Stephen Greenblatt: The Critic as Anecdotalist

R.V. YOUNG is a professor of Renaissance literature and literary criticism at North Carolina State University and the editor of the Modern Age.

In “The Forms of Power and Power of
Forms in the Renaissance,” a widely
cited introduction to a special issue of
the academic literary journal Genre, Stephen
Greenblatt provides a fanfare for the
arrival of “what we may call the new historicism,
set apart from both the dominant
historical scholarship of the past and the
formalist criticism that partially displaced
this scholarship in the decades after World
War Two.” This older scholarship, Greenblatt
maintains, “tends to be monological;
that is, it is concerned with discovering
a single political vision, usually identical
to that said to be held by the entire literate
class or indeed the entire population.”
“Literature,” he continues, “is conceived
to mirror a period’s beliefs, but to mirror
them, as it were, from a safe distance.” By
contrast, “The new historicism erodes the
firm ground of both criticism and literature.
It tends to ask questions about its own
methodological assumptions and those of
others.”¹

The introduction that is credited with
introducing the term “new historicism”
concludes with this peroration:

The critical practice represented in
this volume challenges the assumptions
that guarantee a secure distinction
between “literary foreground”
and “political background” or, more
generally, between artistic production
and other kinds of social production.
Such distinctions do in fact exist, but
they are not intrinsic to the texts;
rather they are made up and constantly
redrawn by artists, audiences,
and readers. These collective social
constructions on the one hand define
the range of aesthetic possibilities
within a given representational mode
and, on the other, link that mode to
the complex network of institutions,
practices, and beliefs that constitute
the culture as a whole. In this light,
the study of genre is an exploration of
the poetics of culture.²

The phrases in this definitive account
of new historicism (which apply likewise
to its variants, cultural poetics and cultural
materialism) have been repeated and mimicked,
triumphantly brandished and solemnly
invoked—usually with the implication
that any demurral has been rendered
irrelevant—for more than a quarter of a
century. They are the key terms of a quasi
scientific account of literature that reduces
it to just so much data at the disposal of a
new “critical practice.” A more revealing
insight into the sources of the new historicism,
however, emerges in the prologue of
a later book, Hamlet in Purgatory. Greenblatt
recounts the surprising discovery
that his deceased father “had left a sum of
money to an organization that would say
kaddish for him—kaddish being the Aramaic
prayer for the dead, recited for eleven
months after a person’s death, and then
on certain annual occasions.” This prayer,
Greenblatt adds, “is usually said by the
deceased’s immediate family and particularly
by his sons. . . . Evidently, my father
did not trust either my older brother or
me to recite the prayer for him. The effect
the bequest had on me, perhaps perversely,
was to impel me to do so, as if in a blend of
love and spite.”³

If the earlier remarks set forth the methods
of the new historicism and, in some
respects, its goals, the anecdote about Greenblatt’s
father furnishes a provocative hint
about its motives. The man who proposes
to explain—if not explain away—Shakespeare
and other major authors by telling
anecdotes here reveals a great deal about
himself. The new historicism, as practiced
by its leading exponent, manifests a tireless
fascination with the culture of the past
in all its myriad forms, but it is relentlessly
reductive: the distinction between literary
works of art and other kinds of writing—
like anecdotes—is subverted; every sample
of writing is a “social production” that may
be treated as a document. In Greenblatt’s
influential phrase, they are “collective
social constructions.” There is love, then,
but also spite. Attention is lavished upon
Shakespeare and his plays, but the poet
becomes a case study and the poetry is not
scrutinized because of its intrinsic worth;
rather the worth is determined by the theorist’s
scrutiny. Greenblatt, surprised by his
evidently irreligious father’s concern to be
remembered in prayer, says the kaddish,
but “perversely.” By the same token, the
new historicist, scandalized by how seriously
both the older historical scholars and
the new critics took the works they studied,
continues to examine and interpret them,
but with the goal of draining them of any
inherent significance.

