Shakespeare's History Plays

Contents

Acknowledgements A Note on Texts

6 Shakespeare’s Historical and Political Thought in Context 7 Personal Action and Agency in Henry VI

8 Ideology in Richard II and Henry IV

Introduction

Following the publication of Stephen Greenblatt’s Renaissance Self- Fashioning in 1980,' few observers could have predicted the speed and temerity with which new historicism and cultural materialism came to dominate the study of early modern English literature. New historicism and cultural materialism demystified and repoliticised canonical literary texts by bringing structuralist-Marxist and post-structuralist theory to bear on them. The radical critique of the essentialist humanism to which most previous Shakespeare criticism appeared prone proved irresistible. Awakening from years spent in the apolitical slumber of New Criticism and formalism, the academy was plainly ripe for change. As Catherine Belsey recalls: ‘within a very short time [of the publication of Renaissance Self-Fashioning], it seemed that every American English department needed its resident early modern new historicist, and every Renaissance studies doctoral candidate’s research paper began with a historical anecdote’.* By 1985, Jonathan Dollimore was able to state in his introduction to Political Shakespeare that ‘it would be wrong to represent idealist criticism as still confidently dominant in Shakespeare studies’;? in new historicism and cultural materialism, the so-called ‘Crisis in English Studies’* finally seemed to have found its solution. The discipline was reinvigorated by the prospect of dissident politics, ‘reading against the grain’, Althusserian ideology critique, Foucauldian analyses of power, and feminist deconstructions of gender and sexuality; all of which must have felt like a breath of fresh air in 1985.

As Peter Erikson notes, by the mid-1980s new historicism and, by implication, cultural materialism had completed their ‘initial phase of development ... and ... entered a transitional stage marked by uncertainty, growing pains, internal disagreement, and reassessment.’ By the mid-1990s, new historicism and cultural materialism had secured their grip on Shakespeare studies and entered a period of what Hugh Grady calls ‘institutionalization and popularization’. Key essays by their major practitioners were collected in anthologies, and summarised and critiqued in book-length treatments.” One seminal volume of criticism, Alternative Shakespeares, which included several key cultural historicist essays, even spawned sequels.* In 1995, Ivo Kamps declared: ‘materialist criticism has successfully entered virtually all aspects of Shakespeare studies’.? In short, new historicism and cultural materialism — or ‘cultural historicism’!° for the sake of brevity — became ‘the new orthodoxy in many Literature departments’.'! The bold, pioneering works of the 1980s had become modern classics of twentieth-century Shakespeare criticism;!* what once provided a radical challenge to the status quo had itself become the dominant approach.

In 1996, Kiernan Ryan noted that the issues surrounding cultural historicism were ‘no longer being debated with the same ferocity and frequency’ as they were during the 1980s, and while this might have seemed to be ‘a sign that their charm has already faded and their credibility is in decline’, it was, in fact, a sign of how entrenched and pervasive the cultural historicist view had become.’ Almost fifteen years later, Ryan’s observation still stands and it needs to be taken seriously. Today, as one group of critics put it, cultural historicism is ‘overwhelmingly the dominant conceptual matrix of literary study’.'4 Just as the pervasiveness of essentialist humanism before 1980 produced a climate in which critics stopped questioning their own latent assumptions, criticism today faces a similar ‘crisis’ provoked by the pervasiveness of cultural historicism’s anti-essentialist, anti-humanist ideas. If literary critics do not pause to reflect upon their assumptions, intellectual stagnation and acquiescence in the academic status quo become real possibilities. For some critics this has already happened. In the view of Stephen Cohen, for example, ‘New Historicism has largely ceased to be a source of theoretical innovation in literary studies’; ‘the decades-long hegemony of New Historicism’s insistence on the political and ideological implication of literature’, he argues, has left us in the ‘critical doldrums’.'!° Marcus Nordlund agrees and wonders ‘will a new dominant paradigm emerge and rescue literary studies from its increasing disenchantment with postmodern historicism?’!¢ Joseph Carroll puts it more bluntly: ‘it cannot last’.!”

