Essay 4—
"New Historicism"

The phrase, "the new historicism," is fundamentally ambiguous. It takes its force from the contrast it establishes with something else, "the old ——," but this is precisely where the ambiguity comes in.^[1] What is the contrasting term? If the stress is on the noun in the phrase, then the stress is on the new historicism as opposed to the old formalism. This is a perfectly understandable interpretation of the phrase, and it probably accounts for much of the phrase's success as a slogan. The opposition between formalism and historicism is immediately intelligible, and almost no one now willingly confesses to being a formalist—which, as John Hollander, among others, would remind us, is too bad (who will care about such things as meter?).^[2] The New Historicism thus nicely fits into a dialectical sequence with, and becomes the successor of, the New Criticism. The sequence becomes purely American, and deconstruction, with its complex and ambiguous political and philosophical entanglements, fades from the scene almost entirely.

As initially formulated by Stephen Greenblatt, however, the point of the phrase was not the new historicism but the new historicism.^[3] The

[1] See my remarks in Claude J. Summers and Ted-Larry Pebworth, eds., "The Muses Common-weale": Poetry and Politics in the Seventeenth Century, (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1988), 212–15.

[2] In The Happier Eden: The Politics of Marriage in the Stuart Epithalamium (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990), 269, Heather Dubrow has called for a "new formalism." It is a call, with full, ironic self-awareness, with which I am deeply sympathetic.

[3] See Greenblatt's foreword to "The Forms of Power and the Power of Forms in the Renaissance," special issue of Genre 15 (1982): 3–6.

contrast was not with formalism but with an older kind of historical scholarship, the new as opposed to the old historicism.^[4] It is this version of the contrast that captures the intended polemic of the phrase, and it is this polemic that I wish here to explore and, to some extent, to deplore. New Historicism seems to me best as a certain kind of critical praxis, a praxis that does not need to be theorized to be effective, and that does not need to indulge in polemics of any kind.^[5] One of the reasons Greenblatt prefers "cultural poetics" to "new historicism" is that it is not only wittier, more obscure, and more descriptive than the latter but also less polemical.^[6] The profession, however, has fixed on "New Historicism" as the name of the "movement" with which Greenblatt is associated because in the current atmosphere polemics are strongly encouraged. Both the agonistic mode and what is taken to be theoretical self-consciousness are de rigueur.

Both these demands seem to me unfortunate. Polemics are certainly necessary at times, but they are only justified by being necessary; otherwise they produce more heat than light. More importantly, I do not believe that the demand that all praxes be fully and systematically theorized, especially by those who are performing the praxes, is a legitimate demand, or even a sensible one. Why should we expect a good literary or cultural critic—or even an outstanding one like Stephen Greenblatt—to be a competent philosopher as well? There is no evidence that this is a common conjunction. The demand for the conjunction is, I think, a legacy of Theory. I certainly believe that scholars, critics, and historians should perform their praxes as intelligently and reflectively as possible, but intelligent and even reflective performance of a praxis is not the same as having the ability to give an abstract and systematic account of the principles that actually or supposedly underlie that praxis. The demand for such an account seems to me both to mistake the kind of praxis that historically informed literary or cultural scholarship is—namely, a mixed bag of other praxes—and to imply a false belief about

[4] For a useful and historically well-informed but somewhat inconclusive meditation on the propriety of the notion of a "new" historicism, see Brook Thomas, "The New Historicism and Other Old-fashioned Topics," in H. Aram Veeser, ed., The New Historicism (New York: Routledge, 1989), 182–203.

[5] On the lack of necessity of new historical practice to attempt to theorize itself, and on some of the problems it falls into when its practitioners attempt to do so, see Stanley Fish, "The Young and the Restless," in Veeser, New Historicism, 306–8.

