Art Among The Ruins by Frank Kermode - The New York Review of Books

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Art Among the Ruins

JULY 5, 2001
Frank Kermode
Practicing New Historicism

by Catherine Gallagher and Stephen Greenblatt
University of Chicago Press, 249 pp., $25.00
Shakespeare After Theory

by David Scott Kastan
Routledge, 264 pp., $18.99 (paper)
1.
New Historicism emerged as an influential movement in the 1980s with Stephen Greenblatt’s
early studies in Renaissance culture, and Greenblatt, who reluctantly takes credit for inventing
the label, remains its most eminent practitioner. Broadly speaking, New Historicism is a way,
or a bundle of ways, of writing about literary history which incorporates insights provided by
other intellectual disciplines, refuses to isolate literature from other forms of discourse, and
assumes that the entire culture, including many aspects of it generally overlooked by
conventional history—for instance, anecdotes concerning the lives and behavior of ordinary
people—can be regarded as text, with all of its parts somehow interrelated. A typical essay of
Greenblatt’s will begin with an anecdote of the kind he himself calls “outlandish,” coming
from well outside the range of normal historiography, and attending, for example, to
transvestism, riots, exorcisms, or life in peasant villages.
The New Historicists have absorbed methods and materials from a diversity of sources, not
least from the speculations of the French philosopher of history Michel Foucault concerning
the operations of power and the conflicts of discourse in a given society. But it is probably
true that their practice has been most influenced by the anthropologist Clifford Geertz.
Geertz developed the method he called “thick description,” which treated an entire culture as
a coherent network of signs; the particular text that attracted his interest, say Balinese
cockfighting with its rituals, was to be understood as implicated in the entire culture, so that
an account of cockfighting in Bali should not be isolated from other cultural phenomena but
should be “thick,” in the sense that the cockfighting needed to be understood as the
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manifestation of a collective consciousness informing the institutions of the society at large.

By adapting this method, literary criticism, argues Greenblatt, “could venture out to
unfamiliar cultural texts, and these texts—often marginal, fragmentary, unexpected, and crude
—in turn could begin to interact in interesting ways with the intimately familiar works of the
literary canon.”
Greenblatt’s studies in Renaissance culture—ingenious, learned, elegantly written—have

been copiously imitated but never rivaled. It is through his influence that New Historicism
has been a dominant interest among academic literary critics for something like a generation,
so it is not surprising that some of them are showing signs of restlessness and hinting that it’s
time to move on. David Scott Kastan says so quite explicitly in Shakespeare After Theory,
whereas Greenblatt and his collaborator, Catherine Gallagher, seem to have chosen this
moment, when the fashion is said to be passing its zenith, to provide compelling instances of
what, in the right hands, the method or practice can still achieve.
The result is a collection of essays of remarkable virtuosity. As usual the authors won’t say
exactly what sort of thing they think New Historicism is; they are “practicing” it, not
“theorizing” it. You know what it is by watching what they do; it is a practice, not a theory. It
has no prescribed doctrinal basis beyond the assumption that its business with literature is to
treat it as “the key to particular historically embedded social and psychological formations”
(meaning “to what happens in history and human behavior”). To their list of distinguished
mentors or predecessors the authors now add Herder, an exemplary exponent of that “mutual
embeddedness of art and history” which informs their own “fascination with the possibility of
treating all of the written and visual traces of a particular culture as a mutually intelligible
network of signs”:
Major works of art remain centrally important, but they are jostled now by an array of
other texts and images. Some of these alternative objects of attention are literary works
regarded as too minor to deserve sustained interest and hence marginalized or excluded
entirely from the canon. Others are texts that have been regarded as altogether
nonliterary, that is, as lacking the aesthetic polish, the self-conscious use of rhetorical
figures, the aura of distance from the everyday world, the marked status as fiction that
separately or together characterize belles lettres.
There has been in effect a social rebellion in the study of culture, so that figures hitherto
kept outside the proper circles of interest—a rabble of half-crazed religious visionaries,
semiliterate political agitators, coarse-faced peasants in hobnailed boots, dandies whose
writings had been discarded as ephemera, imperial bureaucrats, freed slaves, women
novelists dismissed as impudent scribblers, learned women excluded from easy access to
the materials of scholarship, scandalmongers, provincial politicians, charlatans, and

