Shakespearean Negotiations

The New Historicism: Studies in Cultural Poetics

by Stephen Greenblatt

The author has been at the centre of a shift in literary interpretation towards a critical method that places cultural creation in historical context. This book exemplifies the method in an examination of how collective beliefs and experiences are shaped, transferred from one medium to another, concentrated in manageable form, and offered to the public on the stage. As well as providing a new way of understanding Shakespeare, the book is an original analysis of a cultural process. The first chapter introduces the methods and purposes of the new historicism, and later chapters consider the types of cultural negotiation that shape the four main genres of Shakespearean history, comedy, tragedy and romance. Particular reference is made to "Henry IV", "Henry V", "Twelth Night", "King Lear" and "The Tempest", and the book includes analyses of such aspects of early modern culture as exorcism, cross-dressing, colonial propaganda and martial law codes.

Genres: Shakespeare, Nonfiction, History, Literary Criticism, Drama, Renaissance, Criticism

216 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1988

About the author

Stephen Greenblatt (Ph.D. Yale) is Cogan University Professor of English and American Literature and Language at Harvard University. Also General Editor of The Norton Anthology of English Literature, Eighth Edition, he is the author of nine books, including Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare; Hamlet in Purgatory; Practicing New Historicism; Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World; Learning to Curse: Essays in Early Modern Culture; and The Swerve: How the World Became Modern. He has edited six collections of criticism, is the co-author (with Charles Mee) of a play, Cardenio, and is a founding coeditor of the journal Representations. He honors include the MLA's James Russell Lowell Prize, for Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England, the Distinguished Humanist Award from the Mellon Foundation, the Distinguished Teaching Award from the University of California, Berkeley. He is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society. He lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and in Vermont.

Stephen Jay Greenblatt is a Pulitzer Prize winning American literary critic, theorist and scholar.

Greenblatt is regarded by many as one of the founders of New Historicism, a set of critical practices that he often refers to as "cultural poetics"; his works have been influential since the early 1980s when he introduced the term. Greenblatt has written and edited numerous books and articles relevant to new historicism, the study of culture, Renaissance studies and Shakespeare studies and is considered to be an expert in these fields. He is also co-founder of the literary-cultural journal Representations, which often publishes articles by new historicists. His most popular work is Will in the World, a biography of Shakespeare that was on the New York Times Best Seller List for nine weeks.

Reviews

[Mark Valentine · Rating 4 out of 5]

Greenblatt provides a context for understanding Shakespeare that enriches literary criticism. He reaches into the events that were happening around the playwright and traces how they appear in his plays. His chapter on exorcism as a public fraud and the possession that Edgar exhibits in Act III of King Lear, for example, is profound.

My favorite chapter occurs early, Invisible Bullets. Greenblatt explores reports published about the New World's discoveries and Shakespeare's infusion of this into The Tempest and other plays.

Recommended for any willing to deepen his or her appreciation of Shakespeare. Greenblatt writes really well too.

[T. Tokunaga]

【Shakespearean Negotiations / Stephen Greenblatt】

If you're surrounded by individualistic artistic people who mainly do theater nowadays, or even those notorious theater kids, you'd very likely feel hurt by this passage.

--The triumphant cunning of the theater is to make its spectators forget that they are participating in a practical activity, to invent a sphere that seems far removed from the manipulation of the everyday. (P18, 1 'The Circulation of Social Energy)

This book dives into its notorious (and renowned, in my opinion) blend of history and literature, from the comprehension of Indian anxiety of Harriot, an Elizabethan polymath, about later-revealed biological warfare (P36, 2 'Invisible Bullets') with Henry IV's rich glossary of Falstaff and the underclass and the incompleteness of the process leading to his gruesome sense of power.

In the Chapter 3, 'Fiction and Friction,' Montaigne's account, Jean le Fabvre's androgenious love, compared to Twelfth Night, "swerving," especially transvestism is taken as "festive and a time-honored theatrical method of achieving a conventional, reassuring resolution." (P70).

Chapter 4 focused on exorcism, with Samuel Harsnett, a bishop from late 16th century and Thomas Perry's fraud possession by devil case in 1620s and the concept of tragicomedy (P106), The Comedy of Errors and King Lear, especially in Edgar and Gloucester's harbouring between ritual performance and silence of God (P119).

Chapter 5, with Hugh Latimer, a Protestant martyr under Mary Tudor, in the sense of arousal of anxiety by inflation, social and population pressure and epidemics to turn into, eventually, love and affection, and its "condoning" in Measure for Measure and The Tempest, especially the climax between Ferdinand and Prospero, and failure of "anxiety and tolerance" with Caliban and Antonio the Duke.

[Marion]

Obwohl es ein wissenschaftliches Thema ist, was Greenblatt hier behandelt, ist es locker und lässig geschrieben, mit kleinen Anekdoten am Rande, die das Lesen und das Verständnis erleichtern!

[Glinsky]

“I have no wish to live in a culture where men believe in devils;” writes Greenblatt.
What an ugly, stupid thought that is.

[Paul · Rating 2 out of 5]

Largely vaporous Will-babble from one of the founders of the New Historicism.