It is worth pointing out here that it is not the aim of this book to dismiss the achievements of cultural historicism. We read and write about Shakespeare today, not as the victims of a constricting orthodoxy but as the inheritors of a critical legacy that succeeded in changing the character of Shakespeare studies significantly. New historicism and cultural materialism have been not only instrumental in reinvigorating the study of early modern English literature but also politically vital for a generation of academics and students whose voices might otherwise have been silenced by the quietism characteristic of New Criticism and traditional historicist scholarship. This book aims to rethink aspects of cultural historicism that have been hitherto under-theorised. It searches for radical political agency in the lives of individuals who face many constraints from a variety of determinants and is consistent with the original aims of both new historicism and cultural materialism.

Furthermore, it seems to me that, despite appearances, a groundswell of change is already well under way. This is not difficult to see if one casts a glance at Table 1.1, where I have mapped out the myriad ‘isms’ that exist in the current state of Shakespeare studies and listed their leading proponents.'® Although cultural historicists still hold a significant majority, the ‘dissenter’ camps have been gaining traction as most of the first-generation cultural historicists have been reaching their late sixties and early seventies. We seem to be on the verge of a sea change.

Ewan Fernie has noted a ‘new turn in criticism towards empiricism and the aesthetic’,!? which highlights two major debates in current Shakespeare studies. These are: first, the reopened debate about human nature, which has been triggered partly by the advances made in this area by evolutionary psychology and neurobiology, advances that appear to contradict the radical anti-humanist critique of essentialist humanism; and second, the renewed concern with form and language. In other words, there are two general shifts in focus: the first from culture to the individual, the second from context to text. I wish to centre my study of cultural historicism and Shakespeare’s history plays on the debate about human nature. However, before elaborating on my reasons for this, it is worth noting a few features of the ‘Revenge of the Aesthetic’,”° or, as Stephen Cohen dubs it, ‘historical formalism’,*! not least because they share several of the grounds for my critique of cultural historicism in the first five chapters of this book.

Cohen objects to the ‘pan-textualism’ of cultural historicism which, despite claims to the contrary,” ‘render[s] it incapable of satisfactorily accounting for heterogeneity, conflict, or historical change’. For Cohen, the problem is that cultural historicists ‘invite the effacing of the formal elements that set the literary text apart from other texts’. He proposes instead a type of criticism which can explore the ‘mutual implication’ of ‘literature’s formal individuation and its historical situation’.’? Richard Levin, who has long struggled with cultural historicists on a variety of issues (see Chapters 2 and 3), has more of a problem with the way cultural historicists treat literary texts. He views their overwhelming concern with ‘certain ideological issues’ as a narrowing of focus. ‘Typically’, he says, they ‘frame an argument, then turn selectively to passages in one or more texts’ to support it — a tendency which limits uesgq puqeg SSRN uo\SUIADg pureq ue sey 109g praeq suenos ATOOYI-3ISOg,

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TT 38L stylistic analyses and discourages what Levin calls ‘a kind of alertness’ to the details and nuances of each play.** Kiernan Ryan makes a similar argument; he speaks of ‘the tunnel vision to which so much radical criticism seems to be congenitally predisposed’, and complains about ‘the neglect of formal techniques, structural implications and dramatic parentheses, whose import changes the meaning of the narrative they articulate’.*>

