b. 1943

The leading proponent of “New Historicism,” Stephen Greenblatt became a key figure
in the shift from literary to cultural poetics and from textual to contextual interpre­
tation in U.S. English departments in the 1980s and 1990s. Inspired by MICHEL
FOUCAULT’s historical investigations of medical and penal institutions and his theo­
retical understanding of power, the New Historicists see the literary work as a vessel
tossed in a social sea of competing interests, antagonistic values, and contradictions.
For Greenblatt, literary works are “fields of force, places of dissension and shifting
interests, occasions for the jostling of orthodox and subversive impulses.”
Greenblatt was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1943 and did his under­
graduate and graduate work at Yale University, gaining his Ph.D. in 1969. For more
than twenty years, he taught at the University of California at Berkeley, where he was
one of the founders of Representations, the journal in which much pathbreaking New
Historicist work first appeared. He moved to Harvard University in the mid-1990s.
New Historicism, as our selection suggests, begins its quest to be political by deny­
ing that any social world is stable and that artworks are separated from the power
struggles constituting social reality. The literary work is a player in the competition
among various groups to gain their ends, a competition that takes place on many
levels. New Historicism accepts Foucault’s insistence that power operates through
myriad capillary channels; these include not just dirbct coercion and governmental
action but also, crucially, daily routines and language. Because discourse organizes
perception of the world by its categorical groupings and because symbols bind social
agents emotionally to institutions and practices, conflicts over images resonate
throughout the social order. Thus the New Historicist not only pays attention to such
discursive disputes in particular texts but also examines how particular texts are
addressed to other texts, other discursive orders, in the wider culture. A “cultural
poetics” tries to identify the key images—and the values, beliefs, practices, and social
structures that those images point toward—of a particular cultural moment. Unlike
the old historicist, the New Historicist does not expect that cultural moment to be
unified, with the literary text simply reflecting or embodying that unity. Rather, the
text is a dynamic interweaving of multiple strands from a culture that is itself an
unstable field of contending forces.

Any given text for the New Historicist is an attempted intervention in the ongoing
struggle to influence or even dominate the cultural field. The critic’s own work inter­
venes in his or her own present, responding to and striving to alter contemporary
configurations of power. To explain how Shakespeare’s Richard II is implicated in the
power struggles of its time is both to write a history of the consolidation of power
prior to our moment and to awaken today’s reader to the conflicts that define our
moment. The New Historicists, again following Foucault, often construct narratives
in which dispersed and disputed power becomes more insidious, and dominance
grows more dominant. They want to emphasize history’s contingencies, its fluidity in
any given moment, but they also emphasize how history reveals the growth of forms
of power that continuously affect subjects’ lives.
The tendency to tell similar historical tales of power’s expanding reach, coupled
with fairly blunt evaluations of literary works as either complicitous with or resistant
to power, has opened New Historicism to criticism. Historians have objected that
these literary critics read a few nonliterary texts, juxtapose them with plays or novels,
and think they are doing history. But such complaints, even when justified in indi­
vidual cases, largely miss the point. New Historicism is part of a broader sea change
in literary studies—and in history as well. Instead of asking what a particular text
means in and of itself, New Historicists ask what it does within the ensemble of social…(cont)

…author of masterpieces, these critics attempt to understand the lived social reality of
the era being studied. And just as New Historicism and cultural studies were begin­
ning to emerge in departments of literature, history departments also were changing.
During the late twentieth century, new prominence was given to both social and cul­
tural history, which shift the historians’ gaze away from famous actors or grand histor­
ical events to ordinary people and their mundane routines. A whole new relation to
texts, which were now being read to gain insight into the society from which they
sprang, along with a new definition of the goal of historical investigation, has increas­
ingly blurred the disciplinary lines between English and history. As literary critics have
become more familiar with this paradigm, they have grown accustomed to delving as
deeply into archives as historians; and some historians have begun to adopt the more
linguistically nuanced interpretations of sources characteristic of literary critics.
Greenblatt’s work, along with that of Louis Adrian Montrose, Stephen Mullaney,
Jonathan Dollimore, Catherine Belsey, and numerous other literary critics, has
ensured that English Renaissance studies and New Historicism have become inex­
tricably linked. But New Historicists work has also been highly influential in studies
of other historical periods, especially nineteenth-century American and British liter­
ature. Jerome McGann, for example, though not influenced so directly by Foucault
as are members of the Representations group, has brought a New Historicist concern
with social context to the criticism of British Romantic poetry. By the late 1990s,
literary critics seldom explicitly identified themselves as New Historicists, but the
emphasis on context over text still prevailed in literary studies.

