Stephen Greenblatt

American literary scholar who founded New Historicism and wrote Will in the World (Shakespeare biography) and Hamlet in Purgatory — which argues that Hamlet's ghost is Shakespeare's working through of the Catholic doctrine of Purgatory that Protestant England abolished.

Founded New Historicism — the approach that literature must be understood in its specific historical context of power, ideology, and material culture — and applied it to Shakespeare with Hamlet in Purgatory, arguing that the play's emotional power comes from Shakespeare's personal grief over his son Hamnet.