The works that constitute the “canon” of
European literature, which provide so vital
a part of Western Civilization’s self-understanding,
are a monument or testimony
to the authority of authors. That authority
is by analogy paternal: great writers are
among the fathers of Western culture. In
an age that “is pleased to understand itself
as constructed on the idea of autonomy,”⁴
the wishes of a father may be recognized,
but not really respected. As the “father” of
the new historicism, a method of scholarship
that subjects every tradition to a bath
of solvent skepticism, Stephen Greenblatt
flaunts a paradoxical anti-paternal paternity.
He appropriates, as it were, the authority
to call into question every traditional
authority with respect to familial, social,
and political relationships and, above all,
with respect to sexuality and religion. In
rendering any and all cultural institutions
and moral expectations problematic, he
becomes an exemplum of one of the ways
Western Civilization is crumbling from
within as a result of the relentless trituration
of its academic elites.

Greenblatt’s first book was a study of
Sir Walter Raleigh, but it was Renaissance
Self-Fashioning that made his reputation
and inaugurated the predominance of the
new historicism in academic literary study
in America.⁵ The latter book manifests a
remarkable array of rhetorical skills, often
with great verve, in dismantling the originality
and wisdom of the authors who
are its objects and reducing them to creatures
of the social matrix from which they
never quite emerge. The opening chapter
deploys a brilliant conceit by creating an
analogue between Hans Holbein’s famous
anamorphic painting, The Ambassadors,
and Sir Thomas More’s career as a courtier.
Viewed head-on, the painting displays
two sumptuously dressed French diplomats
surrounded by articles symbolic of affluence,
power, and learning; viewed from an
acute angle, the peculiar shadowy image
at the feet of the two courtiers is revealed
as a death’s head or memento mori. Greenblatt
finds a similarly unbridgeable crevasse
in More’s life and work opening up—an
irresolvable contradiction between idealism
and ambition.

Greenblatt’s discussion offers numerous
shrewd, arrestingly formulated insights
regarding particular texts; after all, he
learned to read literature with close attention
to detail as a graduate student at Yale,
when it was the vital center of academic
new criticism in the 1960s.⁶ Nevertheless,
his interpretation rests on a popular
but inadequate and, frankly, banal understanding
of More himself and especially
his masterpiece, Utopia. According to this
view, the young, idealistic (sc. “liberal”)
More, who wrote “the truly golden little
book” (libellus uere aureus), basically agreed
with his character, Raphael Hythlodaeus,
and accepted the notion that Utopian
society does represent the “best state of
a commonwealth” (optimus reipublicae status).
Regrettably, his involvement in the
controversies of the Reformation and his
position in the government of Henry VIII
turned him into an increasingly strident
polemicist and severe persecutor on behalf
of reactionary politics and religion. Some
(but certainly not all) will allow that his
eventual oppression and suffering at the
hands of King Henry and his henchmen
restored to him a measure of equanimity.

Greenblatt thus assumes that the author
of Utopia shares Raphael’s belief that sinful
pride can be uprooted by the elimination
of private property, because of his “insight
in Utopia that there is an essential relationship
between private property and private
selves.” The objections to communism by
the character “Thomas More” that men
who can count on others to work will not
work themselves and that a utopian society
will inevitably founder on the innate
tendency of fallen men and women to
favor their own interests are discounted:
“Such arguments assume a selfishness that
is canceled by the Utopian reduction of the
self.”⁷ The character “More” remarks, “That
all things might be well cannot come to pass,
unless all men might be good, which I do
not anticipate for some few years to come.”⁸
The rueful irony of this observation is, for
Greenblatt, no part the author’s awareness
of the literary significance of his own
work. “The passion for social justice, the
conviction that pride and private property
are causally linked, the daring attack on
‘the conspiracy of the rich’ give way to
the demand for discipline and the extirpation
of dissent,” Greenblatt writes of
More’s works of religious polemic. “More
has recast as hateful, as deserving extermination,
some of the qualities of mind we
most associate with the author of Utopia.
To search for causes, to question the given,
to rely on one’s own probing ‘wit’ are now
manifest signs of evil, evil that must be
ridiculed in print and persecuted remorselessly
by both church and state.”⁹