These are arguments to which I am sympathetic; however, the main thrust of my critique of cultural historicism is theoretical. I believe that many of the problems faced by literary criticism today, especially in Shakespeare studies, are rooted in the anti-essentialist, anti-humanist theoretical framework that cultural historicism adopted in the 1980s. We need to update and, where necessary, overhaul our theories if we are to avoid languishing in the ‘critical doldrums’ of which Cohen speaks. Since the turn of the new millennium — when David Scott Kastan assumed that he was writing ‘after theory’, and Terry Eagleton declared ‘the golden age of cultural theory’ to be over*® — the references to Antonio Gramsci, Pierre Macherey, Louis Althusser, Raymond Williams and Michel Foucault have slipped from the footnotes along with serious engagement with their respective theories. Yet their influences endure, hidden, disavowed and unquestioned. Scott Cutler Shershow’s axiomatic statement that ‘Shakespeare, like any other writer, like any other writing or reading or effort of thought, like language itself, can finally be nothing more nor less than what Marx calls the “product” and the “presence” of the community’? is still tacitly if not overtly endorsed by many in the field of Shakespeare studies. This statement seems to preclude the autonomy of the individual: if Shakespeare is truly ‘nothing more’ than the product of his community, then his ability to think things through for himself and come to his own conclusions is put into question. In the same volume, Shershow, along with Jean E. Howard, wonders: ‘How do we find ourselves at a point in which the realm of the esthetic, last refuge of a universal humanism, has been cordoned off from history and supposedly cut loose from market values?’*® Humanists might well wonder the same thing: how have we come to a point at which the belief in fundamental human universals has been cordoned off from the discussion of history or politics and ghettoised in the ‘realm of the esthetic’?

This monograph will critically assess the anti-humanist assumptions of cultural historicism and their impact on the reading and understanding of Shakespeare’s plays. It posits that a writer of Shakespeare’s intelligence and complexity requires a mode of criticism sensitive to the many nuances that distinguish his voice from the other voices of his world and time. To this end, I will scrutinise the assumptions and methods of new historicism in Chapter 2 and of cultural materialism in Chapter 3 to identify the problems they pose in practice. I will then put forward an argument against the anti-humanist assumptions that unite new historicists and cultural materialists in Chapter 4, before proposing an alternative set of assumptions in Chapter 5 that are more conducive to appreciating Shakespeare’s startling insights into the issues raised by the question of personal agency in history and ideology. In Chapter 6, with these issues in mind, I will survey the range of views in sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century historiography to which Shakespeare might have been exposed, while maintaining that he had agency enough to make up his own mind about such matters. In Chapter 7 I will turn to the Henry VI plays to analyse Shakespeare’s close focus on individuals and their scope for agency in history; and in Chapter 8 I will turn to the second tetralogy to look at the complex understanding of ideology and power that Shakespeare develops in those plays.

1. Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1980).

2. Catherine Belsey, ‘Historicizing New Historicism’, in Presentist Shakespeares, ed. Hugh Grady and Terence Hawkes (New York and London: Routledge, 2007), p. 27.

3. Jonathan Dollimore, ‘Introduction: Shakespeare, Cultural Materialism and the New Historicism’, in Political Shakespeare: Essays in Cultural Materialism, ed. Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1985), p. 4.

4. Peter Widdowson, ‘Introduction: The Crisis in English Studies’, in Re-Reading English, ed. Peter Widdowson (London: Methuen, 1982), pp. 1-14.

5. Peter Erikson, ‘Rewriting the Renaissance, Rewriting Ourselves’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 38:3 (Autumn 1987), p. 330.

6. Hugh Grady, ‘Why Presentism Now’, SHAKSPER 2007: SHAKSPER Roundtable: Presentism (updated 29 January 2007) <http://www.shaksper. net/archives/2007/0065.html>, accessed 18 February 2007.

7. H. Aram Veeser (ed.), The New Historicism (New York and London: Routledge, 1989); Richard Wilson and Richard Dutton (eds), New Historicism and Renaissance Drama (London: Longman, 1992); H. Aram Veeser (ed.), The New Historicism Reader (New York and London: Routledge, 1994); Scott Wilson, Cultural Materialism: Theory and Practice (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995); Kiernan Ryan (ed.), New Historicism and Cultural Materialism: A Reader (London: Arnold, 1996); Jeremy Hawthorn, Cunning Passages: New Historicism, Cultural Materialism and Marxism in the Contemporary Literary Debate (London: Arnold, 1996).

8. John Drakakis (ed.), Alternative Shakespeares (New York and London:

Methuen, 1985); Terence Hawkes (ed.), Alternative Shakespeares, Volume 2 (New York and London: Routledge, 1996); Diana E. Henderson (ed.), Alternative Shakespeares 3 (New York and London: Routledge, 2008).

. Ivo Kamps, ‘Introduction’, in Materialist Shakespeare: A History, ed. Ivo

Kamps (New York and London: Verso, 1995), p. 16.