forgotten academics—have now forced their way in, or rather have been invited in by
our generation of critics.
What this means is that in principle any information that survives from a past cultural epoch
can be summoned in support of the interpretation of some particular cultural phenomenon
such as a Shakespeare play; for instance, Greenblatt, in his Shakespearean Negotiations
(1988), links a report by Montaigne of a marriage between two women with cross-dressing
and gender confusion in the plot of Twelfth Night. Such links help to describe more “thickly”
the culture under description. The arts provide only some of the clues to the character of the
whole. But although such interests may seem to move criticism away from particular works
of art, these writers still profess a certain veneration for the arts: “Major works of art remain
centrally important, but they are jostled now by an array of other texts and images.”
As another example of the method, one may cite Greenblatt’s essay “The Cultivation of
Anxiety: King Lear and His Heirs.” 1 It begins a long way from Shakespeare, with an
anecdote published in the American Baptist Magazine in 1831, concerning the tyrannous
behavior of the writer toward his “self-willed” child, a little more than one year old. The
anecdote becomes the occasion for a study of strategies of intense familial love which had
their origin in the England of Shakespeare. The child, offered food only in return for a
manifestation of love, is subjected to and fails a “love test,” like Lear’s daughter Cordelia.
Greenblatt then studies family relationships in Jacobean England, and their bearing on the
conduct of Lear and Gloucester in the play. The nature of the family, its conventional duties
and disciplines, were inevitably represented in the drama of the time, which is already
“saturated with social significance”; and these conventions (understood as part of the natural
order of things) were still observable in an American minister, the president, no less, of
Brown University, who tormented his baby son in 1831.
This partial account of one essay may serve to show something of the originality and scope of
the method. It provoked the obvious criticism that the confrontation of major with minor
works of art, or with documents of historical and sociological rather than artistic interest,
would weaken the independence and authority of the former. The response was that the
confrontation actually explains what it means to be major.
In an analogy that plays a large part in Practicing New Historicism Greenblatt and Gallagher
suggest that the old view of major works as somehow cut off from the surrounding world,
transcending the normal and embodying “the freedom of the human imagination,” is
analogous to the Catholic Eucharist, a miracle of transubstantiation, a piece of bread turned
into the body of Christ, texts transformed into canonical icons. But of course New Historicists
don’t accept this bit of old-style aesthetic magic, preferring to see art as just one more
element or sign in the whole cultural structure; though some, including Greenblatt, find
reasons to explain why the works we still think of as literature have lasted better than the
others.
What these writers do in practice is to “identify, out of the vast array of textual traces in a
culture, which are the significant ones.” They look for an “interpreting detail” which stands
out from the mass of cultural evidence; which is somehow “luminous”; which says to the
person who wants to analyze a culture, “start here.” Such details may be anecdotes of the sort
Greenblatt used in his essay on Lear. In so far as New Historicism has an established method
of proceeding, it depends on the use of anecdotes as starting points, a dependence justified at
length in the opening chapters of this book. The anecdote is seen as that “luminous detail”
from which one begins the exploration of a cultural network which may also have within it
some venerable masterpiece.
Erich Auerbach’s Mimesis, a great book from an earlier epoch, is claimed by the authors as a
distinguished precedent. In his study of Western realism Auerbach chose for depth analysis a
series of passages from the whole range of Western literature and related them to the culture
in which the works that contain them originated. In each chapter the entire analysis is
developed from a single passage, a canto of the Paradiso, a passage from Père Goriot or To
the Lighthouse. But despite superficial similarities Auerbach’s method is essentially different
from that of the New Historicists; he does argue from a fragment to a whole, but starts from
works acknowledged to be of central importance to that whole, whereas New Historicism can
fix on any luminous detail anywhere in the entire cultural setting, and indeed expressly
prefers the “marginal and eccentric.”
So the effectiveness of New Historical anecdote has nothing to do with Auerbach but a lot to
do with the fun that can be had from devising arguments meant to relate marginal stories to
some central work, as in the example given above, where the nineteenth-century minister’s
anecdote is surprisingly juxtaposed with Lear’s love test. Such juxtapositions recur in almost
all Greenblatt’s Shakespearean essays.
The danger of the procedure, as the authors admit, is that an anecdote may be chosen “out of
the hundreds of thousands of possibilities” simply because it already “sounded like” a passage
in Marlowe or Shakespeare; so that the effect of surprise and confirmation when it turns out
to sound like Marlowe or Shakespeare is spurious. And indeed it is hard to see how the choice
of luminosities can avoid being affected by prior interests. However, the anecdote, if
sufficiently “outlandish and irregular,” might have the satisfying effect of undermining what
had looked like historical certainties, so opening up the cultural network and undermining