Without dwelling upon how fair an
assessment of More’s life and career is
implied by these comments, it is sufficient
to note how feeble and simplistic a reading
of Utopia they suggest. In the introduction
to his definitive translation of this work,
Clarence Miller points out that skepticism
of the Utopian ideal is built into the stylistic
texture of the work. The awkward
and eccentric complexity of the Latin syntax
of Hythlodaeus’s lengthy rants against
European political conditions in Book I
contrasts sharply and meaningfully with
the clarity and brevity of the sentences in
Book II, as he describes the social institutions
of Utopia.¹⁰ This stylistic incongruity
is epitomized in his name: Raphael,
meaning “God’s healing” (the name of
the archangel in the Book of Tobit), and
Hythlodaeus, meaning “dispenser of nonsense.”
The only connection between the
admittedly grim reality of sixteenth-century
Europe and the “Nowhere” (Greek
utopos = “no-place”) of idealistic dreams
is this dubious and contradictory figure, so
the journey from one to the other would
require more than a sea voyage. As Miller
trenchantly maintains, Utopian institutions
will only work for citizens who have
already been brought up with a Utopian
education.¹¹ In the twentieth century,
serious efforts to construct Utopia with
existing peoples resulted in Stalin’s Soviet
Union, Mao’s China, and Pol Pot’s Cambodia.

Greenblatt’s blunder in reading Utopia is
a failure of literary interpretation: it comes
of the determination to break down “the
distinction between ‘literary foreground’
and ‘political background'”—between a
work of imaginative literature, a fiction,
and a treatise. The division that he sees in
More’s soul is actually a feature of the vision
of reality presented in Utopia. With his
acute sense of sin, as well as of the intrinsic
limitations of mortal creatures, More
recognizes and finds a memorable means
of dramatizing how perfection will always
elude the best efforts of human beings. To
pursue it too intensely and persistently will
end in something far worse than ordinary
imperfection, as Greenblatt also sees: “The
public quality of Utopian space renders this
gaze inescapable, for ordinary citizens as
well as slaves. Being seen is central to the
experience of shame (and, for that matter,
of praise), and thus Utopia is constructed
so that one is always under observation.”¹²
The critic fails to acknowledge, however,
that what he has perceived is what the poet
has created.

The poetry of Sir Thomas Wyatt is subjected
to a similar reductionism. Greenblatt
is bent on exposing the fragmentation of
the poet’s self through the poems: “I would
suggest that there is no privileged sphere
of individuality in Wyatt, set off from linguistic
convention, from social pressure,
from the shaping force of religious and
political power.”¹³ While he concedes a
point suggested by Donald Friedman, that
in both Wyatt’s translations of the Psalms
and his Satires “the poet discovers his true
voice,” in the next paragraph he undermines
the concession: “Thus though both
the psalms and the satires self-consciously
give voice to a ‘true’ self, stripped of falsification and corruption, we encounter
two distinct versions, the former produced
by submission, the latter by negation.“¹⁴ The
critical procedure in play here requires
that generic differences be elided, that the
penitent voice of psalm-imitation, a dramatized
version of David as everyman, and
the sophisticated indignation of the satirical
persona be treated as indistinguishable
and, finally, as identifiable with the poet
himself. The purpose of writing in a particular
conventional genre (satire, pastoral,
sonnet, devotional lyric) is, however, precisely
to assume a mask or voice or role
independent of the personal identity of the
poet, so that he might embody a perspective
and utter sentiments unavailable to an
historical individual in a particular time
and place.

The new historicist thus devalues both
literature and the men who create it by
demanding, in effect, that the poet and
the poetry be interchangeable. Greenblatt
avers that Wyatt achieves in his satires “the
voice of what Courthope in 1897 called
with perfect precision ‘an English gentle
man conversant with affairs.'” But he proceeds
to denigrate the achievement because
it doesn’t square with the details of Wyatt’s
biography, because “it is important to
understand how much of the self is left out
of this self-presentation, how tightly the
nexus of power, sexuality, and inwardness
has been reined in.”¹⁵ The detached persona
of the poem, critical of court corruption,
is tainted by the historical compromises of
the poet: “We may remind ourselves that
the estate to which the poet retreats from
power is the reward for royal service and
that the pleasant acres are swelled with
confiscated monastic lands.” This smug
dismissal is accomplished “only by standing
outside the poems and questioning
their fundamental assumptions.”¹⁶ A fundamental
purpose of poetry, to provide
a space in which a man can escape from
pressing circumstances and the weight of
his own interests and partialities in order to
contemplate human experience with disinterested
perception, is thereby subverted.

