EXPLAIN THE MAIN TENETS OF NEW HISTORICISM AND ITS RELATION TO SHAKESPEAREAN STUDIES

By the early 1980s, New historicism, also known as “the return of history”, emerged as a post-structuralist
approach that introduced a groundbreaking system of historical analysis of Renaissance texts. American
new historicists such as Stephen Greenblat, Louis Montrose, Jonathan Goldberg, Stephen Orgel or Leonard
Tennenhouse, and British new historicists, also known as cultural materialists, such as Jonathan Dollimore,
Alan Sinfield, Catherine Belsey, Francis Barker or Raymond Williams, among many others, opposed the
historical analysis developed by Tillyard in the 1940s. Tillyard viewed history as something that objectively
reflected reality and the literary text as a mere mirror of historical facts and values of the age. Tillyard
observed just one divine and monarchic dominant Elizabethan world picture and considered its culture
and history as unified, ordered and stable entities where subversive elements had no place. He saw history
and culture in structuralist terms, since they are viewed as ordered structures with a ruling centre or origin
engendered by the ruling classes in their own interests.

New historicists radically oppose these conclusions. Fists of all, they point out the textuality of history
and, by following the post-structuralist idea that there is never a pure correspondence between language
and its external referent, new historicists consider that historical accounts are unable to show us the facts
of the past objectively. Consequently, literature cannot directly reflect historical reality either. Secondly,
new historicists defend a post-structuralist definition of history as a discontinuous structure without a
centre. For new historicism, there is not just one but multiple and sometimes even antagonistic histories
where everything, including dissenting and challenging voices, has its significant place within the social
formation. New historicism points out the discontinuity of reality and not is uniformity. For new
historicism history is understood as the multiform result of a convergence of social discourses such as the
historical, the religious, the scientific, the political, the educational, as well as the literary. Consequently,
the literary text is considered as one of the multiple social discourses that contribute to construct such
heterogeneous history. A literary text is a site of intertextuality in which we can identify the presence and
interconnection of elements that belong to multiple and diverse cultural discourses.

Deeply influenced by Foucault, in Shakespearean Negotiations (1988), Stephen Greenblatt, founding figure
of new historicism , defines the text, and more specifically the Renaissance play, not as “the central, stable
locus of theatrical meaning”. Greenblatt views the plays as historical “monuments”. According to
Greenblatt, the literary work is one of those cultural practices that are constantly circulating in society and
getting in contact with the rest. The diverse discourses that converge in a play and the relationship
between them turn it into a faithful reflection of the process that he calls “circulation of social energy”. To
Greenblatt, literary works, and more specifically, Shakespeare’s plays, are essential constituents of such a
social process.

The author precedes his or her work in the sense that it is the result of the interconnection of different
social discourses at work in the construction of a certain culture. Authors are not free or autonomous but
dependent upon the social forces around them and are, consequently, mere intermediaries between
ideology and the literary text.

Definitions of culture as “a set of control mechanisms” and man as a “cultural artefact” are appropriated
by Greenblatt in his work Renaissance Self-Fashioning (1980) and turn into two of the most significant new
historicist maxims.For new historicism, man is controlled, constrained and shaped by social and historical
forces and turned into an ideological construction. Consequently, the term “subjectivity” acquires in this
context a new meaning. It does not refer to an inherent and transitional human essence untouched by
external constraints. It now alludes to the process of “subjectification” by means of which man is
“subject”, is dependent upon, is subordinate to the social and cultural pressures of its own age.

This conception of the human being is closely related to the reason why new historicists choose
Renaissance literary texts as their main object of study. Jonathan Dollimore describes the early 17th
century as a transitional period between two different ages and two different notions of the human being,
respectively predicated on the Christian essentialism of the Middle Ages and the essentialist humanism of
the Enlightment.

The influential Marxist thinker Louis Althusser analyses the process by which human subjects are shaped by
ideology. Ideology fashions man through the workings of what Althusser calls the ISA (Ideological State
Apparatusses), that is, “a certain number of realities which present themselves to the immediate observer in
the form of distinct and specialized institutions” (the government, the Army, the Police, the Courts, the
Prisons, etc. Which work by repression and violence. The instrument these ISA use in order to shape and
control human consciousness is the language at work in the social processes, that is, the ideological
discourse.

