ABSTRACT
Any attempt to characterise new historicism and evaluate its contribution to our understanding of Renaissance literature could legitimately confine itself to Stephen Greenblatt’s ‘Invisible Bullets’. He himself would probably regard this as his major Shakespearean project, having revised it three times and given it pride of place at the beginning of Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England.1 The essay focuses on Henry IV and Henry V, but its argument is purportedly applicable to all the histories (23) and indeed to all Shakespeare’s plays (40). It is arguably the most important study of Shakespeare and of Renaissance culture in the new-historicist mode. Some have objected that it produces a view of Shakespeare which is politically unacceptable insofar as it confirms the Foucaultian stress on the futility of resistance and subversion. My own concern, however, is less with Greenblatt’s conclusions than with how he arrives at them: with the coherence of his arguments, his use of evidence, and the precise nature of his methodology. Given the cult status of this essay, and given too the institutional distinction of Greenblatt himself (winner, with Shakespearean Negotiations, of the Modern Language Association of America’s prize for An Outstanding Literary Study, President of that Association in 2002, and hailed by PMLA’s editor in 2003 as ‘an intellectually unimpeachable source’ of scholarly advice), an analysis of the kind I am offering here seems worthwhile. It constitutes in effect a localised inquiry into standards of excellence in the professional study of literature today.