Introduction to The Power of Forms in the English Renaissance

“I am Richard II. Know ye not that?” exclaimed Queen Elizabeth on August
4, 1601, in the wake of the abortive Essex rising.1 On the day before the
rising, someone had paid the Lord Chamberlain’s Men forty shillings to revive their old play about the deposing and killing of Richard II.2 As far as we
know, the play—almost certainly Shakespeare’s—was performed only once
at the Globe, but in Elizabeth’s bitter recollection the performance has metastisized:
“this tragedy was played 40tie times in open streets and houses.”3
The Queen enjoyed and protected the theater; against moralists who
charged that it was a corrupting and seditious force, she evidently sided with
those who replied that it released social tensions, inculcated valuable moral
lessons, and occupied with harmless diversion those who might otherwise
conspire against legitimate authority. But there were some in the Essex fac­
tion who saw in the theater the power to subvert, or rather the power to wrest
legitimation from the established ruler and confer it on another. This power,
notwithstanding royal protection, censorship, and the players’ professions of
unswerving loyalty, could be purchased for forty shillings.
The story of Richard II was obviously a highly charged one in a society
where political discussion was conducted, as in parts of the world today,
with Aesopian indirection.4 Clearly it is not the text alone—over which the
censor had some control—that bears the full significance of Shakespeare’s
play, or of any version of the story. It is rather the story’s full situation—
the genre it is thought to embody, the circumstances of its performance,
the imaginings of its audience—that governs its shifting meanings. “40tie
times in open streets and houses”: for the Queen the repeatability of the
tragedy, and hence the numbers of people who have been exposed to its
infection, is part of the danger, along with the fact (or rather her conviction)
that the play had broken out of the boundaries of the playhouse, where
such stories are clearly marked as powerful illusions, and moved into the
more volatile zone—the zone she calls “open”—of the streets. In the streets
the story begins to lose the conventional containment of the playhouse
where audiences are kept at a safe distance both from the action on stage
and from the world beyond the walls. And in the wake of this subversive
deregulation, the terms that mark the distinction between the lucid and the
real become themselves problematical: are the “houses” to which Elizabeth
refers public theaters or private dwellings where her enemies plot her over­
throw? can “tragedy” be a strictly literary term when the Queen’s own life
is endangered by the play?5
Modern historical scholarship has assured Elizabeth that she had nothing
to worry about: Richard II is not at all subversive but rather a hymn to Tudor6
order. The play, far from encouraging thoughts of rebellion, regards the dep­
osition of the legitimate king as a “sacrilegious” act that drags the country
down into “the abyss of chaos”; “that Shakespeare and his audience regarded
Bolingbroke as a usurper,” declares J. Dover Wilson, “is incontestable.”7