[6] For "cultural poetics," see Renaissance Self-Fashioning from More to Shakespeare (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 4–5 (hereafter RSF ), and "Towards a Poetics of Culture," in Veeser, New Historicism, 1–14.

the general relation of praxes to philosophical accounts thereof. For quite a while (and to his credit), Greenblatt tried to resist the demand to "theorize" his practice, but his attempts at finally doing so ("The Circulation of Social Energy" and "Resonance and Wonder") do not seem to me to have produced work on a level with his praxis.^[7] This is not surprising, and it is hard for me to imagine rationally wishing for more general essays of this sort from him rather than for more essays on particular cultural and literary phenomena.

There are real differences, I believe, between the newer and the older modes of historical interpretation, and I do not wish to stand with Fish in denying these differences. I will try to describe some of them, but I will also try to show that the practitioners of the new need not be, and indeed cannot coherently be, supercilious to the old, and that current practitioners of the older modes need not feel defensive and entrenched against the new. The modes need each other and answer different questions. I would argue that a strict pluralism is in order here: different questions demand different answers.

One of the striking features of the Introduction to Renaissance Self-Fashioning, the book that initiated the new historicism in literary studies, is how halfhearted its polemical moves are (RSF, 4–6). Greenblatt warns against three possibilities. The first is a kind of interpretation that "limits itself to the behavior of the author" and thereby risks losing "a sense of the larger networks of meaning in which both the author and his works participate." That this is a risk is obvious, but that a study that focuses on an author necessarily falls into it is not. And these "larger networks of meaning" are left spectacularly unexplicated. It is only through knowing the special place that Greenblatt gives to intercultural violence that the phrase becomes at all intelligible. As we shall see, Greenblatt's approach to historical figures is not strikingly different from "literary biography (in either a conventionally historical or a psychoanalytic mode)" (RSF, 4), and where it is so, it buys its difference at a very high price, the price, in fact, of falling into the second, opposite fault that Greenblatt diagnoses. This fault occurs when literature is viewed "exclusively as the expression of social rules and instructions" and there-

[7] "The Circulation of Social Energy" appears as the first chapter of Shakespearean Negotiations (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1988); "Resonance and Wonder" appears as the final chapter of Learning to Curse: Essays in Early Modern Culture (New York: Routledge, 1990). For a discussion of a key passage in "Resonance and Wonder," see pp. 77–78 below. For Greenblatt's reluctance to theorize his practice, see "Towards a Poetics of a Culture," 1.

fore risks "being absorbed entirely into an ideological superstructure." This absorption is seen as negative, but no counsel is given as to how to avoid it, especially if "the behavior of the author" is not given a privileged position (we will see later the importance of the oddly behavioristic phrasing here).

Greenblatt's third caveat is closer to the first. It is against a conception that sees literature as too detached from social codes and that therefore loses its grasp of "art's concrete functions in relation to individuals and to institutions, both of which shrink into an obligatory 'historical background' that adds little to our understanding." Again, it is not clear why such "shrinkage" is necessary. Art can be seen as having a certain distance from prevailing codes without being seen as totally detached from them. And why must "historical background" add little to our understanding? The potential problem surely lies in the metaphor of "background." We all know books and articles in which "Part I: Background" has little or no effect on "Part II: Interpretation," but it is not clear why "background" or contextualization needs to be done in this inert way. In the best works of older historical interpretation, the "background" is anything but inert (to take a work directly related to Greenblatt's "Shakespeare and the Exorcists," William Elton's "King Lear" and the Gods comes to mind).^[8] The rejected critical modes seem to remain standing; only bad versions of them seem to be rejected. This is, I think, where things should be, but Greenblatt seems to want to establish more distance from these other modes than his own formulations actually allow.

The references to "art's concrete functions" and to "larger networks of meaning" are the phrases that are meant to do the work of suggesting a positive version of Greenblatt's own practice. Putting aside my conviction that the word "concrete" as an adjective always functions in a canting and mystificatory way, the phrase about art's functions points to an important premise of the new type of historical interpretation: art does certain "cultural work"; it participates in the cultural formations that it reflects, reflects on, and helps to create. The central idea is the Geertzian one of a "cultural system." Geertz's essay on "Art as a Cultural System" is perhaps the most important single text behind Greenblatt's new historicism in literary studies.^[9] To do a "cultural poetics" is

[8] William R. Elton, "King Lear" and the Gods (San Marino: The Huntington Library, 1966). For "Shakespeare and the Exorcists," see Essay 3, pp. 57–59 above.

