Stephen Greenblatt's Background
Stephen Greenblatt is the literary critic most closely associated with New Historicism, the approach he helped define starting in the early 1980s. His core argument is straightforward: you can't separate a literary text from the historical moment that produced it. Texts don't carry timeless, fixed meanings. They're shaped by the culture around them, and they shape that culture in return.
Education and Early Career
- Graduated from Yale University with a B.A. in English and received his Ph.D. from Yale in 1969
- Taught at the University of California, Berkeley from 1969 to 1997, holding positions including Professor of English and Chair of the English Department
- Joined the faculty of Harvard University in 1997, where he holds the title of John Cogan University Professor of the Humanities
Influential Works and Ideas
Greenblatt's major publications include Renaissance Self-Fashioning (1980), Shakespearean Negotiations (1988), and Hamlet in Purgatory (2001). Across these works, several key ideas emerge:
- Cultural poetics: His term for studying the relationship between literature and the social, political, and cultural conditions surrounding its production and reception. This phrase became nearly synonymous with New Historicism itself.
- Literature as historically situated: Literary texts aren't timeless or universal. They're products of specific historical circumstances, and those circumstances shape what the texts mean.
- Circulation of social energy: Texts don't just passively reflect their culture. They actively participate in it, absorbing and redistributing the beliefs, anxieties, and power dynamics of their moment. Think of a text as a node in a network of cultural forces, both receiving and transmitting social meaning.
New Historicism Movement
New Historicism emerged in the late 1970s and early 1980s as a challenge to formalist and structuralist approaches that treated literary texts as self-contained objects. Where formalism asked "How does this text work internally?", New Historicism asks "What cultural work does this text do in its historical moment?"
The movement draws on history, anthropology, sociology, and cultural studies to place literary texts within their broader contexts.
Origins and Influences
- Developed partly in response to the limits of New Criticism and structuralism, which focused on a text's internal features while bracketing out history
- Drew on Marxist criticism (attention to ideology and material conditions), poststructuralism (the instability of meaning), and cultural studies (the blurring of "high" and "low" culture)
- Michel Foucault's work on power and discourse was especially influential, providing tools for analyzing how power operates through cultural institutions and texts
- Key figures alongside Greenblatt include Louis Montrose and Catherine Gallagher
Key Principles
- Literature is a product of specific historical and cultural circumstances, not a universal art form floating above history.
- The meaning of a text isn't fixed. It's constantly negotiated by readers across different historical moments.
- Power relations are inscribed in literary texts. Studying literature can reveal how texts reinforce or challenge the social hierarchies of their time.
- The boundary between "literature" and other cultural forms (legal documents, sermons, travel narratives, political speeches) is porous. New Historicists frequently read literary texts alongside non-literary ones to understand how meaning circulates across a culture.
Relationship to Other Theories
New Historicism overlaps with cultural materialism (the British counterpart associated with Raymond Williams and Jonathan Dollimore), but the two differ in emphasis. Cultural materialism tends to foreground resistance and dissent within texts, while New Historicism often focuses on how texts participate in systems of power, sometimes containing or neutralizing the subversion they seem to express.
Both approaches share ground with Marxist criticism in their attention to ideology, but New Historicism is less committed to a systematic economic framework. Its debt to poststructuralism, particularly Foucault and Derrida, shows up in its skepticism toward stable meanings and its interest in how discourse constructs reality.
Greenblatt's Approach to Literature
Literature as Cultural Artifact
For Greenblatt, a literary text is never autonomous. It's a cultural artifact embedded in the social world. This means studying a Shakespeare play requires studying the religious controversies, political anxieties, economic pressures, and everyday practices of early modern England alongside it.
The goal isn't just to use history as "background" for the text. It's to show how the text and its surrounding culture are mutually constitutive: the culture shapes the text, and the text participates in shaping the culture.
The Anecdote as Method
One of Greenblatt's signature moves is opening an analysis with a striking historical anecdote, often drawn from a non-literary source (a court record, a travel narrative, a theological treatise). He then uses that anecdote to illuminate something unexpected about the literary text under discussion. This technique does two things: it demonstrates the porousness between literary and non-literary discourse, and it models the kind of surprising connections New Historicism seeks to uncover.
Circulation of Social Energy
This concept is central to Greenblatt's method. Social energy refers to the capacity of cultural forms to produce and organize collective experiences like pleasure, anxiety, wonder, or dread. Literary texts don't just reflect social energy; they capture it, transform it, and redirect it.
In Shakespearean Negotiations, Greenblatt describes his project as studying "the collective making of distinct cultural practices and inquiry into the relations among these practices." A play performed on the Elizabethan stage, for example, draws energy from religious rituals, legal proceedings, and political ceremonies, then recirculates that energy in new forms for its audience.
