"What we know is that Shakespeare wrote perhaps the most remarkable body of passionate love poetry in the English language to a young man"
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Greenblatt smuggles a cultural hand grenade into an apparently mild scholarly sentence. The phrase "what we know" performs courtroom work: it narrows the claims to the documentary minimum, the kind of bedrock a critic can stand on without falling into biography-as-fanfic. Yet the rest of the line is anything but neutral. "Perhaps the most remarkable body" is calibrated awe, a reminder that the Sonnets aren’t a sidebar to the plays but a peak of English lyric intensity. Then comes the kicker: "to a young man."
That last clause is doing the heavy lifting, because it forces a collision between canon and comfort. For centuries, Shakespeare has been packaged as safely universal, his passions abstracted into "human nature". Greenblatt refuses that sanitization. He doesn’t claim Shakespeare "was" anything in a modern identity sense; he insists on the undeniable direction of desire in the poems themselves. The subtext is methodological and political at once: you can respect historical difference while still taking erotic address seriously.
Context matters: Greenblatt writes in a post-Stonewall, post-queer-theory world, but also as a flagship New Historicist, allergic to timelessness and attentive to the pressures of patronage, class, and censorship. By anchoring the line in knowledge, he anticipates the predictable backlash - the "just close friendship" dodge - and preempts it. The intent is to make readers look at the evidence we keep reading past: Shakespeare’s most incandescent language of devotion is not hypothetical; it’s aimed, repeatedly, at a male beloved, and the canon has been managing that fact for us.
That last clause is doing the heavy lifting, because it forces a collision between canon and comfort. For centuries, Shakespeare has been packaged as safely universal, his passions abstracted into "human nature". Greenblatt refuses that sanitization. He doesn’t claim Shakespeare "was" anything in a modern identity sense; he insists on the undeniable direction of desire in the poems themselves. The subtext is methodological and political at once: you can respect historical difference while still taking erotic address seriously.
Context matters: Greenblatt writes in a post-Stonewall, post-queer-theory world, but also as a flagship New Historicist, allergic to timelessness and attentive to the pressures of patronage, class, and censorship. By anchoring the line in knowledge, he anticipates the predictable backlash - the "just close friendship" dodge - and preempts it. The intent is to make readers look at the evidence we keep reading past: Shakespeare’s most incandescent language of devotion is not hypothetical; it’s aimed, repeatedly, at a male beloved, and the canon has been managing that fact for us.
Quote Details
| Topic | Poetry |
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