[9] See Clifford Geertz, Local Knowledge: Further Essays in Interpretive Anthropology (New York: Basic Books, 1983), 94–120.

to "read" a culture in something like the way in which the New Critics read a poem, as a thematically unified whole in which all of what are taken to be the salient parts are "organically" or functionally related.^[10] Geertz thinks that there are central themes or modes for particular societies, themes that can be seen to pervade every social formation from high art and religion to the forms of market behavior (he sees his motivating questions as "What is the general form of a [particular culture's] life?" and "What exactly are the vehicles in which that form is embodied?").^[11] Greenblatt accepts this view; he sees the dominant mode of Renaissance (and modern) culture as the theatricalization of the self, and the dominant imaginative and practical activity of that (our) culture as the demonization (and destruction) of the other.

In order to suggest the powers and limits of this kind of historicism, I will look in some detail at the opening chapters of Renaissance Self-Fashioning, the chapters on the giant and literally opposed figures of More and Tyndale. What makes Greenblatt's chapter on More so impressive is that it attempts to deal with More's whole corpus and career, from the early epigrams through the controversial and devotional works, with More the hunter of heretics as well as with More the humanist and More the martyr. Greenblatt's treatment of More looks, as I have already suggested, very much like "literary biography (in either a conventionally historical or psychoanalytic mode)." It follows the course of More's life and it presents this life in the context of a familiar historical and causal mode: "as intellectuals emerged from the Church into an independent lay status, they had to reconceive their relations to power and particularly to the increasing power of the royal courts" (36). Greenblatt even—quite correctly, I believe—faults Louis Marin for underestimating the degree of authorial control in Utopia (23–24).

What makes Greenblatt's presentation of More distinctive and puts it in touch with "larger networks of meaning" is the idea that More's "project" was a "life lived as histrionic improvisation." "Histrionic improvisation" becomes the key to More's life and works. Greenblatt presents a picture of More as a man who saw all his roles as roles, and who saw selfhood as role playing. This sounds awfully Wittgensteinian

[10] For some useful background on the notion of "expressive causality" in Taine and in Romantic (Hegelian) historicism generally, see Frank Lentricchia, "Foucault's Legacy—A New Historicism?" in Veeser, New Historicism, 231–42.

[11] "From the Native's Point of View: On the Nature of Anthropological Understanding," in Local Knowledge, 70 (emphasis mine).

and modern, and Greenblatt intends this. He sees More as an inventor and early practitioner of "that complex, self-conscious, theatrical accommodation to the world which we recognize as a characteristic mode of modern individuality" (37). This is a brilliant and rich scheme, but it is a scheme nonetheless. The problem, as always, lies in denial and hyperbole. The scheme beautifully captures More's commitment to role playing, but it is committed to denying two things: (1) More's sense of inferiority, and (2) More's sense of role playing as a specific and important skill rather than an inevitable condition. This second point indicates where hyperbole and metaphysical inflation set in. Greenblatt twice takes a passage in which More emphasizes the importance of playing one's part correctly if one is going to take on a role as being about the necessity of role playing. The idea of role playing as an option drops away. Geertzian totalizing produces a whole set of misreadings.

For Greenblatt, Utopia is like Marx's Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts in propounding communism "less as a coherent economic program than as a weapon against certain tendencies in human nature" (37). This may be true—though I think More goes to some lengths to suggest that Utopian communism is "a coherent economic program"—but Greenblatt states this thesis only as a matter of degree ("less . . . than as"). The signs of special pleading—the discounting of the obvious and the "surface"—occur more clearly when Greenblatt specifies the "tendencies in human nature" that Utopia is attacking. He has to bypass the tendencies that More explicitly targets ("selfishness and pride, to be sure") in favor of the elimination of the histrionically conceived self, the focus of Greenblatt's scheme. Utopia has to be seen as a project for the elimination of selfhood, not for the elimination of economic acquisitiveness and need. So the reading of Utopia becomes familiarly dystopian. It must be the case that there is no real inferiority in Utopia—no real freedom, no real pleasure, no real toleration of different beliefs. Both the nonasceticism of Utopia and its genuine allowance of diversity of beliefs and intellectual tastes have to be downplayed by Greenblatt. The author—here, More—has been "absorbed entirely into an ideological superstructure."