“history’s normal epistemological assumptions.”
The assumptions referred to are those of conventional historians who make up a narrative of
past events according to inherited notions of what is important and what is not, ignoring
anecdotes “incompletely digested by the larger narrative” which “divulge a different reality”
and which “historians cannot assimilate into typicality or coherent significance.” The effect of
introducing this “outlandish” matter into the narrative can be sensational, the luminous detail
emitting “flashes of a horrific outside to any conceivable historical order.” This may
administer a salutary jolt to the investigator. It can put “one beside oneself, momentarily
beyond a merely cognitive relation to one’s task.” That is to say, the anecdote can give the
New Historicist a sudden insight into connections and relations not previously observed or
suspected.
Another prime concern of the school is “the unsettled relation between ‘the real’ and its
licensed representations,” and the most remarkable chapter in this book professes to
demonstrate a crisis of representation in an altarpiece, now in the Palazzo Ducale at Urbino,
by the fifteenth-century Netherlandish painter Joos van Gent. This huge painting (in oils, a
novelty in the Italy of the time) is called The Communion of the Apostles. After the Last
Supper Jesus administers the sacrament to his kneeling disciples. The communion wafer, held
between Jesus’ thumb and forefinger, is in a position a little to the left of the center of the
composition. Jesus’ left hand, pretty well in the true center of the work, holds a paten, the
plate for holding the wafer, as a priest’s might (see detail on page 61).
Jesus in this unique situation is both sacrifice and priest, administering his own body to the
faithful by means of the transubstantiated bread. The communion wafer, represented in the
painting as a white ellipse in Jesus’ extended right hand, is not in reality a representation of
the body of Christ but his actual body; faith requires that the morsel of bread of which one
sees only the species, the accidental appearance, be accepted as that real body. This, it is here
argued, is a situation which defies representation; so the space where the wafer should be is
said to have been left blank. The picture thus affirms the doctrine of the Real Presence as
insisted on by the Church, so expressing “the ideological consensus of a dominant institution,
a ruling class, or a hegemonic elite.”
The turbaned figure on the right of the picture is thought to represent a recently converted
Jew, privileged to be present at the celebration of the Eucharist. The original viewers of the
altarpiece would have known this, and been aware of the “wave of anti-Semitic agitation” that
occurred in Italy in the 1460s. But despite such contemporary references the primary interest
of the painting is theological, having to do with what the Epistle to the Hebrews calls “the
eternal priesthood of Christ.” The people represented in the painting are in this sense
marginal. Given the theology of the Real Presence, the central point of the work is of course
the wafer.
But the heart of the argument is that the wafer is not in fact represented. The bit of bread
“under whose accidents that body supposedly exists and is eaten is a small blank….” Later
the blank becomes “this dab of white,” though later still it is again a “blank spot.” So it is
“less a representation than a space where visual representation is emphatically refusing to
happen.” Thus it complies with the “ideological” demands of the Church.
Under van Gent’s painting there was a predella, or decorated altar-step, by Paolo Uccello,
telling in six episodes the story of a Jewish “Profanation of the Host.” The story, extant in
many versions, is of a Jew who sought to disprove the Christian doctrine of the Real
Presence, in this case by procuring the wafer and cooking it to test whether it behaved like a
real body. So the predella provides a narrative supporting the relative abstraction of the
altarpiece. The altarpiece is theologically abstract, but Uccello’s painting, though sharing an
interest in the theological doctrine, is in other respects very different: it tells a story. However,
it also has a telltale luminosity: “the wound in the wall.” The Host that the Jews are secretly
cooking gives out blood, and the soldiers outside could not have known this had the blood not
trickled across the room and out through this hole in the wall, which is not only a structural
element in the representation but “a tear in the fabric of that representation.” The doctrinal
point is that the experiment of the Jews proves the Real Presence by a test no Christian would
make. Only a Jew would dare to have doubted it. The consequences for the family concerned
are depicted by Uccello as very severe.
The authors’ analysis of these paintings, though avowedly incomplete, is far more detailed
than my account of it, but it should be clear that the hole and the blank Host together do the
work of anecdote or revealing luminosity. We have been shown a general truth about
representation: the blank spot and the hole are “tears where energies, desires, and
representations flow out into the world.” These paintings together “both bear and efface the
marks of the eucharistic doctrine of the Real Presence, especially its anti-
representationalism.”
So the works of van Gent and Uccello reflect what was to become a doctrinal dispute, with
powerful political and social implications, that would soon split the Church and set nations
against one another. All this is deduced from one blank spot and a hole in a wall. The
ingenuity and assurance of the essay are extraordinary, yet it may well be that its argument is
doubtful, like others that depend on anecdotes to transcend the understanding of more
conventional historians.