The term coined by Kiernan Ryan, in ‘Literature as History: Shakespeare and the Politics of Appropriation’, paper given at the Annual Conference of German University Teachers of English, Halle, Germany, 18 September 2006. It was later used by Andy Mousley, in Re-Humanising Shakespeare (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007), p. 77. I view new historicism and cultural materialism as, essentially, two sides of the same coin. Though there are differences, the theoretical and practical similarities are too patent to overlook. Edward Pechter has described ‘cultural materialism’ as Jonathan Dollimore’s and Alan Sinfield’s ‘term for the new historicism’ (‘The New Historicism and its Discontents’, PMLA, 102:3 (May 1987), p. 299); and Dollimore himself has admitted that there is a ‘convergence between British cultural materialism and American new historicism’ and moments of significant ‘overlap’ (‘Shakespeare, Cultural Materialism, Feminism and Marxist Humanism’, New Literary History, 21:3 (Spring 1990), p. 471). Unlike Pechter, however, I do not suggest that cultural materialism is a subsidiary of new historicism and, unlike Jeremy Hawthorn, I do not venture to treat all of them as new historicists (see Hawthorn, Cunning Passages, p. 4), because it is clear that their geneses are quite distinct. I prefer to view new historicism and cultural materialism as two distinct movements that form distinguishable parts of the same practice.

Tamsin Spargo, ‘Introduction: Past, Present and Future Pasts’, in Reading the Past: Literature and History, ed. Tamsin Spargo (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2000), p. 11.

In addition to Political Shakespeare and Greenblatt’s Renaissance Self- Fashioning, I would count the following among their number: Jonathan Goldberg, James I and the Politics of Literature (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983); Jonathan Dollimore, Radical Tragedy: Religion, Ideology and Power in the Drama of Shakespeare and his Contemporaries, 3rd edn (1984; Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004); Graham Holderness, Shakespeare’s History (New York: St Martin’s, 1985); Leonard Tennenhouse, Power on Display: The Politics of Shakespeare’s Genres (New York and London: Methuen, 1986); Jean E. Howard and Marion F. O’Connor (eds), Shakespeare Reproduced: The Text in History and Ideology (London: Methuen, 1987); Stephen Greenblatt, Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England (Oxford: Clarendon, 1988); Annabel Patterson, Shakespeare and the Popular Voice (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989); Stephen Greenblatt, Learning to Curse: Essays in Early Modern Culture (New York and London: Routledge, 1990); Phyllis Rackin, Stages of History: Shakespeare’s English Chronicles (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990); Alan Sinfield, Faultlines: Cultural Materialism and the Politics of Dissident Reading (Oxford: Clarendon, 1992).

Kiernan Ryan, ‘Introduction’, in New Historicism and Cultural Materialism: A Reader, ed. Kiernan Ryan (London: Arnold, 1996), p. ix.

22;

Joseph Carroll, Jonathan Gottschall, John Johnson and Daniel Kruger, ‘Imagining Human Nature’, in Evolution, Literature, and Film: A Reader, ed. Brian Boyd, Joseph Carroll and Jonathan Gottschall (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), p. 214.

Stephen A. Cohen, ‘Introduction’, in Shakespeare and Historical Formalism, ed. Stephen A. Cohen (Aldershot: Algate, 2007), p. 2.

Marcus Nordlund, Shakespeare and the Nature of Love: Literature, Culture, Evolution (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2007), p. 11. Joseph Carroll, Reading Human Nature: Literary Darwinism in Theory and Practice (Albany, NY: State University Press of New York, 2011), p. 277.