Major Works and Analyses
Renaissance Self-Fashioning (1980)
This book launched Greenblatt's career and helped define New Historicism. It examines how six figures from the English Renaissance (including Thomas More, Edmund Spenser, and Christopher Marlowe) constructed their identities through cultural practices like writing, courtly behavior, and religious devotion.
The central argument: the "self" in the Renaissance wasn't a stable, pre-existing thing. It was actively fashioned through engagement with cultural institutions and discourses. Identity was a performance shaped by available cultural scripts, and literature was one of the primary sites where that performance took place.
Shakespearean Negotiations (1988)
Here Greenblatt applies his method directly to Shakespeare's plays, reading them alongside non-literary texts from early modern England. He explores how the plays negotiate issues like gender roles, religious belief, and political authority.
A famous example: Greenblatt analyzes how the theater's practice of using boy actors to play female roles intersects with broader cultural anxieties about gender and sexuality in Elizabethan England. The plays don't simply reflect these anxieties; they give them a specific shape and channel them for audiences.
Hamlet in Purgatory (2001)
This book focuses on the religious context of Hamlet, specifically the doctrine of purgatory. After the English Reformation, purgatory was officially rejected by the Protestant church, yet it lingered powerfully in popular imagination. Greenblatt argues that the ghost of Hamlet's father embodies this cultural tension: a figure from a Catholic theological framework appearing in a Protestant cultural moment.
The book shows how the play channels genuine religious grief and uncertainty about what happens to the dead, transforming theological controversy into theatrical power.
Greenblatt's Writing Style
Accessible and Engaging Prose
Greenblatt is unusual among literary theorists for writing in a style that non-specialists can actually enjoy reading. His 2011 book The Swerve: How the World Became Modern (about the rediscovery of Lucretius's poem De Rerum Natura) won both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, reaching a wide popular audience.
Use of Anecdotes and Examples
His characteristic method of opening with a vivid historical anecdote isn't just a stylistic choice. It's a theoretical commitment. By beginning with a specific, concrete detail from the archive, Greenblatt demonstrates that the boundary between "literary" and "non-literary" texts is artificial. A colonial administrator's report and a Shakespeare play participate in the same cultural system.
Blending of Genres
Greenblatt's writing crosses boundaries between literary criticism, cultural history, and narrative nonfiction. This interdisciplinary quality reflects his conviction that literature can't be understood within the walls of a single discipline. You need history, anthropology, religious studies, and political theory to grasp what a text is doing in its moment.
Critiques and Limitations
Accusations of Reductionism
Some critics argue that Greenblatt's method can flatten literary texts into illustrations of historical context. If every text is primarily a product of its cultural moment, what happens to the features that make a particular work distinctive or enduring? The worry is that New Historicism sometimes treats literature as just another document rather than recognizing what's formally or aesthetically unique about it.
Overemphasis on Power Relations
A related critique, especially from scholars influenced by Foucault's own critics, is that Greenblatt's analyses tend to find power everywhere and resistance nowhere. In his reading of Shakespeare, for instance, moments of apparent subversion often turn out to be "contained" by the dominant order. This can produce a somewhat pessimistic picture in which literature always ends up serving the interests of existing power structures.
Neglect of Aesthetic Qualities
Formalist critics have pushed back on New Historicism's relative indifference to literary form, style, and beauty. If you spend most of your analysis connecting a play to court records and theological treatises, you may undervalue the specific ways literary language creates meaning through metaphor, rhythm, ambiguity, and structure. The concern is that treating texts primarily as cultural documents risks losing sight of what makes them literary.
Influence and Legacy
Impact on Literary Studies
Greenblatt's work fundamentally changed how Renaissance literature is studied. Before New Historicism, the dominant approach to Shakespeare and his contemporaries was largely formalist. After Greenblatt, it became standard practice to read literary texts alongside non-literary documents and to ask how texts participate in the power dynamics of their historical moment.
His influence extends well beyond Renaissance studies. Scholars working on virtually every literary period now routinely engage with the questions New Historicism raised about the relationship between texts and their cultural contexts.
Popularization of New Historicism
Greenblatt's readable prose helped New Historicism reach audiences that most literary theory never touches. The Swerve brought his approach to a mainstream readership, and his work has been widely assigned in undergraduate courses, making New Historicist methods accessible to students encountering literary theory for the first time.
Continuing Relevance and Debates
New Historicism's core questions remain active in literary studies: How do texts participate in the cultures that produce them? Can literature genuinely challenge power, or does it mostly reinforce existing structures? Where do we draw the line between literary and non-literary discourse?
These questions haven't been settled, and Greenblatt's work continues to serve as a reference point for scholars on all sides of these debates. Even critics who push back against New Historicism typically do so by engaging with the framework Greenblatt established.