Stephen Greenblatt has been at the center of a major shift in literary interpretation toward a critical method that situates cultural creation in history. Shakespearean Negotiations is a sustained and powerful exemplification of this innovative method, offering a new way of understanding the power of Shakespeare's achievement and, beyond this, an original analysis of cultural process.

Stephen Greenblatt is The Class of 1932 Professor of English Literature at the University of California, Berkeley.

"Greenblatt compels one to think afresh about the strange position of a theater existing on the margin of an authoritarian society, and indeed about the whole question of the social and political contexts of works of art."—Frank Kermode, The New Republic

"The most intensely rewarding lit-crit book I've ever read."—Scott L. Malcomson, Voice Literary Supplement

"An indispensable addition to our understanding of the structures of representation and response in Elizabethan and Jacobean culture."—John Drakakis, Times Higher Education Supplement

"[Shakespearean Negotiations], so sharp on cultural stereotypes and on the abuse of power, should be read by all students of history and literature, by all thinking men and women."—E.A.J. Honigmann, New York Review of Books

James Russell Lowell Prize, The Modern Language Association