The bibliography lists key works from the scholars listed here. For a detailed overview of each of these critical schools see: Neema Parvini, Shakespeare and Contemporary Theory: New Historicism and Cultural Materialism (New York and London: Arden, 2012). This table is, of course, by no means exhaustive. There are a plethora of other commentators — John Brannigan, Ivo Kamps, Claire Colebrook, Howard Felperin, Jeremy Hawthorn, Richard Lehan, Jürgen Pieters, Carolyn Porter, Kiernan Ryan and H. Aram Veeser, to name but ten prominent ones — who each have their own allegiances. Five of them consider new historicism and cultural materialism in book-length treatments, Lehan and Porter offer lengthy essays, and the remaining four have all edited collections of cultural historicist work. Their positions are so nuanced that it would be impossible to map and place all of them. It is worth noting that, Felperin, Lehan and perhaps Ryan aside, all these commentators are generally sympathetic to the cultural historicist cause and might expect to be included in their number. Veeser and Kamps in particular adopt a rather celebratory tone when discussing new historicism and cultural materialism in the introductions to their respective volumes. In short, the procultural historicists outnumber those opposed to them.

Ewan Fernie, Shame in Shakespeare (New York and London: Routledge, 2002), p. 4.

Michael P. Clark (ed.), Revenge of the Aesthetic: The Place of Literature in Theory Today (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000).

Cohen, ‘Introduction’, in Shakespeare and Historical Formalism, p. 2. See also: Susan J. Wolfson, ‘Reading for Form’, Modern Language Quarterly, 61:1 (March 2000), a special edition with a polemical introduction by Susan J. Wolfson; David Rasmussen (ed.), Renaissance Literature and its Formal Engagements (New York and Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002).

For example, Dollimore argues that ‘materialist criticism ... refuses what Stephen Greenblatt calls the monological approach of historical scholarship of the past’ (‘Introduction’, in Political Shakespeare, p. 4). This issue is discussed in greater detail in the section entitled ‘“Arbitrary Connectedness”: “The Consequences of the Synchronic — or the Dangers of Spatializing Time”’ in Chapter 2.

Cohen, ‘Introduction’, in Shakespeare and Historical Formalism, pp. 4, 5, 3.

Richard Levin, Shakespeare’s Secret Schemers: The Study of an Early Modern Dramatic Device (Newark, DE: University of Delaware Press, 2001), p. 16.

Kiernan Ryan, Shakespeare, 3rd edn (New York and Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), pp. 38, 47.

David Scott Kastan, Shakespeare After Theory (New York and London: Routledge, 1999); Terry Eagleton, After Theory (London: Allen Lane, 2003), p. 1.

Scott Cutler Shershow, ‘Shakespeare Beyond Shakespeare’, in Marxist Shakespeares, ed. Jean E. Howard and Scott Cutler Shershow (New York and London: Routledge, 2001), p. 262, emphasis mine.

Jean E. Howard and Scott Cutler Shershow, ‘Introduction: Marxism Now, Shakespeare Now’, in Marxist Shakespeares, pp. 9-10.

Chapter 2

‘Arbitrary Connectedness’: ‘The Consequences of the Synchronic — or the Dangers of Spatializing Time’

It has been commonly believed that new historicism and cultural materialism constitute ‘a reaction against formalism’.! The story goes that where the structuralists and New Critics found a self-contained unity in the literary text, the cultural historicists find an expanse of intertextual relations. This is the kind of story Jeremy Hawthorn retells at the end of Cunning Passages:

After decades of literary criticism dominated by the formalisms of the New Critics, the structuralists, and the post-structuralists, the achievements of new historicism and, especially, cultural materialism, are allowing students of literature not just to observe but to take part in the social struggles that literature arises from and gives access to. The opportunity should be grasped. The doors to the ivory towers filled with prisoners taken by fifty-seven varieties of formalism have been unlocked. Let’s take a look outside.*

Hawthorn speaks here as if the new historicists and cultural materialists have led literary criticism to a new promised land, free from the chains of the structural totalities that characterised the formalist systems that they replaced. And before ‘freeing’ the students in this way, they scaled the walls of the old academy and shattered the political conservatism perpetuated by an apolitical formalism. Scott Wilson tells a similar tale:

The cultural materialist academic may no longer function as ‘the man of culture’ judging and evaluating the great works of a national tradition, the traditional scholar and critic, exposed by Marxist theory as an institutional ‘state functionary’, the Capitalist lackey of an ideological state apparatus ensuring the uneventful reproduction of an exploitative mode of production for the ruling class.’