In the course of his various arguments,
it becomes clear that what Greenblatt most
loathes is Christianity, not merely as the
mediator of God’s authority, but indeed
as the channel of God’s intimacy with the
human soul—what a Christian would call
grace. This intense encounter necessarily
entails a modification, rather a transfiguration, of human desire: “Blessed are
the clean of heart: for they shall see God”
(Mt. 5.8); and it is this turning of desire
toward a different, infinite object—which
seems just a limitation or barrier to a carnal
man—that generates such resentment:

The goal of steadfastness or boundedness
was, as we have seen, central
to the careers of both More and
Tyndale; it is for both Catholic and
Protestant the response to a crisis
in political and spiritual authority.
Wyatt’s penitential psalms offer
us an almost formulaic reduction
of the historical, psychological, and
literary forces that we have repeatedly
encountered: power over sexuality
produces inwardness. In other words,
the inner life expressed in the penitential
psalms owes its existence to a
wrathful God’s power over sexuality;
before the Lord’s anger was stirred
up by “filthy life,” David was blind
to his own inwardness, an inwardness
he is now driven to render in
speech.¹⁷

It must be acknowledged that, despite
the elements of hysteria in this portrayal,
Greenblatt has located and been repelled
by Christianity in its essence, not by an
Enlightenment caricature. Rémi Brague
perceives the same power in the faith,
although he is seeing it in its clarity and
integrity, not myopically from an occluded
vantage point:

The new law is the law of faith, law of
liberty. Christ does not give that new
law, for example, by dictating it in
the Sermon on the Mount; rather, by
making the grace of the Spirit overflow on the believers who form his
mystical body, as communicated by
the sacraments and in the faith.¹⁸

Following St. Thomas Aquinas, Brague
places at the heart of Christianity the very
inwardness that Greenblatt rejects: “Thomas
defines law as the way we act when in full
possession of our freedom.”¹⁹

For Greenblatt, however, freedom is
an illusion, power the only reality. When
he turns to a discussion of the destruction
of the Bower of Bliss by Sir Guyon, the
Knight of Temperance at the end of the
second book of Edmund Spenser’s Faerie
Queene, there is a long preamble in which
Jacob Burckhardt’s Civilization of the Renais
sance in Italy is extolled, but its ‘assertion
that, in the process [of establishing “new
forms of identity’], these men emerged
at last as free individuals must be sharply
qualified.”²⁰ Greenblatt then offers a good
deal of anecdotal material about Sir Walter
Raleigh and Queen Elizabeth I, which
purports to reveal “the transformation of
power relations into erotic relations, and
appreciation of the queen’s ability at once
to fashion her identity and to manipulate
the identities of her followers.”²¹

It is against this backdrop that Spenser’s
elaborate allegorical epic is considered and
its moral fiction trumped by gossip about
court intrigue. Greenblatt dismisses C.
S. Lewis’s classic discussion of the contrast
between the sterile, sickly sexuality
of the Bower of Bliss in Book II and the
healthy, procreative sexuality of the Garden
of Adonis in Book III, by observing
that the latter, “that great ‘seminary’ of
living things, has almost no erotic appeal.”
By contrast, Acrasia, the seductive witch of
the Bower, “offers not simply sexual pleasure—’
long wanton joys’—but self-abandonment,
erotic aestheticism, the melting
of the will, the end of all quests; and
Spenser understands, at the deepest level
of his being, the appeal of such an end.”
Greenblatt cannot conceive—or at least
will not accept—the paradoxical notion of
the law of grace, of the liberation of the
will, rather than its “melting,” in conformity
to the divine will. “The Bower
of Bliss must be destroyed not because its
gratifications are unreal but because they
threaten ‘civility’—civilization—which
for Spenser is achieved only through
renunciation and the constant exercise of
power.” According to Greenblatt, Spenser’s
vision foreshadows the melancholy
vision of Civilization and Its Discontents, and
he “participates with Freud in a venerable
and profoundly significant intertwining
of sexual and colonial discourse, accepts
sexual colonialism only with a near-tragic
sense of the cost.” ²²

