Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England (The New Historicism: Studies in Cultural Poetics) (No. 84) (Volume 4)

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Although Greenblatt as received a good deal attention for his interest in critical practice and for his coining of the terms "New Historicisim" and "cultural poetics," his real strengths ahev also ben doing close readings of literary and historical texts. In Shakespearean Negotiations, Greenblatt offers typically brilliant and engaging readings of some of Shakespeare's major plays. His book is of interest to a wide audience beyond an academic one. The man is an exceptionally gifted writer and storyteller. It's a pity that so few other literary and cultural critics even come close to matching him. Perhaps only Stephen Orgel and Stanley Fish have equally brilliant prose styles and analytical powers.

In Shakespearean Negotiations (1988) Stephen Greenblatt more fully expands on his theory of new historicism with various essays, the most significant being "Invisible Bullets," "The Circulation of Social Energy," and "Shakespeare and the Exorcists." These essays emphasize what has since become known as the essence of new historicism which can be summed up as follows: One cannot assume that history and literature provide a totalized narrative that fully accounts for the autonomy of a text. Historical eras are not conveniently divided into self-contained epochs. The term "world view" does not exist in designating an overarching label that describes the culture of any society. Historical "facts" cannot be judged as verifiable facts at all in that most "facts" are little more than subjective interpretations. One cannot draw a clear demarcation between literature and history in that both are mutually constitutive of each other. Just as literary texts and history texts are not autonomous neither is any work of art; all art reflects the mind of an artist who is thoroughly embedded in the conflicting and discordant social strands that we call "culture." The term "author" improperly gives credit to a uniquely talented individual who uses his autonomous self to create a text that is the fruit only of himself.The preceding summation aligns closely with the deconstructive tenets of Jacques Derrida and the general post-structuralist/post-modernist theories of writers like Michael Foucault and Jean-Francois Lyotard. Greenblatt is a Renaissance scholar who uses Shakespeare as fulcrum as one who wrote his plays knowing that both contemporary and future readers would read these plays not as stand alone texts but as texts that are ineluctably embedded in non-canonical and even trivial sources. Greenblatt is convinced that Shakespeare was typical of sixteenth and seventeenth century writers who took ideas from the various interlocking strands of society about them and re-fashioned and re-shaped them in so powerful a way that future critics simple assume that his writings are the product or an originary literary genius. Greenblatt holds that the Bard's genius lay primarily in this re-fashioning of pre-existing ideas, customs, habits, and other assorted cultural trivia in a practice that Greenblatt terms "negotiations," hence the title of his book.Not all theorists today are convinced of the practicality or even the suitability of a theory that demands that one take the word of Stephen Greenblatt that William Shakespeare really did intend his plays to be taken in a way that reduces them as not much more than a literary appendage to a vastly larger web of interconnected cultural strands of which Shakespeare was but one tiny filament. Greenblatt couches his book with a convincing array of impressive post-structuralist scholarly jargon as he nails down his thesis with many telling points. But the problem here begins with the first line of "The Circulation of Social Energy:" "I began with the desire to speak with the dead." Greenblatt implies a great deal more than he intends. His wish is to open a conduit to the past so that the marginalized voices of the long dead disenfranchised may be heard. Instead many have noted that the voice truly being heard is not the collective voices from the past but the originary voice of Stephen Greenblatt himself. Thus this one-to-many dialogue symbolizes the very concept of forced unity that he wishes to dispel. Still, Shakespearean Negotiations is a superbly written text that deserves to be read even if one feels like contesting it.