My son (with some help from Jere) got me Stephen Greenblatt's Shakespeare's Freedom for my birthday. It's a slim volume, and a splurge in hardcover, but I'm always happy to read Greenblatt on Shakespeare, so it was an excellent choice for a gift. Freedom from convention is what Greenblatt is mostly going for here, not the "apparently unbounded power and visionary scope of [Shakespeare's] achievement" and the attempt to measure an expanse generally necessitates coming to its edges.
Greenblatt chooses Theodor Adorno, a philosopher from the Frankfurt School, as his guide through the territory -- the book began as a series of lectures on Adorno and Shakespeare. As such, the four chapters, concerned with Beauty, Hatred, Authority, and Aesthetic Autonomy, mostly stand alone. Greenblatt attempts to draw them together in an introductory parable of 'irreducible individuality' featuring Barnadine from Measure for Measure, an admitted murderer who refuses to be executed, and is eventually pardoned, but there really is no central thesis.
The individual lecture-essays are well worth a read, though it's probably not a good introduction to either Shakespeare or Adorno. I'm trying to avoid oversimplifying or ruining anything, so I'll just note that I enjoyed the meditations on "Shakespearean Beauty Marks" (think Cleopatra and her divine flaws) and "The Limits of Hatred" (insiders and outsiders; Antonio/Shylock; Iago/Othello), and I thought that "Shakespeare and the Ethics of Authority" (Macbeth, Lear, and Bill Clinton), the one essay I'd read previously, was still marvellous. "Shakespearean Autonomy" was more diffuse, running from A Midsummer Night's Dream to The Tempest by way of Coriolanus and Philip Sydney, but still engaging.
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