Spenser himself may provide, however,
the most effective rebuttal to Greenblatt’s
effort to expropriate the poetic vision of
the Faerie Queene for a program of reductive
Freudian despair. At the end of the
second book of the poem, after he has
destroyed the Bower of Bliss and taken
the witch prisoner, the Knight of Temperance
and his accompanying Palmer
come upon a group of “wild-beasts” that
“fierce at them gan fly, / As in their mistress
reskew.” After “pacifying” them, the
Palmer explains:

These seeming beasts are men

indeed,

Whom this Enchauntress hath trans

formed thus,

Whylome her louers, which her

lusts did feed,

Now turned into figures hideous,
According to their minds like

monstruous.

After the Palmer with his “vertuous staffe”
transforms them back into men, they still
“vnmanly looke” and “stared ghastly,”
either for “inward shame” or for “wrath”
to see Acrasia taken prisoner. One called
Grill is especially enraged to have been
changed from a pig back into a man, and
when Sir Guyon is incensed that a man
would choose “To be a beast, and lacke
intelligence,” the Palmer assures him that
indignation is useless:

The dunghill kind
Delights in filth and foule

incontinence:

Let Grill be Grill, and haue his

hoggish mind,

But let vs hence depart, whilest

wether serues and wind.²³

Now it is, doubtless, excessively harsh to
paraphrase Spenser thus: “Let Greenblatt
be Greenblatt and have . . .”; nevertheless,
his materialist conception of humanity and
his asseveration that the only alternative to
the dissolution of rational identity in the
indulgence of desire is the anguish of an
unsatisfying, socially constructed, artifi-
cial morality implies that men are in principle
no different from hogs. The price of
Christian civilization is self-control, and
self-control is repressive and destructive.
In Greenblatt’s discussion of Othello, the
inwardness that develops from Christianity’s
focus on spiritual growth and selfmastery
becomes the gnawing misery of
self-consciousness; and the shared spiritual
awareness of empathy is merely a means
of manipulation. In a derisory account
of sociologist Daniel Lerner’s theory that
empathy, “the mobile personality of Western
society,” is the source of the West’s
dominance, Greenblatt quips, “what Professor
Lerner calls ’empathy,’ Shakespeare
calls ‘Iago.’ “²⁴ One need not accept what
Greenblatt sees as Lerner’s cheery rationalization
of Western imperialism to question
the former’s reduction of the growth of
consciousness and conscience in the Christian
world to a restless urge to manipulate
and deceive.

Before turning to Othello, Greenblatt
tells another of his signature anecdotes,
borrowed from Peter Martyr Vermigli,
about how the Spaniards took advantage
of the religion of the natives of the Lucayas
(nowadays the Bahamas) in order to
beguile them into believing that they were
transporting them to a paradise where they
would rejoin their deceased relatives, while
in fact they were enslaving them in the gold
mines of Hispaniola. He then maintains
that Thomas More’s celebrated “improvisational
gift” is likewise “the mystification
of manipulation as disinterested empathy.”
As evidence he adduces “More’s controversial
works, such as The Confutation of
Tyndale’s Answer, whose recurrent method
is through improvisation to transform the
heretic’s faith into a fiction, then absorb
it into a new symbolic structure that will
ridicule or consume it.”²⁵ Greenblatt thus
suggests that there is in principle no difference
between the Spanish conquistadors’
mendaciously luring the Lucayans
into servitude and death by exploiting
their religious beliefs and More’s refuting
of Tyndale’s religious beliefs by drawing
out implications that Tyndale had not
intended. Ironically, Greenblatt seems
oblivious to the possibility that his own
treatment of More and the other authors
whom he discusses might easily be subjected
to the same strictures.