Joos van Gent’s enormous painting is in poor physical condition. The color, especially the
white, was always thin, and some of the work, apparently done in a hurry and perhaps by
assistants unfamiliar with painting in oils, was inexpert. The work has suffered much from
traveling to exhibitions, from worm damage, and from inept restoration by painters unfamiliar
with Flemish techniques. An examination made in 1899 detected cracks and whitish stains
where the paint had fallen off (macchie biancastre pel colore caduto). In 1931 it was reported
as almost irretrievably damaged, but it was then once again subjected to restoration (a round
window previously painted out now reappeared). 2
The authors say nothing of the dilapidated condition of the picture, a consideration which
might have suggested other reasons for the state of the paint, if there is any, on the place of
the wafer. Their description of it seems to say either that there is no paint or that there is at
best a dab of white paint—surely a point they should have made up their minds about. But if
the more or less paintless state of the wafer does show that the Host could not be represented,
the implication is that the painter and his patrons knew this, and so did the restorers, clumsy
yet providentially endowed with New Historicist sensitivity, over the next five hundred years.
It is hard to believe they would see the profound purpose of a small blank patch in a large
picture from which the paint was falling off anyway. And as far as I can discover, there is no
parallel in the history of quattrocento or indeed of Italian art at any time for this reverent
abstention from representation. After all, there seemed to be no problem about representing
the blood of Christ by red paint. It would seem that the linking of that small blankish patch to
the whole desperate history of the doctrine of the Real Presence is a conceit rather than a fact.
The presence in the painting of the converted Jew Isaac, emissary of the Persian king, is
important to the argument because it brings in the matter of Jewish attitudes toward the
Christian doctrine, and allows the authors to introduce the theme of anti-Semitism, with much
detail about the Franciscan effort to provide alternatives to usury. They therefore choose one
out of several available explanations for the presence of this figure. Their candidate happens,
conveniently, to be a converted Jew. Another candidate considered by scholars is Caterino
Zeno, a Venetian, who was also, as it happens, an emissary of the Persian sovereign, but not a
Jew, indeed, presumably, a Catholic, which suits the present argument much less well.
Moreover the painting as a whole may have a much simpler theme than is here proposed; for
example, it may commemorate the moment when the sacrament is administered to Saint
Peter, appropriately the first-ever communicant.
Authors as sophisticated as these are, as we’ve seen, well aware of the danger that the
“luminous detail” may be chosen not at random and not for its simple luminosity but because
it can be made to “resonate with” an idea they already have in their heads. The Host is like the
anecdote, valued because it is in a way “a horrific outside to any conceivable historical
order.” It can serve to pierce the defenses of conventional historiography. So can Uccello’s
hole in the wall. The idea is rather thrilling, and it enables the authors to get where they want
to be, into the network of the theological and social conflicts of the time. But what is exciting
is not necessarily true. And to have discussed the van Gent painting in such detail without
reference to its condition is arguably to reject hard historical fact in favor of fantasy.
A chapter on “The Potato in the Materialist Imagination” is a sort of learned scherzo, basing
its own “much quirkier analysis” on R.N. Salaman’s famous book The History and Social
Influence of the Potato (1949). Irish peasants, close to the soil, cultivated and lived solely on
potatoes while they were employed to grow the grain that provided bread for their betters.
The potato, dug up and boiled and eaten straight from the pot, required none of the
technology necessary for breadmaking; it was basic, humble, and earthy, as were its
consumers. Indeed it came to be identified with the peasants who lived on it, and who, like
the potato, appeared to be molded of earth or dirt. “Hence,” the authors claim, “[the potato]
seems an appropriate topic for launching a discussion of the modern materialistic
imagination.” This discussion is rather insecurely linked to that of “the elusive object,” the
unrepresentable Host, by the statement that the potato, coming right out of the earth, is the
opposite of transcendent and immortal, being associated with filth and infirmity. “Perhaps it
was because the Irish peasantry was in the grip of superstition, because they thought they
could eat God’s body, that they uncomplainingly lived on a hog’s diet.”
Well, perhaps. This chapter again demonstrates what serious fun these new games can be.
Less persuasive and amusing is a chapter intimately relating Reformation theology to Hamlet.
Here the arguments about the Real Presence are juxtaposed rather uneasily with certain
scattered passages in Hamlet, such as the hero’s remarks about the body of Polonius. Much is
made of the ritual care taken in church to avoid unseemly disposal of any remnants of the
wafer, lest it be consumed by a mouse, for instance; and Hamlet tends to dwell on the
indignity suffered by a king’s body if it has to make a progress through the guts of a beggar:
The play enacts and reenacts queasy rituals of defilement and revulsion, an obsession
with a corporeality that reduces everything to appetite and excretion.
The book ends with a chapter on the novel: “Novels,” we are told,
may…be said to activate a fundamental practice of modern ideology—acquiescence