New historicism and cultural materialism are thus said to supplant liberal-humanist scholarship with its outmoded, diachronic conception of ‘a unitary past’,* and its view of history as a grand narrative of human progress, putting in its place ‘the idea of an epistemological rupture’ so prevalent in Althusserian and Foucauldian notions of a discontinuous history.° Cultural historicism is said to replace the close reading required by the humanist’s formalism — which rests on assumptions of unity and ideological pretensions to scholarly objectivity — with the ‘methodological anarchy’ celebrated by H. Aram Veeser.°®

However, a brief engagement with other views of the cultural historicist project tells a rather different story. In a seminal essay, Walter Cohen found that new historicism was not as radically opposed to formalism as it appeared to be:

The strategy is governed methodologically by the assumption that any one aspect of a society is related to any other. No organising principle determines these relationships: any social practice has at least a potential connection to any theatrical practice. Hence new historicist studies of Shakespeare have a radically unpredictable quality. This implicit commitment to arbitrary connectedness produces impressive results . . . yet [this] commitment . . . inevitably limits the persuasiveness of much new historicist work . . . Contradictions between essays arise as a matter of course.”

Cohen recognises the assumption in cultural historicism that any two parts of a culture will necessarily have significance for each other on the grounds that they are the products of this same culture. Thus they will share certain ideological or discursive features, and might both be said to reproduce or to resist power. Cohen’s key criticism is that:

The assumption of arbitrary connectedness seems to preclude a systematic survey of the available evidence, leading instead to a kind of synecdoche in which a single text or group of texts stands in for all texts and thus exhausts the discursive field.’

Rather than supplanting formalism, in other words, as Jeremy Hawthorn and Scott Wilson suggest it does, cultural historicism might be said to represent the fifty-eighth variety to be manufactured by the formalist factory.

Others since Cohen have gone further, finding in this conception of culture, paradoxically, a type of ‘hidden formalism’. Among the most vehement has been David Scott Kastan, whose conclusions about new historicism are similar to Cohen’s. Kastan characterises the typical new historicist essay as ‘offering some bizarre incident as the point of generation of a cultural principle that is then discovered in a canonical text’.? Like Cohen, he sees this move as ‘arbitrary connectedness’, one that assumes a society in which nothing is truly variant or discontinuous . . . The anecdote, however, clearly functions not as evidence but as trope — a synecdoche — assuming ... that the part can stand for the whole, that culture is radically coherent ... [New historicism and cultural materialism] are not properly historical at all but rather formalist practices, discovering pattern and order, unity and coherence, in the culture ... exactly as an earlier generation of formalist critics found them in works of literature.!°

This scathing assessment extends Cohen’s diagnosis of ‘arbitrary connectedness’ and thraldom to synecdoche by making the bold claim that new historicism finds ‘unity and order’ in culture. Kastan accuses new historicism of formalism at the level of method. Richard Lehan also criticises new historicism for a perceived formalism, but finds another problem. For him, the new historicist ‘drains meaning from history’ by subscribing to the anti-humanist notion that history is discontinuous. To subscribe to that notion, Lehan continues, is to ‘spatialize time and rob it of sequence, direction, and agency’. He accuses new historicism of locking history into ‘part of a tropological frieze’, which begs the question of ‘how .. . we get from frieze to frieze, or from what Foucault would call episteme to episteme’. Lehan argues ultimately for the recovery of ‘the diachronic nature’ of history and insists upon ‘the belief that meaning is built into time’ upon the fundamental logic of cause and effect. His solution is to re-establish ‘the idea of historical process’ by retracing ‘the connection’ between epistemes.'! Despite differences, what Kastan and Lehan have in common is their claim that new historicism is not ‘historical’ at all and therefore can only, to use Hayden White’s phrase, ‘give offence to historians in general’ as well as reducing, rather than illuminating, the literary texts they appropriate.!*