A moment in Greenblatt's reading of Utopia simultaneously demonstrates the power and the limits of his approach. The characterization of Utopia (the imagined society) as a shame-culture is a fresh and major insight generated by Greenblatt's anthropological awareness. Like all

important literary insights, it makes many details of the text fall into place (especially about Utopian beliefs about the dead). But this insight itself becomes a limitation when it is totalized, and when the shame / guilt contrast is invoked in a schematic way. Utopia is seen not as an idealized classical society—the view that the best intellectual-historical treatment of the text suggests^[12]—but rather as a vision of freedom from guilt (RSF, 52). Guilt becomes the absent center of the text, and the theme of relief from guilt provides an entirely adventitious connection to Luther (for whom freedom from guilt was indeed central).^[13] Anthropological awareness here produces a scheme, shame versus guilt, that leads to a false historicization of a genuine and genuinely historicizable insight.

Both the connection to Luther and the question of interiority point us to Greenblatt's treatment of Tyndale and, therefore, of the Reformation. With regard to Tyndale, we can directly compare an "old historical" and a new historical approach, since much of the same material that Greenblatt treats in the second chapter of Renaissance Self-Fashioning is treated by C. S. Lewis in English Literature in the Sixteenth Century .^[14] Religion in general is something of a problem for New Historicism, which tends—unlike Renaissance English culture—to have a radically secular focus. This is not a problem when the historical materials themselves are strongly secular, as in Frank Whigham's work on courtesy books, but it is a problem when the materials themselves are religious.^[15] The tendency of New Historicism is to equate religion with ritual. Since the Reformation posits the centrality of an internal, non-ritual experience, it becomes a special difficulty for New Historicism. Practitioners of the mode tend to see the Reformation only as a process

[12] See R. W. Chambers, Thomas More (London: Jonathan Cape, 1953).

[13] Luther's account of conversion (his own and that of others) stressed freedom from anxiety and guilt. See "Preface to the Latin Writings" (1545) and The Freedom of a Christian , both in Martin Luther: Selections from his Writings, ed. John Dillenberger (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1961), 11–12, 52–85.

[14] C. S. Lewis, English Literature in the Sixteenth Century, Excluding Drama (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1954). Hereafter cited as ELSC .

[15] Frank Whigham, Ambition and Privilege: The Social Tropes of Renaissance Courtesy Theory (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1984). It should be noted, however, that there are some interesting moments of scriptural awareness in, for instance, Castiglione's Courtier (see the moment in book 2 of The Courtier in which Cesare Gonzaga claims that Federico Fregoso "stole" his point about strategic humility from the gospels; Baldesar Castiglione, The Book of the Courtier , trans. Charles S. Singleton [New York: Doubleday, 1959], 113). It should also be noted that the courtesy tradition did interact on a large scale with the religious tradition; see Essay 5 below.

of desacramentalization.^[16] They have great difficulty seeing in the Reformation any positive content. We have already noted Greenblatt's disposition to see Protestantism as Catholicism's "skeptical younger brother."^[17] Greenblatt knows that the Reformation was not simply a negative movement, but he has a great deal of difficulty conveying any positive sense of it.

