Revisiting The Tempes *

The most significant criticism of Tudor and Stuart literary texts in recent years has returned these texts to the cultural moment that first produced them. Explicitly or not, such literary criticism has contributed to a deepening understanding of historical consciousness in the period. “Considering literary texts not as autonomous utterances out of history, but as illustrations of a Renaissance culture whose forms of representation are conditioned by the social, political world they participate in,” Thomas Healy observes, “has prompted readings of texts which seek to restore their former agencies and original discursive energies.” ¹ While he goes on to ask how we might best gain access to such a culture—a highly rhetorical one that privileged feigning—the general practice has been to follow the “interpretive theory of culture” of Clifford Geertz and his principle of “thick description” as practiced by Stephen Greenblatt, Louis Adrian Montrose, and Steven Mullaney among others—that is, in the words of Geertz, “the study of culture [in which] the signifiers are not symptoms or clusters of symptoms, but symbolic acts or clusters of symbolic acts.” For Geertz, all possible observations of a culture are “inscriptions” of it, and his practice is one of “setting down the meaning particular social actions have for the actors whose actions they are, and stating, as explicitly as we can manage, what the knowledge thus attained demonstrates about the society in which it is found.” ²