Before moving on, I want to ask a series of questions about the underlying assumptions and the consequences of cultural historicism that arise after reading Cohen, Kastan and Lehan. On what basis are the cultural historicists able to connect arbitrarily disparate aspects of culture? Is cultural historicism really a type of formalism? If so, can it be said to offer a real alternative to formalism, in the way its advocates announce? What are the consequences of employing a disjunctive theory of history in literary analysis? And to what extent does such a theory serve to deny political agency and rob history of meaning? I also want to ask a couple of further questions that these critics do not entirely take into account: first, what is cultural historicism’s relationship with deconstruction and how does this affect its conceptualisation of culture? And second, does this synchronic approach to culture have any worth for the literary critic? With these questions in mind, let us turn to two of the key studies of new historicism: Jonathan Goldberg’s James I and the Politics of Literature and Stephen Greenblatt’s essay ‘Martial Law in the Land of Cockaigne’.

James | and the Politics of Literature

In James I and the Politics of Literature, viewed by many as the archetypal new historicist text, ‘indicative of the conceptual dilemmas that haunt’ new historicism,'? Goldberg advances the argument that the theatrical works of the Jacobean era reproduce sovereign power. To make this argument he draws principally on Michel Foucault: ‘To adopt the voice of power is, in Foucault’s definition, to speak beyond oneself, ascribing one’s powers elsewhere, saying one thing and meaning another ... Denying itself, contradiction defines the essence of the discourse of power.’!* Hence during James Ps rule, the poet’s work is ascribed to the ruler whose power is always already transcendent. The king and the playwright are inextricably linked by this power relation. Goldberg goes on to demonstrate this in a range of texts, most notably in the chapter ‘The Royal Masque: Ideology and Writing’.!> In this chapter Goldberg introduces his version of the concept of ‘ideology’ — so thoroughly discredited and disavowed by Foucault’s own thought — and he does so without reference to Marx, Gramsci, Mannheim, Althusser, Hall or any other major theorist of ideology. This is most telling in Goldberg’s virtual conflation of the state with the figure of the king. Goldberg’s study paints a picture of Jacobean England as the virtual extension of the king’s will. The Marx of Capital might have found something distinctly Hegelian about this landscape:

To Hegel, the life-process of the human brain, i.e. the process of thinking, which, under the name of ‘the Idea’, he even transforms into an independent subject, is the demiurgos of the real world, and the real world is only the > 16 external, phenomenal form of ‘the Idea’.

Goldberg’s theoretically disengaged application of the term ‘ideology’ leaves his conception of sovereign power open to the charge of idealism. So it is unsurprising when he turns to Ben Jonson, and finds that the Jacobean masque ‘represents the king’, that the masque and the king mirror each other to reflect ‘the mysteries of the state’.!”

Goldberg’s treatment of Measure for Measure is virtually identical. Here he announces that ‘the crucial note that links theatre and culture in James’s time [is]: representation’.'® The king was always engaged in some form of symbolic action because he ‘represented’ the state, the theatre was also in the game of ‘representation’, and the playwrights who wrote for its stage were also ‘representing’ things in their plays. Parallels and linkages are seen not only as possible but also as necessary to make. Thus for Goldberg:

In the Duke [of Measure for Measure], Shakespeare has written a role that represents his power as a playwright as coincident with the powers of the sovereign ... dramatist and monarch represent each other, a doubleness housed in a single person.!?

So, because Shakespeare, Duke Vincentio and James I all happen to have been engaged in the act of representing something else, they now not only imply each other but also actually constitute the same person. And, by extension, Measure for Measure is effectively a substitute or ‘double’ for sovereign power. The substitutions and doubling that occur in the play are seen ultimately as emblematic of this relationship. With this established, Goldberg is able to highlight the ways in which the Duke and James I are similar, not least because they are in effect the same person. Let us not forget that the Duke is also Shakespeare and that Shakespeare is also James I, as if they form some unholy trinity. Hence, given this triple identification, ‘the power of authority takes root in language itself’. There is no escape, especially when one considers that language is ‘endlessly reduplicative, endlessly representing’.”° If one extends Goldberg’s logic, because James I is the node of representation and words themselves are ‘endlessly’ representative, all words become ascribed to his power; in fact, all words used in Jacobean England are James himself and James I is Jacobean England — he has no ‘private self’. Alan Sinfield is justified in his conclusion that