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Stephen Greenblatt's 'Shakespearean Negotiations' applies a New Historicist approach to analyze Shakespeare's works in the context of Renaissance England, emphasizing the interplay between literary and non-literary texts. The book explores themes such as power, authority, and social dynamics through essays on plays like 'King Lear' and 'The Tempest', revealing how these works reflect and negotiate the cultural tensions of their time. Greenblatt argues that art is a product of collective negotiation and exchange, highlighting the complexities of Elizabethan theatrical culture.

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41 views

Notes

Stephen Greenblatt's 'Shakespearean Negotiations' applies a New Historicist approach to analyze Shakespeare's works in the context of Renaissance England, emphasizing the interplay between literary and non-literary texts. The book explores themes such as power, authority, and social dynamics through essays on plays like 'King Lear' and 'The Tempest', revealing how these works reflect and negotiate the cultural tensions of their time. Greenblatt argues that art is a product of collective negotiation and exchange, highlighting the complexities of Elizabethan theatrical culture.

Uploaded by

Aishwarya Rajesh
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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Stephen Greenblatt "Shakesperean Negotiations"

Stephen Greenblatt, Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance


England

Stephen Greenblatt’s Shakespearean Negotiations


(1988) is a modern classic of Shakespeare criticism and continues to inform studies of Renaissance
writing and Elizabethan and Jacobean culture to this day. Greenblatt’s work remains a milestone in
literary criticism, because it is the first to fully apply a New Historicist approach to the study of
Shakespeare. New Historicism began to take shape in Greenblatt’s previous work Renaissance Self-
Fashioning (1980) and was then developed more comprehensively in Shakespearean Negotiations.
As a method of analysis, New Historicism gives equal attention to literary and non-literary texts,
relates them to each other, and proposes that they continuously inform each other. Following this
approach means to equally attend to literary and non-literary texts and contexts: there is no “literary
‘foreground’” and “historical ‘background’” (Barry 2002: 172); rather, both are equally important,
both are expressions of their particular historical and cultural moment, and both equally merit
careful analytic engagement and attentive study. In Shakespearean Negotiations, Greenblatt puts
this approach into practice in a series of essays that examine plays including King Lear, Henry IV, The
Tempest, and Twelfth Night in relation to non-literary writing of the English Renaissance, including
accounts of colonial activity in Virginia and religious pamphlets. Greenblatt presents a new reading
of Renaissance politics and culture and how key issues such as cross-dressing, exorcism, martial law,
and colonial politics inform Shakespeare’s tragedies, histories, romances, and comedies. “The
circulation of social energy,” meaning the circulation of everything that is produced by society, is the
underlying assumption of Greenblatt’s investigation as he posits that all works of art “are the
products of collective negotiation and exchange” (vii). Crucially, this is not a mere question of
establishing the “influence” of certain Renaissance contexts for the works of Shakespeare, but a
matter of tracing and understanding the dynamic processes that perpetually inform and shape
Elizabethan playwriting and Renaissance theatrical culture, for, as Greenblatt writes, “art does not
simply exist in all cultures; it is made up along with other products, practices, discourses of a given
culture” (13). Chapter two of Greenblatt’s work shows this idea in practice: “Invisible Bullets”
establishes the discursive relationship between Thomas Harriott's A Brief and True Report of the
New Found Land of Virginia (1588) and Shakespeare’s history plays. Greenblatt suggests here that
Harriot’s text, written to reassure investors that the colonial enterprise in Virginia was both
financially viable and politically stable, continuously displays a tension between authority and
subversion and thereby “meditate[s] on the consolidation of state power” abroad (40). This
consolidation of power is a central issue which, in turn, also appears as the major concern of
Shakespeare’s history plays. Greenblatt then proceeds to examine the representation of “self-
undermining authority” in Richard II and Henry IV:
we are invited to understand these costs [of power] in order to ratify the power, to accept the
grotesque and cruelly unequal distribution of possessions: everything to the few, nothing to the
many. The rulers earn, or at least pay for, their exalted position through suffering, and this suffering
ennobles, if it does not exactly cleanse, the lies and betrayals upon which this position depends. (54)

Reading Renaissance theatre as a “primary expression” of Elizabethan power and authority,


Greenblatt suggests that the stage at once expresses, but also helps to contain the “radical doubts”
and subversiveness that the plays produce (65). At its core, both Harriot’s reassuring account of the
colony in Virginia and Shakespeare’s history plays dramatize and reflect the fundamentally
Machiavellian idea that power “originates in force and fraud” (65). Chapter five, “Martial Law in the
Land of Cockaigne”, addresses “techniques of arousing and manipulating anxiety” as both a state-
mandated practice and a key element of Elizabethan and Jacobean theatre (133). Anxiety,
Greenblatt asserts, had long been used as a tool for controlling and educating others: threats or fear
of humiliation could be powerful strategies to exert power and control and public executions were
“designed to arouse fear” in order to ensure civil obedience (cf. Greenblatt 134-137). Tracing this
social and political practice within Shakespeare’s plays, Greenblatt argues that The Tempest features
similar practices of facilitating anxiety in order to establish power and control. Prospero’s magic is
used mainly to “harrow the other characters with fear and wonder and then to reveal that their
anxiety is his to create and allay” (142). The Tempest “seems to act out a fantasy of mind control”
(155) in Prospero’s attempt to establish control through fear. However, the play also appears to pose
uncomfortable questions about the establishment of absolute authority and power. The opening
storm of The Tempest, for instance, shows a force beyond human control and Prospero, ultimately,
admits his dependency on others. Throughout Shakespearean Negotiations, Greenblatt shows how
the New Historicist approach produces a reading of the Elizabethan theatre as a theatre of
“unresolvable doubleness” (158) that reflects and negotiates the tensions of its time. The
Renaissance stage both appropriates and subverts ideas about power and Shakespeare’s plays, like
all other forms of art, are products of (and testimonies to) the exchange between social, political,
and cultural dynamics.

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