Greenblatt's treatment of Tyndale is based upon paradoxes. The first is "the violence of Tyndale's vision of obedience"; the second is Tyndale's (and the general early Protestant) "fetishism of Scripture" (RSF, 90, 94). Both of these paradoxes derive from the sixteenth-century materials as described by the critic ; they are not produced through direct analysis of or quotation from the materials themselves. The function of both these formulations is to depict the early reformers as in a state of major tension and psychological stress. The Protestant rejection of so many of the long-standing institutions of European social life—confession, pilgrimages, prayers for the dead, etc.—seems to require this. Yet there is nothing necessarily paradoxical in Tyndale's rejection of a church that he considered idolatrous, nor in his simultaneous affirmation of a secular order that he believed to be divinely instituted and autonomous. The paradox of "violent obedience" is a way of psychologizing and pathologizing what seems (to Greenblatt) an almost unintelligible cultural radicalism.

The second paradox, the notion of the "fetishism of Scripture," is a partly anthropological and partly Freudian way of seeing Protestantism as continuous with the cultural processes that it attacks, as simply locating popular piety elsewhere—in the Book rather than the church, the relic, or the priest. There is an important truth here, but it is a purely behaviorist truth. It relies, as the early Protestants never did, on treating the Bible as an object in the world rather than as the conveyor of a message. The message was what was important, the content, not the physical existence of the book. A book is not simply an object. But, of course, it is an object, and Greenblatt is excellent on the newness of the object in question, the printed vernacular Bible, in the European world. As he says, "only those who had been brought up to think of the Bible as a Latin work could experience the full shock of the voice of God speaking to them in English from its pages" (96). This is a powerfully

[16] For this tendency, see Steven Mullaney, The Place of the Stage: License, Play, and Power in Renaissance England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), chap. 4.

[17] See Essay 3 above, p. 58.

historical insight, as is the idea (shared by John Foxe, the martyrologist) that printing was the most essential agent of the Reformation. What is missing from the account is any clear notion of what the voice of God was taken by the first generation of printed vernacular Bible readers to be saying . Greenblatt's approach here is like that of a keenly observant anthropologist who does not speak the language of the community he is observing.^[18]

Much of Greenblatt's account would have seemed straightforwardly correct to C. S. Lewis, especially the discussion of the influence of humanism on Tyndale (RSF, 102). This is a point, in fact, that Lewis made.^[19] Yet the one and only mention of Lewis in Greenblatt's chapter is oddly and jarringly hostile. In comparing More's career, at least apparently bifurcated between the tolerant humanist and the hammer of Protestants, with Tyndale's apparently single-minded career, Greenblatt notes, in a rather shocked tone, that Lewis "can even speak of 'the beautiful, cheerful integration' of [Tyndale's] world."^[20] Greenblatt goes on to acknowledge that what Lewis means by this phrase, which has nothing to do with Tyndale's biography, is true: "It is quite true," Greenblatt grudgingly concedes, "that Tyndale utterly denies the medieval distinction between religion and the secular life." This is the gesture that we have come to identify with special pleading. Something is being dismissed as merely true. But what Greenblatt concedes, the denial of the distinction between religion and the secular life, was Lewis's entire point. And it is a giant one. The distinction that, as Greenblatt acknowledges, Tyndale "utterly denies" was fundamental to the institutional life of the Middle Ages. It was the foundation of monasticism. The folding of the "religious" into the "secular" was, as Weber and others along with Lewis have seen, a profound intellectual and cultural revolutions.^[21] So Lewis was right to focus on the importance of the "cheerful integration" of the secular, the physical, and the spiritual in

[18] Compare James Holstun's trenchant remarks on the way in which, in the vivid opening pages of Discipline and Punish , Foucault "stripped Damiens' story [the attempted assassination of Louis XV] down to pure spectacle, giving no account at all of his reasons for attacking the king." See "Ehud's Dagger: Patronage, Tyrannicide, and Killing No Murder," Cultural Critique 22 (Fall 1992): 100–101 (italics mine).

[19] See ELSC, 31, 164, 186.

[20] RSF, 112; ELSC, 190.

[21] For the historical importance of the denial of this distinction, see ELSC, 163–64, 189–91; Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1904–5), trans. Talcott Parsons, foreword by R. H. Tawney (1930; pap. rpt., New York: Scribner's, 1958), especially chap. 3.