But in 1601 neither Queen Elizabeth nor the Earl of Essex were so sure: after
all, someone on the eve of a rebellion thought the play sufficiently seditious
to warrant squandering two pounds on the players, and the Queen under­
stood the performance as a threat. Moreover, even before the Essex rising,
the actual disposition scene (IV.i. 154—318 in the Arden edition) was care­
fully omitted from the first three quartos8 of Shakespeare’s play and appears
for the first time only after Elizabeth’s death.
How can we account for the discrepancy between Dover Wilson’s histor­
ical reconstruction and the anxious response of the figures whose history he
purports to have accurately reconstructed? The answer lies at least in part
in the difference between a conception of art that has no respect whatsoever
for the integrity of the text (“I am Richard II. Know ye not that?”) and one
that hopes to find, through historical research, a stable core of meaning
within the text, a core that unites disparate and even contradictory parts into
an organic whole. That whole may provide a perfectly orthodox celebration
of legitimacy and order, as measured by homilies, royal pronouncements,
and official propaganda, but the Queen is clearly responding to something
else: to the presence of any representation of deposition, whether regarded
as sacrilegious or not; to the choice of this particular story at this particular
time; to the place of the performance; to her own identity as it is present in
the public sphere and as it fuses with the figure of the murdered king. Dover
Wilson is not a New Critic:9 he does not conceive of the text as an iconic
object whose meaning is perfectly contained within its own formal structure.
Yet for him historical research has the effect of conferring autonomy and
fixity upon the text, and it is precisely this fixity that is denied by Elizabeth’s
response.
Dover Wilson’s work is a distinguished example of the characteristic
assumptions and methods of the mainstream literary history practiced in the
first half of our century, and a further glance at these may help us to bring
into focus the distinctive assumptions and methods exemplified in the essays
collected in this volume.’ To be sure, these essays are quite diverse in their
concerns and represent no single critical practice; a comparative glance, for
example, at the brilliant pieces by Franco Moretti and John Traugott2 will
suggest at once how various this work is. Yet diverse as they are, many of the
present essays give voice, I think, to what we may call the new historicism,
set apart from both the dominant historical scholarship of the past and the
formalist criticism that partially displaced this scholarship in the decades
after World War Two. The earlier historicism tends to be monological; that
is, it is concerned with discovering a single political vision, usually identical
to that said to be held by the entire literate class or indeed the entire pop­
ulation (“In the eyes of the later middle ages,” writes Dover Wilson, Richard
II “represented the type and exemplar of royal martyrdom” [p. 50]). This
vision, most often presumed to be internally coherent and consistent, though

occasionally analyzed as the fusion of two or more elements, has the status
of an historical fact. It is not thought to be the product of the historian’s
interpretation, nor even of the particular interests of a given social group
in conflict with other groups. Protected then from interpretation and con­
flict, this vision can serve as a stable point of reference, beyond contingency,
to which literary interpretation can securely refer. Literature is conceived
to mirror the period’s beliefs, but to mirror them, as it were, from a safe
distance.
The new historicism erodes the firm ground of both criticism and litera­
ture. It tends to ask questions about its own methodological assumptions
and those of others: in the present case, for example, it might encourage us
to examine the ideological situation not only of Richard II but of Dover
Wilson on Richard II. The lecture from which I have quoted—”The Political
Background of Shakespeare’s Richard II and Henry IV”—was delivered
before the German Shakespeare Society, at Weimar, in 1939. We might, in
a full discussion of the critical issues at stake here, look closely at the relation
between Dover Wilson’s reading of Richard II—a reading that discovers
Shakespeare’s fears of chaos and his consequent support for legitimate if
weak authority over the claims of ruthless usurper—and the eerie occasion
of his lecture (“these plays,” he concludes, “should be of particular interest
to German students at this moment of that everlasting adventure which we
call history” [p. 51]).
Moreover, recent criticism has been less concerned to establish the
organic unity of literary works and more open to such works as fields of force,
places of dissension and shifting interests, occasions for the jostling of ortho­
dox and subversive impulses. “The Elizabethan playhouse, playwright, and
player,” writes Louis Adrian Montrose in a brilliant recent essay, “exemplify
the contradictions of Elizabethan society and make those contradictions
their subject. If the world is a theatre and the theatre is an image of the
world, then by reflecting upon its own artifice, the drama is holding the
mirror up to nature.”3 As the problematizing of the mirror metaphor suggests,
Renaissance literary works are no longer regarded either as a fixed set of texts
that are set apart from all other forms of expression and that contain their
own determinate meanings or as a stable set of reflections of historical facts
that lie beyond them. The critical practice represented in this volume chal­
lenges the assumptions that guarantee a secure distinction between “literary
foreground” and “political background” or, more generally, between artistic
production and other kinds of social production. Such distinctions do in fact
exist, but they are not intrinsic to the texts; rather they are made up and
constantly redrawn by artists, audiences, and readers. These collective social
constructions on the one hand define the range of aesthetic possibilities
within a given representational mode and, on the other, link that mode to
the complex network of institutions, practices, and beliefs that constitute the
culture as a whole. In this light, the study of genre is an exploration of the
poetics of culture.