In History of Sexuality I (1976), Foucault states that power comes not from what he calls “the primary
existence of a central point, in a unique source of sovereignty from which secondary and descendent forms
would emanate”. Foucault redefines the traditional idea of power by alluding to the “microphysics of
power”. Power is not just located in dominating institutions such as the family, the school, the church, the
court or the mass media that help to construct the ruling ideology of each social formation. Since power is
everywhere, it is also located in the transgressive and subversive forces of society that are repressed,
excluded and silenced. He points out the bond between power and desire. Where there is desire, the
power relation is already present. Since, as Foucault states, power is everywhere, it is also present in
literary texts. For new historicism Elizabethan drama and its theatrical discourse are sites of power that
actively participate in the social construction of the early modern period. New historicists consider that
Foucault’s theories on subversion and containment were actively performed on the Elizabethan stage,
explicitly by those plays whose central theme was political such as the history plays.

For American new historicists, the insubordination reflected by the dramatic text is allowed to emerge in
order to be contained and thus reaffirm the monarchical hegemony. Consequently, theatrical discourse
does not challenge but reproduces the ruling ideological construction of reality and reinforces the
monarchical discourse. In Renaissance Self-Fashioning, Greenblatt states that the subversive element in
society, that is, the alien, the Other, is necessary in order to fashion the identity of those who are
submissive and subordinate to the absolute power or authority.

Dollimore opposes Greenblatt’s assertions and states that though subversion could be used to strengthen
authority, it can also be used against it. For cultural materialists, Elizabethan theatre, at the same time
that reinforced the state power, was also a site of ideological contestation. Dollimore emphasises the
political role of dissident voices able to transform dominant discourses and thus weaken the ruling
ideological structure. By giving an active voice to the oppressed, excluded and exploited, cultural
materialism offers a wider view of the complexity of Renaissance society. Culture is considered as a
multiplicity of voices, as a site of struggle and contradiction. Some cultural materialists have used Bakhtin’s
concept of “carnival”: the power of popular voices to disrupt official order by mocking it and using parody
and the grotesque in order to challenge social rigidity and rules.
The term “materialism” implies that such a culture cannot be isolated from the material conditions of
society such as politics and economy. As a constituent part of such a culture, of such a signifying system,
literature is also embedded within these material ideological forces. According to Dollimore, cultural
materialism presents “a combination of historical context, theoretical method, political commitment and
textual analysis”. Of these four characteristics, the political commitment is what also differentiates
American new historicism from cultural materialism. The latter is a much more politically radical movement
than the former. When analysing Renaissance drama they deal not jus with the material conditions of the
17th century but they appropriate the texts in order to denounce political, economic or social issues at work
nowadays.

Dollimore applies materialist theories of subjectivity to the analysis of King Lear. He opposes the Christian
and humanist analysis of the play’s protagonist. The analysis of Lear’s identity does not find in the character
the reflection of a human essence that all human beings share as Christian essentialism and essentialist
humanism would claim. The examination of Lear’s tragedy demonstrates that his subjectivity is closely
linked to the social and ideological circumstances, that is, the material realities that surround him.

Macbeth has traditionally been analysed as a reinforcement of James I’s power. However, materialist
criticism has opposed such interpretation of the play. Analysis such as Synfield’s, show how there are
textual traces in the play that show that it also subverts the hegemony of the monarchical power.

Greenblatt participates in the critical controversy that evolves around the figure of Henry V. Some critics
have merely ignored those textual traces that point out the ambiguity of Shakespeare’s characterisation,
others have directly alluded to such ambivalence. Greenblatt presents an innovative way of analysing the
text by stressing the new historicist paradoxical way of using the idea of subversion as reinforcement of
authority.

Montrose shows a completely different way of analysing As You Like It. Most critical texts about this play
mainly centre on the issue of gender relations and the connotations of Rosalind’s disguise. From his new
historicist perspective, Montrose relates social and literary discourse. He considers that Orlando’s
situation alludes to the current social problematic about the law of primogeniture that would be affecting
a great part of the audience. Montrose also presents the new historicist idea that Greenblatt stated in
Renaissance Self-Fashioning about the “social presence to the world of the literary text and the social
presence of the world in the literary text.”