Iago becomes in Greenblatt’s telling the
epitome of Western Christian civilization,
which through its feigned empathy, its sinister
identification with the “other,” inevitably
leads to violence and servitude:

Such is the relation Iago establishes
with virtually every character in the
play, from Othello and Desdemona
to such minor figures as Montano
and Bianca. For the Spanish colonialists,
improvisation could only bring
the Lucayans into open enslavement;
for Iago, it is the key to a mastery
whose emblem is the “duteous and
knee-crooking knave” who dotes
“on his own obsequious bondage”
(1.1.45–46), a mastery invisible to
the servant, a mastery, that is, whose
character is essentially ideological.²⁶

But Iago is not in fact the ultimate villain
of the play; he is merely an instrument of
“the centuries-old Christian doctrine of
sexuality, policed socially and psychically,
as we have already seen, by confession.”²⁷

Othello’s tragedy turns out to be “a
manifestation of the colonial power of
Christian doctrine over sexuality.”²⁸
The unmistakable implication is that the
repressive colonization of the New World
was the ineluctable result of Christendom’s
“colonization” of men’s souls. The rich
complexity of Othello as a tragic character
is thus diminished into a caricature—
the dark-skinned “native” inveigled by
the crafty white man. Although Iago is a
military subordinate, his “attitude toward
Othello is nonetheless colonial”; his inferior
position “enables him to play upon the
ambivalence of Othello’s relation to Christian
society: the Moor at once represents
the institution and the alien, the conqueror
and the infidel.”²⁹

Greenblatt thus misses one of the most
significant features of the play: Othello is
a tragic hero—not a helpless victim, but
an imposing, noble figure, whose catastrophe
results from his failure to maintain
his own standards. The only characters
who make an issue of Othello’s skin color
and foreignness are Brabantio, the frantic
father, Rodrigo, the most despicable character
in the play, and Iago, surely Shakespeare’s
most appalling villain. When
Lodovico, an emissary from the Venetian
council, sees the Moor strike his wife,
he cries out, “My lord, this would not
be believed in Venice / Though I should
swear I saw’t” (4.1.241–242). When later
he questions Iago, there is no reason to
doubt the sincerity of his bewilderment
and shock:

Is this the noble Moor whom our

full senate

Call all in all sufficient? This the

nature

Whom passion could not shake?

whose solid virtue

The shot of accident nor dart of

chance

Could neither graze nor pierce?

(4.1.264–268)³⁰

Greenblatt’s anecdote about the Lucayans—
so typical of his interpretive tactics—
serves only to reduce Othello to a dupe,
and his tragedy to a melodrama of ideological
sentimentality. He misses the truly
crucial point that Shakespeare is free of the
racialism that will taint Western culture in
subsequent centuries and evidently expects
the same of his audience.³¹

To be sure, Greenblatt is a skillful critic,
and he rightly calls attention to Othello’s
lyrical outburst when he and Desdemona
are reunited on Cyprus after coming
through a storm at sea on separate ships:

It gives me wonder great as

my content

To see you here before me! O my

soul’s joy,

If after every tempest come such

calms

May the winds blow till they have

wakened death,

And let the labouring bark climb

hills of seas,

Olympus-high, and duck again as

low

As hell’s from heaven. If it were

now to die

‘Twere now to be most happy,

for I fear

My soul hath her content so absolute
That not another comfort like

to this

Succeeds in unknown fate.

(2.1.181–191)

The last few lines, especially, are ominous:
the extreme idealization of the love of a
man and his wife is not only in conflict
with Christian teaching; it also portends
troubles for the marriage. But the problem
is not what Greenblatt suggests in associating
it with rigorous Christian condemnations
of excessive eagerness for pleasure in
marital relations, an attitude that he traces
back to St. Jerome’s defense of the superiority
of virginity to marriage in Against
Jovinian. In this discourse, Jerome (following
Seneca) famously remarks, “A wise
man ought to love a wife with judgment,
not passion. Let him rule the urge to pleasure
and not be carried away headlong into
copulation. Nothing is fouler than to love
a wife as an adulteress.”³²

