Roland Greene delivers the keynote lecture on "The Renaissance World of Cervantes and Shakespeare" at the Humanities West presentation on Shakespeare and Cervantes (February 26, 2016).

The task of literary criticism must be to make the pure epiphanies of a text as obvious as possible—to learn Auerbach’s art of simplicity.

Dated scholarship can obscure more than it describes a period like the Renaissance. Can such studies be productively read today?