New Historicism and Renaissance Drama

Richard Wilson, Richard Dutton

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781315504438
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

New Historicism has been one of the major developments in literary theory over the last decade, both in the USA and Europe. In this book, Wilson and Dutton examine the theories behind New Historicism and its celebrated impact in practice on Renaissance Drama, providing an important collection both for students of the genre and of literary theory.

1 The New Historicism in Renaissance Studies*

JEAN E. HOWARD

In 1986 the American journal ELR (English Literary Renaissance) devoted a special edition to New Historicism, and this effectively consolidated the movement for a ‘return of history’ in literary studies into a recognised school of criticism. Jean Howard’s contribution provided an overview of the theoretical issues at stake, and defined New Historicism from a sympathetic, though not uncritical perspective. Surveying the work in progress, Howard explains the movement in terms of the critique of essentialist humanism in wider contemporary theory: the assault on the concept of a universal and transhistorical ‘human nature’. It is as a consequence of this philosophical decentring, she suggests, that the New Historicist critics are drawn first and foremost to Renaissance literature, where the modern idea of an essential ‘Man’ was initially constituted. New Historicism is therefore committed to the premise that instead of passively reflecting history, Renaissance texts assisted in making it intelligible. This is a cautious formulation, and Howard is careful not to imply that art constructs the reality it represents. We reproduce here only the opening, more generalised sections of this essay.

A new kind of activity is gaining prominence in Renaissance studies: a sustained attempt to read literary texts of the English Renaissance in relationship to other aspects of the social formation in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. This development, loosely called the ‘new history’ and flourishing both in Europe and America, involves figures such as Stephen Greenblatt, Jonathan Dollimore, Alan Sinfield, Kiernan Ryan, Lisa Jardine, Leah Marcus, Louis Montrose, Jonathan Goldberg, Stephen Orgel, Steven Mullaney, Don E. Wayne, Leonard Tennenhouse, Arthur Marotti, and others. Journals such as ELH, English Literary Renaissance, Representations, and LTP: Journal of Literature Teaching Politics regularly publish ‘new history’ pieces. In short, a critical movement is emerging, and in this essay I want to look at the new historicism both to account for its popularity and to try to define what, if anything, is new about its approach to the historical study of texts and then to examine some instances of new historical criticism.

1

Historical scholarship linking Renaissance literary works to various non-literary historical contexts is not, of course, in and of itself, new, although in the last thirty years in particular, formalist approaches have been in the ascendency in some quarters of Renaissance studies. This is partly due to the importance of lyric and partly due to the importance of Shakespeare in the English curriculum. For quite different reasons, formalism has dominated the study of both. In America, the lyric poems of the Renaissance provided many of the set texts, the verbal icons, used by New Critics to demonstrate their critical methods, and several generations of students trained in the New Criticism now teach today’s students. And in both England and America, the plays of Shakespeare have often been treated not as products of a particular moment but as works for and of all times: universal masterpieces (Longhurst 1982). Consequently, until quite recently formalist studies of theme, genre, and structure dominated the criticism of these texts. History, when broached at all, usually meant the history of ideas, as in E.M.W. Tillyard’s famous study of the importance to Renaissance literature of the ‘Elizabethan world picture’ (Tillyard 1943). In part, then, the new historicism is a reaction against formalism, though one must note that certain very contemporary formalisms – particularly structuralism and deconstruction – have not been enormously influential in Renaissance studies. The novel and the Romantic and modern periods have more often provided the exemplary texts for these movements. By contrast, the new historicism has been taken up with particular intensity, in part has been created, by Renaissance scholars.

Why is this so? In part, I believe, many teachers of Renaissance literature simply have grown weary, as I have, of teaching texts as ethereal entities floating above the urgencies and contradictions of history and of seeking in such texts the disinterested expression of a unified truth rather than some articulation of the discontinuities underlying any construction of reality. Yet a purely formalist pedagogy should be debilitating for those who teach any literature, not just that of the Renaissance. Why, then, is it critics of Renaissance texts who have found in a new historicism an answer to their dissatisfaction?

