Books in the The Rice University Campbell Lectures series

The concept of an encyclopedic museum was born of the enlightenment, a manifestation of European society's growing belief that the spread of knowledge, promotion of intellectual inquiry, and trust in individual agency were crucial to human development and the future of a rational society. This title takes us on a brief tour of the modern museum.

Shakespeare lived in a world of absolutes-of claims for the absolute authority of scripture, monarch, and God, and the authority of fathers over wives and children, the old over the young, and the gentle over the baseborn. Greenblatt shows that Shakespeare was averse to such absolutes and constantly probed the possibility of freedom from them.