Tyndale's (Luther's) world view. Nevertheless, the phrase itself somehow acts, despite the specificity of its original context, as an irritant to Greenblatt. "Cheerful integration" cannot in any way be associated with Tyndale. "Nervous alliance" must be substituted for it. The suggestion of harmony, of lack of tension, is unacceptable. Like New Criticism, cultural poetics is a poetics of tension. The language of paradox must be present in or relevant to any serious object of study.^[22] Lewis is rejected—here and in regard to Spenser—for asserting wholeheartedness and affirmation. Even when Lewis is right he must be wrong.^[23]

In a deep sense, Tyndale is unintelligible in Greenblatt's account. Why would any sane person have wanted to be an early Protestant? After quoting a number of passages on original sin from Tyndale, Greenblatt notes, with obvious dutifulness, that "this vision of human loathsomeness is proclaimed, of course, only to be redeemed by the glad tidings" (94). "Of course." Greenblatt (like Fish) is not interested in "glad tidings," and he gives us no sense that we should be. The second half of the dialectic falls away. The vision of loathsomeness matters; the "glad tidings" do not. Greenblatt does follow Lewis in quoting Tyndale speaking (in, it should be noted, a characteristic early Protestant way) of laughing "from the low bottom of his heart," yet Greenblatt's only comment on this remarkable joy is the dutifully learned one that it echoes Luther's "famous sola fide " (RSF, 95 ).^[24] Lewis, on the other hand, using many of the same passages, provides a psychologically and philosophically plausible account of what the conception of total depravity was actually about—namely selfishness, egoism—and therefore of what the experience of feeling freed from it might have been like (ELSC, 187–90). It was freedom from niggling and anxious self-concern that produced this laughter from the bottom of the heart. Lewis evokes "the gigantic

[22] For "the language of paradox," see Cleanth Brooks, The Well Wrought Urn: Studies in the Structure of Poetry (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1947), chap. I.

[23] It should be said that in the Spenser chapter of RSF , the rejection through partial acceptance of "Lewis's brilliant account" is more fully argued (170). Nonetheless, the harshness of his treatment of Lewis stands out sharply against Greenblatt's customary generosity.

[24] See "A Pathway to the Holy Scripture," in Doctrinal Treatises and Introductions to Different Portions of the Holy Scriptures by William Tyndale, ed. Rev. Henry Walter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1848), 9. The Parable of the Wicked Mammon is Tyndale's ode to joy; see Doctrinal Treatises , 45–126. For other early Protestants, especially Thomas Bilney, see E. G. Rupp, "The Cambridge Reformers," in Studies in the Making of the English Protestant Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1947), 15–46.

effort" of Tyndale's theology "to leave room for disinterestedness," and he historicizes this evocation by suggesting "the desperate need for such an effort" that existed in the late medieval context.

This kind of sympathetic recreation of a world view, within a fully historicized context, is indispensable. At the same time, one would not want to forget the importance to the Reformation of the printed book. Anthropological and sociological awareness are important modes of perception and of historicization—new questions are raised and new patterns come into view-but we cannot do without intellectual history, especially when intellectual history is conceived of as involving not just what various ideas mean but also what it meant, and felt like, to hold them. For Lewis, "we want, above all, to know what it felt like to be an early Protestant" (ELSC, 32). "We" may not "want" this "above all"—we may want to be more resistant and suspicious readers—but we, as historicizing scholars, cannot do history only from the outside. The new historicism needs the old to give history an existence in persons; the old history needs the new to give persons an existence in a complex and often violent social world. The agent's conception of an action is neither irrelevant to it on the one hand nor fully constitutive of it on the other. Unlike Geertz, Greenblatt is not worried about "what happens to verstehen when einfühlen disappears." What Greenblatt seeks to know about Renaissance people is not Geertz's "what the devil they think they are up to." Geertz is as suspicious of empathy as Greenblatt is, but Geertz allows it a non-sinister, even necessary role, and he is deeply concerned with means of attaining the inside or "experience-near" point of view.^[25]