This and other passages quoted by
Greenblatt are plainly preoccupied by
excessive sensual lust, which can become
an obsession that diverts a man’s attention
from everything else—most particularly
from his relationship with God—and leads
him to treat his wife as the mere object of
carnal desire. One has to wonder whether
the knowing modern commentators who
sneer at Jerome’s words think that a man
ought to treat his wife as an adulteress or
concubine, whose only purpose is to provide
physical gratification.³³ But the attitude
expressed by Othello in the passage
quoted above is the adoration of the courtly
or Petrarchan lover, not simple sensuality.
Greenblatt rightly observes that Desdemona’s
“erotic intensity” and her “frank
acceptance of pleasure and submission to
her spouse’s pleasure” arouse a “deep current
of sexual anxiety in Othello” and thus
contribute to his credulous acceptance of
Iago’s accusation of infidelity.³⁴ But Othello’s
shock and dismay at Desdemona’s uninhibited
delight in their conjugal relations is
hardly the result of the Church’s admonition
that men should bridle their carnal
desire and treat their wives with delicate
restraint. His delicacy and idealism go far
beyond the Christian standard. If there is a
harmful ideology in play here, it comes not
from St. Paul but from Francesco Petrarcha:
Othello wants Desdemona to be his “soul’s
joy,” the angelic, spiritualized “Donna” of
the Rime sparse and the medieval tradition
of amour courtois. Such is hardly the ideal of
Christian “misogyny”!

“The historical anecdote,” Greenblatt
claims, “functions less as explanatory illustration
than as a disturbance, that which
requires explanation, contextualization,
interpretation.”³⁵ His handling of Othello,
however, suggests that the drive to “contextualize”
the floating anecdote leads
not to explanation or interpretation, but
to ideological imposition: the critic is so
intent on laying the tragedy at the feet of
the “patriarchal” authority embodied in
Christianity that he fails to see that there
is fuel enough for Othello’s destruction
in his own ideal vision of himself, which
requires an equally sublime idealism in his
wife. “You were best go in,” Iago warns
when Brabantio arrives with his retainers
to seize the Moor. “Not I,” he replies, “I
must be found. / My parts, my title and
perfect soul / Shall manifest me rightly”
(1.2.29–32). It is an absurd diminution
of Othello to regard him as the victim of
anyone’s “colonization.” If he is a victim,
it is of his own virtues—of a genuine and
dignified nobility fatally entangled with
an aloof, fastidious pride. He is not at all a
naïve savage undone by a wily European;
he is a civilized gentleman, ruined by the
ideal grandeur of his self-conception.

Stephen Greenblatt’s anecdotes are a
substitute for works of literature, just as the
new historicism is a substitute for subtle
literary interpretation. If the distinction
between works of imaginative literature
and other “documents” and “texts” is
expunged, then what is intricately structured,
dense, and profound will give way
to what is random, thin, and shallow, with
no real enhancement accruing to the latter.
Epic and dramatic poems of high quality
are intrinsically more meaningful and
interesting than anecdotes, but a materialist
view of human nature and of reality makes
authentic meaningfulness problematic. If
life itself lacks purpose and significance,
then the superb formal achievements of
artistic works can only be illusory, and the
casual comment and fortuitous observation—
anecdotes, in other words—may be
taken for a more credible account of reality.
Stephen Greenblatt is a stylish writer
and a keen analyst of literary texts, but the
dominance of his materialist approach to
literature has impoverished our understanding
and undermined our confidence
in our culture.

NOTES

1. Genre 15 (1982), 5.
2. Ibid., 6.
3. Hamlet in Purgatory
   (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), 6–7.

4. Rémi Brague, Th e Law of God: Th e Philosophical History
   of an Idea, trans. Lydia G. Cochrane (Chicago: University
   of Chicago Press, 2007), viii.

5. Sir Walter Ralegh:
   Th e Renaissance Man and His Roles (New Haven, CT:
   Yale University Press, 1973); Renaissance Self-Fashioning
   from More to Shakespeare (Chicago: University of Chicago
   Press, 1980).

