From an upcoming work on Greenblatt by Liam Haydon of the University of Kent, which I'll be publishing next year...

Early responses to Renaissance Self-Fashioning were overwhelmingly positive. The critic Louis Montrose labelled the book “a seminal contribution to our necessary reinvention of the English Renaissance.” Renaissance Self-Fashioning was seen as offering a new methodology with which to approach sixteenth and seventeenth century material. Greenblatt’s combination of social and psychological theory with historical detail offered a new model of an ideologically oriented mode of criticism that was eagerly accepted and built on by Renaissance scholars. This methodology quickly became highly influential in Renaissance studies, which moved from studying a narrow set of canonical writers to an appreciation of what non-canonical (or even apparently non-literary) texts revealed about the context from which they emerged.

However, this positive reception of the book’s aims did not preclude critics from noticing certain structural issues. Jean Howard, despite generally approving of the work, noted that the book’s focus on individuals undermines its general aim of a wider commentary on broader cultural norms. She argued that by focusing on those six particular examples, Greenblatt suggests to the reader that they “transcended pervasive cultural paradigms for fashioning identity and left their marks as individuals.” Other critics noted that Greenblatt focused entirely on male self-fashioning, providing “a male protagonist whose centrality is never questioned,” and neglecting female writers as well as the range of responses that Renaissance women produced from Renaissance men.

Most frequently, however, critics of Renaissance Self-Fashioning saw it as pessimistic in its treatment of individual agency. Greenblatt, they claimed, argues that powerful ideologies will always contain threats against them, and that individual choice is an illusion that masks the authoritarian forces determining human action. Jonathan Dollimore, prominent amongst this movement, has noted that Greenblatt focuses too much on “the formative power of social and ideological structures which are both prior to experience and in some sense determining of it,” rather than on the power of “human agency.”

Some critics further noted that the insistence on focusing on a handful of prominent male figures undermined the validity of the broad claims that Greenblatt was making in the text. These critics, broadly of the feminist school, have subsequently argued that Renaissance Self-Fashioning (and the New Historicism, the movement that developed around Greenblatt’s methodology) ignores female voices and agency in favour of male-dominated power structures. Greenblatt has never formally responded to such criticism, and his subsequent work has not altered in its focus on male writers from whom he can draw a generalised picture of Renaissance culture and practices.

Ten years after the publication of Renaissance Self-Fashioning in 1980, one noted critic of American literature commented that “New Historicists and feminists seem to talk at cross purposes, keeping their mutual distance, relegating each other to a kind of non-presence.” There has been no consensus or significant change in attitude in the years since. However, a parallel school of thought, known as Cultural Materialism, has been developed to correct this perceived flaw in Greenblatt’s methodology by concentrating on the success of radical or marginalised voices within a culture.

Greenblatt explicitly responds to this criticism in his preface to the 2005 edition of Renaissance Self-Fashioning. He accepts that on one level the book describes “an immense malevolent force determined to crush all resistance;” however, he rejects the idea that this should be the dominant reading of the text, suggesting instead that his work chronicles “hope in many different forms, often crushed but then springing up in spite of everything.” Greenblatt’s response, then, is not to change his critical practice, but to challenge the interpretation of that practice. This has not proved sufficiently persuasive to convince all the critics of his work that it is in fact a “hopeful” text, and debate continues about the extent to which an individual can escape from his or her culture, and whether Renaissance texts show a totalising power, or the possibility of subverting or destabilising power.

Other scholarship has accepted his historicist ideas without necessarily applying the methodology of subjection and resistance that animates Renaissance Self-Fashioning. The critics following this kind of approach are not as interested as Greenblatt in power structures, and many would question whether the individual is as powerless in the face of powerful ideologies or belief structures as Greenblatt suggests. The prominent cultural scholar Andrew Hadfield has identified a move among critics to “consider the resistance to the explicable and the easily summarised in literature, in order to suggest what makes works of art distinctive.” That is, they reject Greenblatt’s idea that there is a broad “poetics of culture”, a general sense of power relations and structures, and identifying this can “explain” a work of art. The debate around Greenblatt’s work, then, is not whether or not his historicising methodology is worthwhile, but what the application of that method tells us about power structures and the possibility of radical resistance to them.

Recent work on Shakespeare, for example, puts his work in the context of the educational systems of the Renaissance, or the Bible, or Renaissance ideas of fatherhood. Though critics may disagree on which of these contexts is the most important, they all agree that Shakespeare’s work needs to be seen not as something standing apart from its time, but powerfully influenced by it. These critical approaches to Shakespeare are also linked by the broad trend in historicist studies of moving away from Greenblatt’s generalised, long-view study towards very specific, local contexts for individual texts.

Athough Greenblatt’s historicist methodology has become largely commonplace, the political aspects of New Historicism remain the subject of debate. H. Aram Veeser argued in the introduction to the influential collection of essays, The New Historicism, first published in 1989 and reissued in 2013, that “crisis not consensus surrounds the New Historicists project” since it has been “kept off-balance by internal stresses.” One important essay in that collection, by Gayatri Spivak, argued that New Historicism was more or less incompatible with post-colonial criticism; in her view, New Historicist ideas of “history,” when applied to the “nationhood” and “citizenship” of the post-colonial space, privileges colonial history, not the “subaltern” who has their history written over.