Circulating through ‘languages and tales’: Stephen Greenblatt’s Cardenio

Abstract

Much recent literary scholarship seems geared at sharing the hefty burden of innovation with cultural practice.¹ While being questioned about the new intellectual directions that the field is currently taking with its pedagogical and interpretive practices, Stephen Greenblatt identifies ‘a kind of weakening of the boundary between art-making and criticism’.² Indeed, the literary critic’s will formally to experiment with other practices of writing and to address a wider readership (or audience) in the process seems especially to shape this critic’s recent work. Taking on the genre of the literary biography in Will in the World (2004), he imaginatively plunges into ‘the huge gaps in knowledge’ about Shakespeare’s life and, through informed historical speculation, fleshes a life out of his plays and poetry.³ More recently, Greenblatt has ventured more decisively outside the traditional bounds of critical practice and into the world of imaginative writing: in an apparent attempt to fill in a conspicuous blank in the Bard’s work, he has collaborated with professional playwright Charles Mee to co-author a play based on the Cardenio story in Don Quixote’⁴ that Shakespeare reportedly made into a play of his own.⁵