Open the curtain and see their puppets play

Peter Burke

  • Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England by Stephen Greenblatt
    Oxford, 205 pp, £22.50, April 1988, ISBN 0 19 812980 7
  • Representing the English Renaissance edited by Stephen Greenblatt
    University of California Press, 372 pp, $42.00, February 1988, ISBN 0 520 06129 2

Like sociology and anthropology, the study of art and literature, especially the art and literature of the Renaissance, seems to be taking a historical turn in the Eighties. To a historian like myself this trend is obviously encouraging. Indeed, for a historian the problem is not so much to explain the rise of the so-called ‘New Historicism’ associated with Stephen Greenblatt and his friends and followers, as to account for the hostile reactions to it. Why should it be considered subversive to replace literary texts in their historical contexts? Is the movement dangerous because it is historicist or because it is new?

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