R e s o n a n c e a n d W o n d e r / 2029

tracks.” In this regard, Greenblatt represents a revival of literary criticism and aes-
thetic appreciation over theory; often overlooked is the influence on his work of e r i c h
a u e r b a c h , who studied literary masterpieces across Western culture in his classic
Mimesis (1953; see above). Auerbach opens each chapter with a brief quotation from
a literary work, from which he builds his arguments about the shift in cultural repre-
sentation over two thousand years. As Greenblatt discusses in Practicing New His-
toricism (2000), anecdotes play a similar role for him. They sometimes seem random,
but from them Greenblatt builds a sense of an era. Greenblatt’s anecdotes try to
effect what he has called “the touch of the real,” re-creating the social and cultural
negotiations of a historical moment.
Although Greenblatt has largely avoided theoretical battles, his work has been
criticized on various grounds. Traditionalists appreciate his high valuation of litera-
ture, but feel he brings extraneous material into the field. More radical critics,
often from the Marxist side, have attacked him for not taking a strong political
stand and for having a vague sense of historical causality; he often juxtaposes
objects or events that lack a verifiable historical connection— for example, a trial in
France and an English play. Ironically, it is probably because he takes a nonpolemi-
cal stance, and maintains the importance of literature, that Greenblatt has become
a leading representative of literary studies and the world s leading commentator on
Shakespeare.

“Resonance and W onder” Keywords: Aesthetics, The Canon/Tradition, Drama,

Formalism, Literary History, Marxism, New Historicism, Poststructuralism

From Resonance and Wonder

In a small glass case in the library of Christ Church, Oxford, there is a

round, red priests hat; a note card identifies it as having belonged to Cardi-
nal Wolsey.1 It is altogether appropriate that this hat should have wound up at
Christ Church, for the college owed its existence to Wolsey, who had decided
at the height of his power to found in his own honor a magnificent new
Oxford college. But the hat was not a direct bequest; historical forces, as we
sometimes say— in this case taking the ominous form of Henry VIII—
intervened, and Christ Church, like Hampton Court Palace,2 was cut off
from its original benefactor. Instead, the note informs us, the hat was
acquired for Christ Church in the eighteenth century, purchased, we are
told, from a company of players. If this miniature history of an artifact is too
vague to be of much consequence— I do not know the name of the company
of players, or the circumstances in which they acquired their curious stage
property, or whether it was ever used, for example, by an actor playing Wolsey
in Shakespeare’s Henry VIII,3 or when it was placed under glass, or even
whether it was anything but a clever fraud— it nonetheless evokes a vision of
cultural production that I find compelling. The peregrinations of Wolsey’s

1. Thomas Wolsey (ca. 1475-1530), English prel- founded Cardinal College in 1525; it was
ate and statesman who was both a Roman Catho- refounded as Christ Church in 1546.
lic cardinal (1515-30) and Lord Chancellor 2. A huge palace complex, in outer London, built
(1515-29) under Henry V III, king of England by Wolsey, then taken over and expanded by
(1491-1547; reigned 1509—47). Wolsey was Henry V III.
charged with treason after failing to obtain the 3. A history play (1613), w ritten in collaboration
divorce from Catherine of Aragon sought by with John Fletcher.
Henry V III, but he died before his trial. Wolsey
2030 / S t e p h e n J. G r e e n b l a t t

hat suggest that cultural artifacts do not stay still, that they exist in time, and
that they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotia-
tions, and appropriations.
The term culture has, in the case of the hat, a convenient material
referent— a bit of red cloth stitched together— but that referent is only a tiny
element in a complex symbolic construction that originally marked the trans-
formation of Wolsey from a butcher’s son to a prince of the church. Wolsey’s
gentleman usher, George Cavendish,4 has left a remarkably circumstantial
contemporary account of that construction, an account that enables us even
to glimpse the hat or as Cavendish terms it, the “pillion,” in its place, on the
Cardinals head.
And after Mass he would return in his privy chamber again and, being
advertised of the furniture of his chamber without5 with noblemen and
gentlemen . . . , would issue out into them apparelled all in red in the
habit of a Cardinal; which was either of fine scarlet or else of crimson
satin, taffeta, damask, or caffa [a rich silk cloth], the best that he could
get for money; and upon his head a round pillion with a neck of black
velvet, set to the same in the inner side. . . . There was also borne before
him first the Great Seal of England, and then his Cardinal’s hat by a
nobleman or some worthy gentleman right solemnly, bareheaded. And as
soon as he was entered into his chamber of presence6 where was attend-
ing his coming to await upon him to Westminster Hall, as well noblemen
and other worthy gentlemen as noblemen and gentlemen of his own fam-
ily; thus passing forth with two great crosses of silver borne before him,
with also two great pillars of silver, and his sergeant at arms with a great
mace of silver gilt. Then his gentlemen ushers cried and said, ‘On my
lords and masters, make way for my lord’s grace!”’7
The extraordinary theatricality of this manifestation of clerical power did
not escape the notice of the Protestant reformers who called the Catholic
church “the Pope’s playhouse.” When the Reformation in England8 disman-
tled the histrionic apparatus of Catholicism, they sold some of its gorgeous
properties to the professional players— not only a mark of thrift but a polem-
ical gesture, signifying that the sanctified vestments were in reality mere
trumpery whose proper place was a disreputable world of illusion-mongering.
In exchange for this polemical service, the theatrical joint-stock companies
received more than an attractive, cut-rate wardrobe; they acquired the tar-
nished but still potent charisma that clung to the old vestments, charisma