One of the theoretical charges that Greenblatt is most concerned to defend New Historicism against is the charge that, as a "historicism," it implies "the belief that processes are at work in history that man can do little to alter."^[26] Greenblatt is as notably unsuccessful in this defense as he is defending against the related charge that his work encourages a sense of political helplessness.^[27] In his comment on "processes . . . at work in history that man can do little to alter," Greenblatt objects to the ahistoricity of "man" (and, I suppose, its implicit sexism) by insisting

[25] Geertz discusses the problem of empathy in "From the Native's Point of View," Local Knowledge , esp. 59 and 70. The quotations from Geertz in the previous sentence are from pp. 56 and 58 respectively of this essay. For Greenblatt's stunning identification of a certain concept of empathy with what "Shakespeare calls 'Iago,'" see RSF , 225ff.

[26] See "Resonance and Wonder," in Learning to Curse , 164.

[27] On the imagination of resistance to established power in Greenblatt's work, see Essay 6, n. 1 below.

that New Historicism studies "selves fashioned and acting according to the generative rules and conflicts of a given culture." But this gives us selves without giving us agents. Greenblatt attempts to remedy this and to assert the New Historicism's "insistence on agency" by stating that in the New Historicism "even inaction or extreme marginality is understood to possess meaning and therefore to imply intention."^[28] But the issue of meaning is not the same as the issue of agency. All sorts of actions and events that are not the products of intention possess meaning. And to say that "to possess meaning" is "therefore to imply intention" short-circuits (in a familiar way borrowed from Stanley Fish and Walter Benn Michaels) the whole issue of intention on whose part.^[29] What becomes clear in Greenblatt's defense of "new historicism" against a dictionary definition of "historicism" is that, as would be equally true of a structuralist or a New Critic, it is in fact meanings rather than intentions that Greenblatt is interested in. He is not interested in the intentions and experiences of individual persons. He returns to cultural systems, to studying the patterns rather than the experiences of meaning in the past. Greenblatt's culturally fashioned selves are curiously empty, like the behaviorists' black boxes. They are created and recreated from the outside. These selves do not quite seem to be persons, a term that is missing from Greenblatt's "insistence on agency"—though not, it must be said again, from Geertz's anthropology.^[30]

Greenblatt's most extended treatment of the concept of a person is in his highly polemical, brief essay on "Psychoanalysis and Renaissance Culture."^[31] He there uses a rather spectacular case of imposture as a model for Renaissance selfhood and treats Hobbes's definition of a person as capturing the meaning of personal identity in the period. Yet the case of the false Martin Guerre seems to be one of straightforward fraud; the major ambiguities in the situation center on Bertrande, the wife, rather than on the impostor. If the impostor had claimed that even though he was born Arnauld du Tilh, he had, through the marital and social relations he had established in his assumed identity, a better title to being "Martin Guerre" than did the man given the name at birth, the case would suit Greenblatt's view and might bear the weight that he places

[28] "Resonance and Wonder," 164; emphasis mine.

[29] See W. J. T. Mitchell, ed., Against Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985).

[30] On the centrality of "the concept of person" to Geertz, see "From the Native's Point Of View," 59 and 69.

[31] Learning to Curse , 131–45.

on it. But Arnauld never took this route. The question at issue in the case, and in Hobbes's treatment, is legal identity.^[32] That this question does not bring subjectivity to the fore does not indicate anything about the status of subjectivity and the experience of personal identity in the period. It would not do so today. What this essay reveals, in its almost conscious hyperboles, is the strength of Greenblatt's desire to see Renaissance persons as entirely other than ourselves, as not persons, in our sense, at all.

The new historicism in Stephen Greenblatt, like the old historicism in Rosemond Tuve, is worst when it is at its most polemical. That "empathy" can have a sinister dimension is one of the most remarkable and important things that Greenblatt has taught us. But it does not have only a sinister dimension. We cannot successfully do history (or live in the world) without it. It name is not only Iago.

[32] See Natalie Zemon Davis, The Return of Martin Guerre (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1983). Davis returns to this case, and dissents from Greenblatt's view of it, in "On the Lame," American Historical Review 93 (1988): 572–603 (esp. 602).