is a rebuke to two lazy habits: treating texts as sealed aesthetic objects, or reducing them to mere mirrors of their time. Greenblatt’s Shakespeare is neither isolated genius nor passive product. He’s an operator inside a bustling cultural economy, taking inherited narratives and turning them into something newly dangerous, funny, and psychologically intricate. The context is a late-20th-century critical shift away from reverent Bardolatry toward systems, circulation, and power - a move that makes Shakespeare feel less like a monument and more like a live wire.