ABSTRACT
Although I agreed with many points in the critique of Stephen Greenblatt’s essay on Marlowe developed by Howard Felperin in ‘Making it “neo”: the new historicism and Renaissance literature’ (Textual Practice, vol. 1, no. 3 (Winter 1987)), it seems to me that there is a serious difficulty in Felperin’s own position-a difficulty that extends well beyond this particular controversy to the larger enterprise of post-structuralism. His basic objection to Greenblatt’s essay is that it violates the post-structuralist principle (shared by both of them) which holds that there is no unmediated access to ‘real’ and ‘true’ knowledge of a literary text or a historical epoch (which is itself known to us only through texts), since all interpretations of texts are actually ‘productions’ of the interpreter, and that anyone seeking to ‘privilege’ his own ‘production’ of literature or history by a claim to truth and reality is therefore guilty of ‘hermeneutic hubris’. He certainly demonstrates that Greenblatt violates this principle, but I am afraid that in his demonstration he violates it himself. For one thing, he does not treat Greenblatt’s essay as a ‘text’ that he is now ‘producing’, because he clearly believes that he has immediate access to its real, true meaning-in fact he even complains that one passage in the essay is ‘less than transparent’ (p. 2.66), although he insisted earlier that the ‘assumption of linguistic transparency’ was an error of the ‘old historicism’ that all good poststructuralists reject (p. 2.64). And his argument is based upon a number of assertions, also clearly meant to be taken as true, about Marlowe’s plays and ‘project’, and about what the Elizabethans thought and even what they were unable to think (pp. 264, 275).