The answer, I believe, lies partly in the uncanny way in which, at this historical moment, an analysis of Renaissance culture can be made to speak to the concerns of late twentieth-century culture. For a long time the Renaissance as cultural epoch was constructed in the terms set forth by Jacob Burckhardt; it was the age of the discovery of man the individual, the age of the revival of classical culture, the age of the secularization of life. How enmeshed this picture was in nineteenth-century ideology is now clear, but it may be less clear what the current revival of interest in the Renaissance may have to do with twentieth-century concerns. Consider, for example, the work of Jonathan Dollimore, who is particularly interested in the way in which what he calls essentialist humanism has both dominated the study of English literature in the twentieth century and also has prevented recognition of the fact that man is not so much possessed of an essential nature as constructed by social and historical forces. Looking back at the seventeenth century, Dollimore sees it as a sort of privileged era lying between the Christian essentialism of the Middle Ages – which saw man as a unitary being who took his essence from God – and Enlightenment humanism – which first promulgated the idea of man the individual: a unified, separate, and whole entity with a core of identity emanating from within. For Dollimore, the late Renaissance was the age of skepticism in which in the drama in particular one finds recorded a recognition of the discontinuous nature of human identity and its social construction (Dollimore 1984). It is not hard to see affinities between this picture of the Renaissance and certain contemporary understandings of our own historical moment as the post-humanist epoch in which essentialist notions of selfhood are no longer viable.

I will return later to the theoretical issues raised by the fact that when a new historian looks at the past he or she is as likely as an old historian to seen an image of the seeing self, not an image of the other. But for the moment I want to continue to pursue further the way in which ‘the Renaissance’ is being reunderstood within that configuration of periods which constitutes the framework by which literary historians make the past intelligible. Within this framework the Renaissance has usually been assigned a transitional position between the Middle Ages – held to be encumbered with a monolithic Christian ideology and a static and essentially unhistorical view of itself – and the modern era – marked by the rise of capitalism with its attendant bourgeois ideology of humanism, progress and the all-important inferiority and self-presence of the individual. Almost inevitably, this construction of the past has produced the question: just how modern and how medieval was this transitional period? Burckhardt, looking back at Renaissance Italy from mid-nineteenth-century Germany, stressed the modernity of the Renaissance, its sense of itself as definitively different from prior periods of history. Others have insisted on the fundamental continuity between the Renaissance and the Middle Ages. But now, as critics and historians sense the modern era slipping away and a new episteme inchoately emerging, the Renaissance is being appropriated in slightly different terms: as neither modern nor medieval, but as a boundary or liminal space between two more monolithic periods where one can see acted out a clash of paradigms and ideologies, a playfulness with signifying systems, a self-reflexivity, and a self-consciousness about the tenuous solidity of human identity which resonate with some of the dominant elements of postmodern culture.

In short, I would argue that the Renaissance, seen as the last refuge of preindustrial man, is of such interest to scholars of the postindustrial era because these scholars construe the period in terms reflecting their own sense of the exhilaration and fearfulness of living inside a gap in history, when the paradigms that structured the past seem facile and new paradigms uncertain. Clearly this emerging reading of the Renaissance is made possible by the traditional emphasis on the Renaissance as an age of transition. Previously critical emphasis was on continuity – on the way the period linked to the past or anticipated the future. Now the emphasis is on discontinuity, seen most clearly perhaps in Dollimore’s insistence on the early seventeenth century as a kind of interperiod standing free of the orthodoxies of the Middle Ages and the Enlightenment. But the difference between prior and past conceptions of the Renaissance is also clear in the way the new historical critics so often make the period intelligible by narratives of rupture, tension, and contradictions, as, for example, when Greenblatt talks about the gap between the Renaissance ideology of human freedom and the actuality of Renaissance man as the subject of determining power relations (Greenblatt 1980), or, as we shall see, when Louis Montrose stresses the enormous contradictions in the social formation which Renaissance literature attempted to mediate. And, as I have been hinting, these narratives of discontinuity and contradiction are narratives which owe much to the way late twentieth-century man construes his own historical condition.