without belief, crediting without credulousness—while significantly altering its
disposition, transforming the usually guarded wariness into pleasurable expectations.
This account of the novel would with some adaptation apply well enough to the book that
includes it: we “assent for the moment while keeping our readiness to depart from the
fictional world.”
However, the centerpiece of the chapter is an analysis of Great Expectations notable for its
flourishes of far-fetched but not always irrelevant learning, as in the treatment of the passage
at the beginning of the novel where Pip studies the gravestone of his father, and, later, the
description of the thirty-two convicts in their pen, with Magwitch and Pip safely outside. In
the opening scene Pip is associated with the tradition of “the wicked son,” a tradition that the
authors now recount and explain:
Pip’s expectations have nothing to do with his father, for no one could seem more
completely defunct in body, spirit, and fortune than the “Philip Pirrip, late of this parish”
who is declared “dead and buried” (along with “Georgiana wife of the above” and
“Alexander, Bartholomew, Abraham, Tobias, and Roger, infant children of the
aforesaid”) in the opening pages of Great Expectations and never mentioned again. The
wicked son’s nefarious suggestion that the past is past, over and done with, and that none
of it has anything to do with him is at once common sense and painful reality to little Pip
as he scans his surroundings and sees only a landscape like a blank sheet, ruled but not
lettered: “The marshes were just a long black line…; and the river was just another
horizontal line, not nearly so broad nor yet so black; and the sky was just a row of long
angry red lines and dense black lines intermixed.”
As a figure for the as yet unwritten social world of this (or perhaps any) orphan, the
blankness of the initial setting makes Pip’s wicked-son mentality seem like an opening
gambit: tell me the story, it seems to say, that will people this desolation and end my
isolation. But the letters in the churchyard promise no stories; they are comically
complete, words and icons combined, and seem to leave no room for curiosity about
their overly represented and therefore everlastingly finished referents: “The shape of the
letters on my father’s [tombstone], gave me the odd idea that he was a square, stout, dark
man, with curly black hair. From the character and turn of the inscription, ‘Also
Georgiana Wife of the Above,’ I drew a childish conclusion that my mother was freckled
and sickly.”
The discussion involves a wide-ranging investigation of nineteenth-century ideas, medical

