Rethinking Historicism from Shakespeare to Milton ed. by Ann Baynes Coiro, Thomas Fulton, and: Shakespeare and the Staging of English History by Janette Dillon, and: Shakespeare’s History Plays: Rethinking Historicism by Neema Parvini (review)

New Historicism was bound to get old sooner or later. This is always the problem with calling something “new.” New College is one of the oldest colleges at Oxford. The Pont Neuf is the oldest standing bridge in Paris. Thus the whirligig of time brings in his revenges. Since the mid-1980s historicism has been the dominant discourse in early modern literary studies. That it is under attack as being outmoded or hegemonic thirty years later is not surprising. The moment when the ground-breaking work of Stephen Greenblatt, Leonard Tennenhouse, and Louis Montrose seemed “thrillingly ‘new’” (Coiro and Fulton 5) has long since passed. The cultural materialism of Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield is similarly dated. Although historicism in early modern studies is often felt to be aligned with Marxism and the political left, it is now under attack from both left and right. Critics and scholars of a more conservative bent contend that historicism disregards the individual genius of Shakespeare and other great artists by particularizing them and subjecting them to historical trends and social forces. Progressives attack historicism for tying Shakespeare texts to specific historical times and places, thus denying their relevance to contemporary issues like income inequality and environmentalism. Both sides argue that historicism reduces texts to contexts and leads to trivial studies of justly obscure texts. And yet, for better or worse, historicism persists.

If one rejects historicism and argues instead that history is a dead weight on the present, then why study Shakespeare at all? One popular answer (somewhat unfashionable in academic circles) is because he was a universal and transcendent genius. His writings are not of an age but for all time. Inelegant formulations of this idea are known uncharitably as bardolatry. But the future of Shakespeare studies without the support of either History or Genius would be an uncertain thing.

The three volumes under review all address this crisis in historicism. Neema Parvini’s Shakespeare’s History Plays rejects historicism’s anti-essentialism and anti-humanism and argues for Shakespeare’s agency as “an extraordinarily gifted individual” (217). The essays collected in Ann Baynes Coiro and Thomas Fulton’s Rethinking Historicism from Shakespeare to Milton critique historicism and imagine ways to reinvigorate it. Although it does not directly address debates around historicism, Janette Dillon’s Shakespeare and the Staging of English History provides a model for using historical insight to inform an analysis of Shakespeare’s plays based on staging and performance.

Neema Parvini’s study is subtitled “Rethinking Historicism,” but it often seems more a rejection than a rethink. New historicism, in his view, was tainted from the start by its reliance on what he terms antihumanist and relativist thought. He sees his own role as redemptive: “This monograph makes a sustained argument against the anti-humanism to which, under the sway of cultural historicism, Shakespeare studies has been in thrall since the 1980s” (215). Leaving aside whether such dramatic terms as “sway” and “thrall” are warranted, it is true that historical criticism tends to assume that human beings are shaped by and subjected to larger social forces, including language itself, and thus are not autonomous shapers of their own destiny. Such an approach, Parvini feels, is uniquely unsuited to deal with a figure like Shakespeare, who arguably transcends his time and place in achievements and abilities.

Parvini states that he has no interest in reviving “the idea of the Universal Bard” (217), but this sits somewhat awkwardly next...