Having said this much, I hope it is clear that I don’t find it odd or arbitrary that the new historical criticism has taken the Renaissance as one of its primary objects of study. And I hope it is clear that at least in one respect I find the ‘new history’ resembling older forms of historical inquiry in that both see the past at least in part through the terms made available by the present. This observation, moreover, raises a more fundamental question: in just what ways is the ‘new’ historical criticism new? Does its newness consist simply in its break with the formalism that has long been prominent in the study of Renaissance literature? Is its newness due mainly to the way it draws a somewhat different picture of the Renaissance than Burckhardt drew? Or are its methods and its understanding of what constitutes the historical investigation of texts in some fundamental way different from those which enabled an earlier historical criticism?

To answer these questions, I want to sketch what must of necessity be a simplified picture of some of the assumptions underlying the historical criticism of a figure such as Tillyard. These assumptions include the following: that history is knowable; and that historians and critics can see the facts of history objectively. (This last assumption is particularly paradoxical since it rests on the premise that while literature is implicated in history, historians and critics are not). The criticism resulting from these premises often led to the trivialization of literature: to its reduction to a mere reflection of something extrinsic to itself, and to the trivialization of criticism: its reduction to a mode for explaining (not reading) texts in terms of their relationship to a fixed ground, such as James I’s monarchical practices, English imperialism, or Puritan theology. At its worst, such criticism reduced literary study to the search for topical references; at its best it illuminated particular texts in relationship to great men or events or ideas of a period, but its distinguishing mark was always the assumption that literature was a mirror reflecting something more real and more important than itself.

Contemporary theoretical work, it seems to me, has seriously put in question a number of these assumptions. For example much reception and reader-response criticism has directly challenged the idea that a reader/interpreter can ever escape his or her own historicity in order to encounter objectively the historical difference encoded in texts. Consequently, one must question the status of that ‘knowledge’ about the past produced either by the historian or the historically minded critic. Similarly, Saussurian linguistics has challenged the premise that language functions referentially. One mode of historical criticism assumes that literature is connected to history in that its representations are direct reflections of historical reality, but one must ask what happens to that assumption when the referentiality of language itself is questioned. If literature refers to no ground extrinsic to itself, what can be the nature of its relationship to an historical context or to material reality? In fact, if one accepts certain tendencies in poststructuralist thought, is the possibility of an historical criticism even conceivable?

It is only by addressing these and a number of other equally urgent theoretical issues that a new historical criticism can distinguish itself from an older, more positivistic critical practice. The new historicism may well turn out to be an important extension of the theoretical ferment of the past two decades, a movement which will fundamentally rethink how we study texts in history. On the other hand, there is a real danger that the emerging interest in history will be appropriated by those wishing to suppress or erase the theoretical revolution that has gone on in the last several decades. Ironically, the ‘new history’ may well turn out to be a backlash phenomenon: a flight from theory or simply a program for producing more ‘new readings’ suited to the twenty-five-page article and the sixty-minute class (Levin 1979). Readings remain, after all, the dominant form of scholarly production in the discipline, and as many are discovering, a cursory journey through Lawrence Stone or Keith Thomas can open up numerous possibilities for new readings based on the ostensible family structure, economic dilemmas, or political upheavals of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. There is nothing inherently wrong with doing readings, but if those readings are based on untenable or unexamined assumptions about literature and history, then they are merely a form of nostalgia and not a serious attempt to explore what it means to attempt an historical criticism in a postmodern era.

In order to evaluate just how new the historical work being done in regard to Renaissance literature really is, I want to do two things. First, I wish to examine in much greater detail some of the theoretical issues facing any historical criticism today and, second, to examine in some detail the work of two of the best practitioners of the new history – Stephen Greenblatt and Louis Montrose – in order to see how they engage or ignore the problematics of their undertaking. From this double examination I hope it will be possible to suggest some of the directions in which such criticism must move if its newness is to be fundamental and not cosmetic.

2

In order to understand what does, or might, constitute the core of a truly new historical criticism one must begin, I believe, with the basic issue of what one assumes to be the nature of man, the creature whose works, thought, and culture have been the focus of most historical inquiry. One of the most striking developments of contemporary thought is the widespread attack on the notion that man possesses a transhistorical core of being. Rather, everything from maternal ‘instinct’ to conceptions of the self are now seen to be the products of specific discourses and social processes (Foucault 1970). This is a much more radical view of just how thoroughly man is a creature of history than has obtained in the past. It is quite different to argue that man has no essential being and to argue that, while in different periods people display different customs and social arrangements, they nonetheless possess an unchanging core of human traits that makes them all part of ‘the family of man’ (Barthes 1972).

