Margreta de Grazia (born 1946) is a scholar of Shakespeare, an Emerita Professor of English and the Humanities at the

University of Pennsylvania The University of Pennsylvania (also known as Penn or UPenn) is a private research university in Philadelphia. It is the fourth-oldest institution of higher education in the United States and is ranked among the highest-regarded universitie ...

. A Guggenheim Fellow, she is best known for her critical reappraisals of Shakespeare's oeuvre and her editions of the ''Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare'' and the ''New Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare''.

Life

Margreta de Grazia was born in 1946 to

Sebastian de Grazia Sebastian de Grazia (1917–2000) was an American philosopher who was Professor of Political Philosophy at Rutgers University. He received the 1990 Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography for his 1989 book '' Machiavelli in Hell''. Biography ...

, one of his five children. She attended

Bryn Mawr College Bryn Mawr College ( ; Welsh: ) is a women's liberal arts college in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania. Founded as a Quaker institution in 1885, Bryn Mawr is one of the Seven Sister colleges, a group of elite, historically women's colleges in the United St ...

, receiving her undergraduate degree in 1968. She obtained master's (1970) and doctoral degrees (1974) in English renaissance studies from

Princeton University Princeton University is a private university, private research university in Princeton, New Jersey. Founded in 1746 in Elizabeth, New Jersey, Elizabeth as the College of New Jersey, Princeton is the List of Colonial Colleges, fourth-oldest ins ...

. de Grazia was briefly married in her youth. She married

Colin Thubron Colin Gerald Dryden Thubron, FRAS (born 14 June 1939) is a British travel writer and novelist. In 2008, ''The Times'' ranked him among the 50 greatest postwar British writers. He is a contributor to ''The New York Review of Books'',University of New Mexico The University of New Mexico (UNM; es, Universidad de Nuevo México) is a public research university in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Founded in 1889, it is the state's flagship academic institution and the largest by enrollment, with over 25,400 ...

and at

Georgetown University Georgetown University is a private university, private research university in the Georgetown (Washington, D.C.), Georgetown neighborhood of Washington, D.C. Founded by Bishop John Carroll (archbishop of Baltimore), John Carroll in 1789 as Georg ...

, before joining the

in 1983. She held several named professorial positions there, among others the Rosenberg Professor of Humanities. In 1994, she was made a Guggenheim Fellow., In 2003, she was awarded the Ira H. Abrams Memorial Award for Distinguished Teaching by the university. The

Royal Society of Literature The Royal Society of Literature (RSL) is a learned society founded in 1820, by George IV of the United Kingdom, King George IV, to "reward literary merit and excite literary talent". A charity that represents the voice of literature in the UK, th ...

elected her as a Fellow in 2021.

Research

In 1991 came out de Grazia's book ''Shakespeare Verbatim: The Reproduction of Authenticity and the 1790 Apparatus''. Its subject was the publication of ''The Plays and Poems of William Shakespeare'' by Edmond Malone in 1790, which served as the foundation for a new model of Shakespeare studies, propelled by Enlightenment ideas and focusing on chronology, biography and authenticity. In contrast to Renaissance searches for authenticity, de Grazia argued that Malone forced Shakespeare as a subject in its own right, a historical construct, by setting up an analytical practice that continued to modern times, and she persuasively located Malone's place in Shakespeare studies by critiquing facile assumptions made by others on scholarly progress. de Grazia's 2007 book, "''Hamlet'' without Hamlet" attempted to overturn two centuries of critical appraisal of the play, where the character was variously treated as a "progenitor of modern consciousness" and removed from the play itself. She averred that at the time of the play, Hamlet was seen as a representation of a failed state, a reference to dynastic rises and falls, and she demonstrated how these themes were linked into the play. Such critics as

Hegel Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (; ; 27 August 1770 – 14 November 1831) was a German philosopher. He is one of the most important figures in German idealism and one of the founding figures of modern Western philosophy. His influence extends a ...

saw Hamlet's disposession as a kickstart of his self-realisation, introspection and journey into modernity, but de Grazia countered this idea by suggesting that he wasn't, in fact, lost within his interior world and that this was rather a plot device for him to demonstrate his unhappiness with his disposession. The book was critiqued for lack of attention to modern stagings of the play and for overstating the break between the critical model of the first 200 years and the following centuries, but was nevertheless considered an exemplary addition to Shakespeare studies.

Selected works

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References

{{DEFAULTSORT:de Grazia, Margreta Bryn Mawr College alumni Fellows of the Royal Society of Literature 1946 births Princeton University alumni Shakespearean scholars Living people