information on real and apparent death, and the relation between Marx on fetishism and other
evidence of the period’s “willingness to enter into known illusions”:
The pleasures of pretending to flesh out a moribund structure, to put blood and muscle
on a conceptual abstraction, to lay it by for future use, then to resuscitate it are the
pleasures of the fictional mode. These pleasures are all the more apparent in serial
publications like Great Expectations, which require that the reader’s interest be
suspended from one installment to the next, often through the technique of a suspenseful
plot. And, since we know that the periodically reappearing simulacra, indicating absence
as they do, will necessarily have a whiff of death about them, it seems only appropriate
that Great Expectations should linger in the graveyard to bare its rites of fiction.
…The novel’s generic readiness to disclose the open secret of its fictionality would seem
to fit a dominant nineteenth-century “ideological” tendency toward epistemological
flexibility. Complicating Marx’s formulation that ideology entails a “fetishistic” belief in
the independent life of mere human inventions, we’ve argued that instead ideology has
required a mode of supplementing disbelief with a willingness to enter into known
illusions, a disposition to take obvious inventions of the human hand and brain for
independently living entities under certain conditions and for certain purposes.
The continuity of skepticism underlying both fiction and the ideology of the modern
period would, then, seem an obvious nexus in which to place Great Expectations‘
revenants, since they, too, invite us to play with the difference between animate and
inanimate beings. Explicitly, in this case, we are invited to pretend that bodies can be
held at the brink of life or move gradually in and out of a vital state through the
operations of the mind. Pip becomes an allegory for the reader, both frightening himself
with the ghastly figures and indulging the wish that he had the power to think the dead
back to life.
The scope and daring of the exercise are notable, but one cannot help regretting that the game
is being played in just the spirit of skeptical pretense that the authors attribute to the “fiction
and the ideology of the modern period.” One of the more basic problems of New Historical
writing is that one cannot be sure whether one is being asked to believe something, or merely
entertained by dextrous performers.
2.
David Scott Kastan thinks the moment of New Historicism has passed. It is “neither new
enough nor historical enough to serve.” What is more, it assumes a certain coherence in a
culture, such that one can begin from some obscure or startling anecdote and find it consonant
with the culture at large, which, for Kastan, is a reprise of the despised formalism of a
previous generation. Specifically he complains about the “notorious anecdotalism” of New
Historicism, “with its habitual gesture toward historic specificity.” What he wants is history
with more facts, although he is anxious that this development should not be seen as a return to
an obsolete, pre-New, form of historicism. We are now, it seems, in “a post-theoretical
moment.”
Yet he admittedly owes much to New Historicism and other aspects of “Theory,” and uses a
lot of the now familiar patter (“mystified,” “demonize,” “imbricate,” “articulation,” including
“highly mobile articulation”), without which it seems the business of modern criticism cannot
be conducted. And like some New Historicists he seems to think that until the arrival of their
own way of doing it all thinking about history had been “positivist” and “untheoretical.”
“Older historicisms found it simpler to pretend that their constructions were limpid, objective
accounts of the past, unfiltered by the interests of the observer.” Unsurprisingly, such names