One can see the idea of a transhistorical human essence in Jonas Barish’s very fine study of what he calls ‘the anti-theatrical prejudice’ in Western culture. For him, the prejudice, while taking slightly different forms from antiquity to the present, nonetheless reflects a fear or a distrust innate to or inherent in the human mind (Barish 1981). Barish does not really entertain the possibility that a phenomenon in one period, which seems analogous to a phenomenon in another, may arise amid such different social conditions and play such a different role in a culture’s power relations and discursive systems that the two phenomena cannot be seen as continuous with one another or as the products of an underlying human nature.

By contrast, Jonathan Dollimore, in his study of seventeenth-century tragedy, takes as his point of departure the idea – which he sees inscribed within Renaissance texts – that man has no essential nature, no traits not the product of social forces at a particular historical juncture (Dollimore 1984). Consequently, while Barish assumes an essential core of humanness which history can modify or shape in various ways, Dollimore assumes that nothing exists before the human subject is created by history. Consequently, an historical criticism working from Dollimore’s premises will find an enormous range of new topics open for historical investigation; topics such as the way emotions and what we call instincts – and not just economic structures or political beliefs – are produced in a particular, historically specific social formation, and the way, of course, in which literature variously participates in this process of construction.

While one may accept in theory that there is no shared human essence linking contemporary man to Renaissance man, however, that does not solve the problem of how one is to acknowledge or recognize the radical otherness of the past. As I suggested earlier, there is a powerful tendency to appropriate the past in terms of the present, and contemporary reader-response theorists have acutely drawn the attention of literary critics to the extent to which the interpreter and his or her historical moment are present in their interpretations of earlier literary works. Hayden White has been perhaps the most eloquent spokesperson for the view that the same is true for historians. For White, interpretation is a key part of each historian’s work and consists largely of providing a ‘plot structure for a sequence of events so that their nature as a comprehensible process is revealed by their figuration as a story of a particular kind’, that is, as a narrative intelligible to the readers of a particular age (White 1978). White stresses how thoroughly the historical discipline differs from a pure descriptive science and how much it owes to literary art, as, through its dominant tropes and narrative structures, it gives to ‘history’ a shape owing as much to the patterns of intelligibility available to the historian from his own culture as to those that may have informed a prior age.

Similarly, Tzvetan Todorov in his book on the Spanish conquest of Central America takes as his primary concern the way the Spanish dealt with the otherness of the American Indians, either by construing them as nonhuman or bestial and, as such, fair game for any kind of genocidal treatment, or by construing them as embryonic Europeans needing only the help of a Spanish education and a Spanish religion to make them mirrors of their white ‘brothers’. In neither case was the difference of the Indian tolerated or allowed to interrogate European ways. Instead, the Indians were either denied inclusion within the category of the human or assimilated utterly into the Spanish idea of what the human was (Todorov 1984).

Recognizing in a fresh way the difficulty of escaping the prison of the present moment and present culture to realize historical and cultural otherness, how is a contemporary historical criticism to proceed? One of Michel Foucault’s central contributions to contemporary historical studies has been to recognize and strive against the tendency to project the present into the past and so to construct narratives of continuity. He counters this tendency by postulating the notion of radical breaks between historical epistemes. He refuses to look for continuities, for precursors of one era in former eras, but by a massive study of the situated discourses of particular disciplines he attempts to let their strangeness, their difference, speak (Foucault 1977). Foucault’s is a procedure of vigilance, and it produces some remarkable results. But it does not erase the fact that there is no transcendent space from which one can perceive the past ‘objectively’. Our view is always informed by our present position; the objects we view available only in the slipperiness of their textualization. That does not seem to me to negate the project of historical investigation, but it does mandate a transformed attitude toward it. First of all, it seems necessary to abandon the myth of objectivity and to acknowledge that all historical knowledge is produced from a partial and a positioned vantage point. Further, instead of evoking a monolithic and repressive ‘history’ one must acknowledge the existence of ‘histories’ produced by subjects variously positioned within the present social formation and motivated by quite different senses of the present needs and present problems which it is hoped will be clarified or reconfigured through the study of the past.

The intellectual historian Dominick LaCapra captur...