Shakespearean Negotiations by Stephen Greenblatt

CITATION:
Greenblatt, Stephen. Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988. Print.
Understanding

• Question: How do Shakespeare's works acquire their compelling force?
• Answer: Artistic works that are fully committed to their cultural contingency can transfer social "stuff" from one domain to another.
• Method: [This book is more of an exposition in method than a single-minded argument.] In short, Greenblatt restores contemporary documents from "context" to comparison with Shakespeare's plays. In most cases, Greenblatt observes the way that political forces constitute their own subversion, whether in real or fictional discourses.
• Assumptions: Greenblatt adopts the Foucauldian perspective towards power and the individual, which is not entirely compatible with other methods which interest me.
• Sententiae: 
• "Despite the wooden walls and the official regulations, the boundaries between the theater and the world were not fixed, nor did they constitute a logically coherent set; rather they were a sustained collective improvisation." (14)
• "Conversely, we identify as principles of order and authority in Renaissance texts what we would, if we took them seriously, find subversive for ourselves: religious and political absolutism, aristocracy of birth, demonology, humoral psychology, and the like. That we do not find such notions subversive, that we complacently identify them as principles of aesthetic or political order, replicates the process of containment taht licensed the elements we call subversive in Renaissance texts: that is, our own values are sufficiently strong for us to contain alien forces almost effortlessly." (39)
• "The concrete individual exists only in relation to forces that pull against spontaneous singularity and that draw any given life, however peculiarly formed, toward communal norms." (75) 
• "I hasten to disclaim that Shakespeare took a lively interest in the medical discourse about sex, or that he favored one theory of generation over another... But there is no unmediated access to the body, no direct appropriation of sexuality; rather sexuality is itself a network of historically contingent figures that constitute the culture's categorical understanding of erotic experience." (86)
• "This strategy--the reinscription of evil onto the professed enemies of evil--is one of the characteristic operations of religious authority in the early modern period and has its secular analogues in more recent history when famous revolutionaries are paraded force to be tried as counter-revolutionaries." (98)
• "For Harsnett the theatrical seduction is not merely a Jesuitical strategy; it is the essence fo the church itself: Catholicism is a 'Mimic superstition.' Harsnett's response is to try to drive the Catholic church into the theater, just as during the Reformation Catholic clerical garments--the copes and albs and amices and stoles that were the glories of medieval textile crafts--were sold to the players." (112) 
• "In a move that Ben Jonson rather than Shakespeare seems to have anticipated, the theater itself comes to be emptied out in the interests of reading... Where institutions like the King's Men had been thought to generate their texts, now texts like King Lear appear to generate their institutions. The commercial contingency of the theater gives way to the philosophical necessity of literature." (127-8)
• "The aesthetic space--or more accurately, the commercial space fo the theatrical joint-stock company--is constituted by the simultaneous appropriation of and swerving from the discourse fo power. And this doubleness in effect produces two different accounts of the nature of mimetic economy. In one account, aesthetic representation is unlike all other exchanges because it takes nothing; art is pure plenitude... [T]here is another version of mimetic economy, one in which aesthetic exchanges, like all other exchanges, always involve loss, even if it is cunningly hidden; in which aesthetic value... is the very soul of scarcity." (159-160)

Overstanding

• Assessment: Admittedly, no one waits with baited breath to hear of what I think of Greenblatt. Nevertheless, I hesitate to quibble with the absolute dissolution of the individual, although I enjoy the critical license granted to me by the Foucauldian work of spotting discourses. Ultimately, that critical license may prove dangerous. The critic has the privilege of associating cultural elements--however disparate--and making the case for an episteme that is subtly--invisibly and therefore powerfully--governing all things. That is, this method runs the risk of making stone soup.
• Synthesis: The natural compliment to Greenblatt is Norbrook, though King, too, may have benefitted from some of Greenblatt's paradoxes. Whereas Greenblatt coyly observes the interplay between political and literary texts under the same episteme, King sets the arts downstream from political culture--understandable in the case of commissioned art, but dangerous at large.
• Application: Greenblatt's given me a lot to mull over, but I'm interested in the degree to which the "representative anecdote" of New Historical analysis can be substituted or complimented by large-scale statistical analysis. While population statistics don't belie the paradoxical institutions of power, they do speak to the material effect of many discourses over time.