6. Cf. the introduction of Learning to Curse:
   Essays in Early Modern Culture (New York: Routledge,
   1990), 1–2, where Greenblatt presents a rather self-serving
   portrait of himself as a disillusioned sophisticate who
   was too knowing to be bothered with the education he
   was being off ered: “I was only mildly interested in the
   formalist agenda that dominated graduate instruction
   and was epitomized in the imposing figure of William K.
   Wimsatt. His theory of the concrete universal—poetry as
   ‘an object which in a mysterious and special way is both
   highly general and highly particular’—seemed almost
   irresistibly true, but I wasn’t sure that I wanted to enlist
   myself for life as a celebrant of the mystery. I would go
   in the late afternoon to the Elizabethan Club—all-male,
   a black servant in a starched white jacket, cucumber
   sandwiches and tea—and listen to Wimsatt at the great
   round table hold forth like Dr. Johnson on poetry and
   aesthetics.” Of course Greenblatt never attempts to refute
   Wimsatt’s theory and never actually says that it is tainted
   with racism and sexism; it’s so much easier to gesture dismissively
   toward the “black servant in a starched white
   jacket, the cucumber sandwiches and tea” than to engage
   in an actual argument.

7. Renaissance Self-Fashioning, 47.
8. Utopia, ed. Edward J. Surtz, S.J., and J. H. Hexter, Th e
   Yale Edition of the Complete Works of Th omas More, vol. 4
   (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1965, 100: “Nam
   ut omnia bene sint, fieri non potest, nisi omnes boni
   sint, quod ad aliquot abhinc annos adhuc non expecto.”

9. Renaissance Self-Fashioning, 64–66.
10. Utopia, trans.
    Clarence Miller (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press,
    2001), x–xi.

11. Ibid., xviii.
12. Renaissance Self-Fashioning,
    49.

13. Ibid., 120.
14. Ibid., 127.
15. Ibid., 131.
16. Ibid.,
    132.

17. Ibid., 125–26.
18. Th e Law of God, 224.
19. Ibid.,
    223.

20. Renaissance Self-Fashioning, 162.
21. Ibid., 169.
22. Ibid., 171, 173.
23. Th e Faerie Queene II.lxxxiv–lxxxvii
    is quoted from Th e Works of Edmund Spenser: A Variorum
    Edition, ed. E. Greenlaw, C. G. Osgood, & F. M. Padelford
    (Baltimore: Th e Johns Hopkins University Press,
    1933), II, 180.

24. Renaissance Self-Fashioning, 224–25.
    Cf. Daniel Lerner, Th e Passing of Traditional Society: Modernizing
    the Middle East (New York: Free Press, [1958]
    1964).

25. Renaissance Self-Fashioning, 231.
26. Ibid., 233.
27. Ibid., 246.
28. Ibid., 242.
29. Ibid., 234.
30. Othello, ed.
    E. A. J. Honigmann (Walton-on-Th ames, Surrey: Th omas
    Nelson & Sons, 1997).

31. See R. V. Young, “Th e Bard, the
    Black, and Jew,” First Th ings 141 (March 2004): 22–28.

32. S. Eusebii Hieronymi Stridonensis Presbyteri Adversus
    Jovinianum Libri Duo 49, Patrologia Latina 23, 281A-B:
    “Sapiens vir judicio debet amare conjugem, non aff ectu.
    Regat impetus voluptatis, nec praeceps feretur in coitum.
    Nihil est foedius quam uxorem amare quasi adulteram.”
    Greenblatt neglects to consult the original text and takes
    his quotations from John T. Noonan, Contraception: A
    History of Its Treatment by the Catholic Th eologians and
    Canonists (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
    1966), 47, 80. It is not without interest that in his neglect
    of usual scholarly procedure, Greenblatt turns to a volume
    that was, among other things, part of a “Catholic” campaign
    to change the Church’s teaching on artificial birth
    control.

33. Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning, 305,
    n. 56, refers disdainfully to a 1978 speech by Pope John
    Paul I, who reproves “the destructive attitude of sheer
    pleasure seeking, which snuff s out life.”

34. Ibid., 250.
35. Learning to Curse, 5.