as R.G. Collingwood and W.B. Gallie (to name but two) are absent from the indexes of both
these books; The Idea of History was published in 1946 and Philosophy and the Historical
Understanding in 1964, presumably too early to be of interest to modern thinkers about
historical explanation, who regard the writing of history with reference to the interests and
presumptions of the observer as their own discovery, and sum up all former inquiries by
reference to positivism and Ranke’s remark about telling it as it really (“actually”?
“essentially”?) was. 3
Kastan’s book, a collection of disparate essays on related themes, involves a good deal of
repetition, both of its main positions and of its illustrations (for example, we are told three
times that in 1612 Thomas Bodley, despising such cheap literature, forbade the acquisition of
playbooks by the great library he founded at Oxford). His main insistence is on the fact that
Elizabethan and Jacobean plays “were not autonomous and self-contained literary objects but
provisional scripts for performance.” They originated with an author, or authors, who did not
own them and (usually) had no control over what became of them in the playhouse or, if they
were among the rather small proportion of plays published, in the printing house. “Actors,
prompters, collaborators, annotators, revisers, copyists, compositors, printers, and
proofreaders all would have a hand in shaping the play-text.”
Shakespeare’s income, as Kastan correctly observes, would have derived not from authorship
but from his being a “sharer” in the company he wrote for, claiming a tenth of its profits. As a
playwright he would simply turn in the original provisional scripts, taking little or no more
interest in them—a plausible view, supported by Shakespeare’s apparent indifference to the
fate of his published plays, and by what is known in general about theatrical and publishing
practice. Modern editions, with their emphasis on the importance of what Shakespeare
actually wrote, neglect the circumstances that diluted his influence on the dramatic product.
At one point Kastan remarks that to old-fashioned editors the “Bad” quarto of Hamlet (1603)
is of less value than the “Good” quarto of 1604, whereas to anybody interested in “the social
text” the Bad “speaks the material and institutional conditions of the production every bit as
fully” and is called “Bad” only because of its lesser proximity to Shakespeare’s manuscript.
He means that the Bad quartos are certainly related to performances controlled by theatrical
conventions and interventions, just as the Good ones were, and only seem to lack authority
because various unknown hands had messed about with them; eliminate the unthinking desire
of editors to know what Shakespeare actually wrote, and there can be no point in thinking
them inferior to Good quartos.
This is an interesting idea, though apparently hard to hold on to, and before long Kastan is
himself talking about a “defective” quarto and the “flawed text” of the 1597 Romeo and
Juliet. Why don’t these meet the obligations of “social text” every bit as well as their
legitimate congeners? On this argument they are flawed only in the least important way, their
dubious relation to what Shakespeare originally wrote. The fetishizing of that original began,
in Kastan’s view, with Heminges and Condell, colleagues of Shakespeare, when they
published the posthumous First Folio in 1623 and claimed that they were providing texts of
Shakespeare’s plays “absolute in their numbers, as he conceiv’d them.” Kastan claims that
they were not only lying but “erasing the very conditions of his art” and falsely representing
the nature of his authority.
These considerations, so agitating to Kastan, would be less worrying if we were content to

