The 'New Historicism' and Early Modern Drama: A Review Article

The 4New Historicism' and Early Modern Drama: A Review Article Clifford Davidson One of the curious things about literary criticism, including that applied to the drama, in the twentieth century is the way in which schools and fads emerge, mature, and then die away. Historical criticism, popular in the early part of this century, rose in response to the need for a positivistic study of literature in the academies where such study would be respected by colleagues from other disciplines. It came under severe attack in the period following the Second World War by the so-called New Critics, whose formalism and ahistorical attention to close reading of texts appealed to an influential generation of professors and teachers. For the past two decades, however, no school has claimed hegemony over the methodology of dramatic criticism, and indeed all previous approaches have been under scrutiny following the rise of deconstructionism and other postmodernist methodologies, some of them deeply rooted in skepticism . Fortunately, not all critics and scholars have eschewed attention to the historical contexts of drama, which indeed are most fruitfully examined through interdisciplinary analysis, an endeavor that has long been encouraged by Comparative Drama. Further, the school now identified as "New Historicism," perhaps best known through familiarity with Stephen Greenblatt's provocative Renaissance Self-Fashioning (1980), has attempted to extend our understanding of literary contexts in unusual and sometimes exciting ways. The revival of interest in historical matters among students of literature parallels developments in the discipline of history itself, where focusing upon widely separated aspects of culture CLIFFORD DAVIDSON, Co-Editor of Comparative Drama, has published widely on Renaissance and medieval subjects. His most recent book is The Guild Chapel Wall Paintings at Stratford-upon-Avon (AMS Press, 1988). 359 360Comparative Drama has often displaced reverence for kings, emperors, and other political leaders whose exploits, often military, formerly were the center of historical attention. Even the study of local records dispersed in dusty archives is no longer considered work best left to the antiquarian, while the evidence laboriously collected by archaeologists also has been found to contain invaluable information for the scholar intent on interpreting the past. Historians of religion have even more radically turned from concentration on theology and official doctrines (and on the historical figures with whom they were associated) in favor of analysis of actual religious practices, whether popular or liturgical , in their pursuit of knowledge about the spirituality of the Christian era. Further, inspired by the phenomenological method of such scholars as Gerardus van der Leeuw and Mircea Eliade, they have often not been afraid to make connections with practices in non-Christian traditions or even with that anthropological preserve formerly designated as "primitive" religion. In literary study, the proponents of New Historicism are likely to see themselves as more tentative than historians working in prosopography or civic history or even religious history; as Herbert Lindenberger indicates in "Toward a New History in Literary Study" (Profession 84, pp. 16-23), they tend to categorize their work as not necessarily permanent or as objective only to a limited degree—a judgment which is, of course, dependent on the presuppositions which underlie their observations. But certainly the New Historicism has done good service in calling attention to recent and relevant specialist studies in anthropology, social history, economics, and political science— an opening up of literary criticism to a broader range of scholarship than had previously been the case. Unfortunately, because of its focus on certain aspects of the social context to the exclusion of others, this approach also may be subjected to severe limitations, as Steven Mullaney's The Place of the Stage (Univ. of Chicago Press, 1988) demonstrates. As an example of the New Historicism, Mullaney's book further is far too dependent on secondary sources rather eccentrically selected (when primary sources are required) and on anecdotes sometimes quite striking and sometimes arbitrary, yet a perceptive reader will find insights here that will potentially lead him or her in the end to a greater understanding of drama and the theater of the early modern period. In the final analysis, MuI- Clifford Davidson361 laney's study may demonstrate the weaknesses as well as the strengths of the...