think of the word “Shakespeare” as simply a convenient way of referring to the plays as we
have them and not primarily to a single author, a person who has been so badly
misrepresented by naive biographers and editors. And although Kastan offers much detailed
supporting material, none of this is really new. However, he proposes a new use for it, the
exploration of the “richly productive interactions” between Shakespeare’s art and “other
intentions that interact with his work.”
The second half of the book con-sists of chapters dealing with a vari-ety of problems
encountered by post-theorists animated by a renewed passion for fact. His argument against
Gary Taylor, the Oxford editor who, with exceptional implausibility, insisted on renaming
Falstaff Oldcastle in 1 Henry IV and changing the title of the play, is clearly correct, and
along the way contains an interesting argument that Lollards (of whom Oldcastle was one)
had come to be regarded by adherents of the Elizabethan Settlement not as heroes but villains.
A substantial group of articles explores the idea that “representation itself became subversive”
and that the theater, simply by existing, was working “to expose the mystifications of power.”
The mere fact that an actor could play a king, wearing the royal insignia, was enough to
weaken “the structure of authority,” the more so since by prancing around London in their
fine clothes the actors were threats to “the culture of degree.” Representing nascent
capitalism, they were a menace to older systems of authority. And the claim is made, not for
the first time but still rather absurdly, that these theatrical subversions led, in the long run, to
the execution of Charles I.
But the authority flouted by the theater was civic, not royal. Elizabeth enjoyed plays, though
insisting on control and moderation, while James I made Shakespeare’s company the King’s
Men, royal servants. The threat to the monarchy cannot have been considered very great.
Indeed in his last chapter Kastan himself argues that in closing the theaters in 1642
Parliament was acting not against royalism or from doctrinaire puritanism but in its own
defense against criticism, at a time when its rule was as unpopular as the King’s.
The chapter which best illustrates the author’s desire to outdo all historicisms, new and old, is
on The Tempest. For a good while the standard approach to this play has been to situate it in
“the discourse of colonialism.” It has long seemed evident enough that it alluded to the
colonialist Virginia ventures, but more than that was wanted, and the “discourse of
colonialism” was ransacked by academic commentators to a degree that showed they would
go to any lengths to avoid talking about the play itself. Kastan agrees that the Virginia
connection has been overdone, but moves it aside only to demonstrate that the play is really
quite minutely concerned with European dynastic politics.
The Tempest was performed as part of the festivities preceding the marriage of Princess
Elizabeth to Frederick, the Elector of Bohemia, in 1613. Does it “resonate,” as Kastan
believes, with the forthcoming marriage and with political issues concerning Bohemia?
Before answering this one should remember that it was only one of fourteen plays given
during the celebrations, and that among the others were Othello and The Winter’s Tale. It is
surely harder to make these plays resonate with nuptial celebrations. However, the politics of
the Holy Roman Empire and especially the position of the Emperor Rudolf still seem more
promising material than the play itself.
“This all may seem to be taking us far from the island world of The Tempest,” says Kastan,
but only to take us closer to the true “historical center.” The reclusive Rudolf was interested
in magic and was deposed, as Prospero was. (Strangely, there is no mention here of Frances
Yates, who had so much to say about Bohemia and the Princess Elizabeth, Rudolf, and his
English mage John Dee. 4 )
When the play mentions a son of Antonio drowned in the wreck, it is customary to regard the
reference as one of those quite common Shakespearean slips. To argue that this drowned son
existed within the terms of the play may help to complicate its dynastic plot; but it quite
unnecessarily makes Ariel a liar when he says the storm produced “not so much perdition as
an hair.” (Kastan, almost incredibly, here proposes a pun on “heir.”) But what is supposed to
have happened to this ghostly character? He is not mentioned again, neither included in nor
excluded from the reconciliations at the end. Nobody, not even his father, laments or even
notices his death. It seems that in this kind of historical criticism you can say anything you
like, however fanciful, without expecting common-sense objections.
Kastan remarks that orthodox historians—historians de métier—find it hard to take the New
Historicism seriously, and it seems unlikely that they will bother much about this post–New
Historicism. An interest in fact is admirable, but theory has given it perhaps too much license,
for all fact is now somehow interrelated; text and context are “imbricated” (i.e., overlapping,
as with fish scales) so that one can say almost anything and claim its relevance to whatever is
being talked about. Much intelligence and much scholarly labor is thus thrown away; while
the plays themselves, puritanically denied “aesthetic” attention, are, like the theaters in 1642,
declared off-limits.
1. 1
In Stephen J. Greenblatt, Learning to Curse: Essays in Early Modern Culture (Routledge,
1990). ↩
2. 2
These facts are derived from the minutely detailed study of the painting by Jacques Lavalleye
in Le Palais ducal d'Urbin (Brussels: Centre national de Recherches "Primitifs flamands,"
1964), a work which escapes attention in the present book. ↩
3. 3
For an acute study of the various interpretations of Ranke's famous dictum, see Stephen Bann,
The Clothing of Clio: A Study of the Representation of History in Nineteenth-Century Britain
and France (Cambridge University Press, 1984), pp. 8–31. ↩
4. 4
See, for instance, Theatre of the World (Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1969), The Rosicrucian
Enlightenment (Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1972), and Shakespeare's Last Plays (Routledge
and Kegan Paul, 1975). ↩
Copyright © 1963-2012 NYREV, Inc. All rights reserved.

Art Among The Ruins by Frank Kermode - The New York Review of Books

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Art Among the Ruins by Frank Kermode | The New York Review of Books 30/08/12 19:04

Art Among the Ruins

Practicing New Historicism

Shakespeare After Theory

manifestation of a collective consciousness informing the institutions of the society at large.

Greenblatt’s studies in Renaissance culture—ingenious, learned, elegantly written—have

the materials of scholarship, scandalmongers, provincial politicians, charlatans, and

“history’s normal epistemological assumptions.”

may…be said to activate a fundamental practice of modern ideology—acquiescence

The discussion involves a wide-ranging investigation of nineteenth-century ideas, medical

These considerations, so agitating to Kastan, would be less worrying if we were content to

Copyright © 1963-2012 NYREV, Inc. All rights reserved.

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