4. English poet (1 4 9 4 -c a . 1561); a member of with M aster Norris upon his knees in the mire, he
W olsey’s household until the cardinal’s death would have pulled o ff his under cap of velvet, but
and author of T he Life and Death o f Cardinal he could not undo the knot under his chin.
Wolsey (written ca. 1554—58, and widely circu - W herefore with violence he rent the laces and
lated in manuscript; printed 1641). pulled it from his head and so kneeled bare-
5. That is, being told that the cham ber outside headed” (p. 106) [Greenblatt’s note]. T he Great
his private room was occupied. Seal of England, now the Great Seal of the
6. T hat is, the cerem onial room where others Realm, is used by the presiding monarch to
waited for (attended) him. authorize official documents. W estm inster Hall
7. George Cavendish, The Life and Death o f Car- served many governmental purposes and now is
dinal Wolsey, in Two Early Tudor Lives, ed. R ich- where the houses of Parliament meet.
ard S. Sylvester and Davis P. Harding (New 8. T he break with the C atholic Church by Henry
Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1962), V III, who issued the Act of Supremacy (1534)
pp. 2 4 -2 5 . We get another glimpse o f the symbol- that rejected papal control and created the
ism o f hats later in the text, when Wolsey is begin- national Church of England.
ning his precipitous fall from power: “And talking
 R e s o n a n c e a n d W o n d e r / 2031

that in paradoxical fashion the players at once emptied out and heightened.
By the time Wolsey s hat reached the library at Christ Church, its charisma
must have been largely exhausted, but the college could confer upon it the
prestige of an historical curiosity, as a trophy of the distant founder. And in
its glass case it still radiates a tiny quantum of cultural energy.
Tiny indeed— I may already have seemed to make much more of this trivial
relic than it deserves. But I am fascinated by transmigrations of the kind I
have just sketched here— from theatricalized rituals to the stage to the uni-
versity library or museum— because they seem to reveal something critically
important about the textual relics with which my profession is obsessed. They
enable us to glimpse the social process through which objects, gestures, ritu-
als, and phrases are fashioned and moved from one zone of display to another.
The display cases with which I am most involved— books— characteristically
conceal this process, so that we have a misleading impression of fixity and
little sense of the historical transactions through which the great texts we
study have been fashioned. Let me give a literary example, an appropriately
tiny textual equivalent of Wolsey s hat. At the close of Shakespeare’s Midsum-
m er Night’s D ream ,9 the Fairy King Oberon declares that he and his atten-
dants are going to bless the beds of the three couples who have just been
married. This ritual of blessing will ensure the happiness of the newlyweds
and ward off moles, harelips, and other prodigious marks that would dis-
figure their offspring. “With this field-dew consecrate,” the Fairy King
concludes,
Every fairy take his gait,
And each several chamber bless,
Through this palace, with sweet peace,
And the owner of it blest
Ever shall in safety rest.
(5.1.415-20)
Oberon himself, we are told, will conduct the blessing upon the “best bride-
bed,” that of the ruler Theseus and his Amazon queen Flippolyta.
The ceremony— manifestly the sanctification of ownership and caste, as
well as marriage— is a witty allusion to the traditional Catholic blessing of
the bride-bed with holy water, a ceremony vehemently attacked as pagan
superstition and banned by English Protestants. But the conventional critical
term “allusion” seems inadequate, for the term usually implies a bloodless,
bodiless thing, while even the tiny, incidental detail of the field dew bears a
more active charge. Here, as with Wolsey’s hat, I want to ask what is at stake
in the shift from one zone of social practice to another, from the old religion
to public theater, from priests to fairies, from holy water to field dew, or
rather to theatrical fairies and theatrical field dew on the London stage.
When the Catholic ritual is made into theatrical representation, the transpo-
sition at once naturalizes, denaturalizes, mocks, and celebrates. It natural-
izes the ritual by transforming the specially sanctified water into ordinary

9. A comedy (ca. 1595) that focuses on the love wife Hippolyta. In Greek mythology, Theseus was
intrigues of two young couples, framed by the king of Athens and had a son with an Amazon
mature relationships of two other couples— the whose name is given variously as Antiope, Mela-
king and queen o f the Fairies, Oberon and Tita- nippe, or Hippolyte (who was not the queen).
nia, as well as Theseus, duke of Athens, and his
2032 / S t e p h e n J. G r e e n b l a t t

dew; it denaturalizes the ritual by removing it from human agents and attrib-
uting it to the fairies; it mocks Catholic practice by associating it with notori-
ous superstition and then by enacting it on the stage where it is revealed as a
histrionic illusion; and it celebrates such practice by reinvesting it with the
charismatic magic of the theater.

Several years ago, intending to signal a turn away from the formal,
decontextualized analysis that dominates new criticism, I used the term
“new historicism”1 to describe an interest in the kinds of issues I have been
raising— in the embeddedness of cultural objects in the contingencies of
history— and the term has achieved a certain currency. But like most labels,
this one is misleading. The new historicism, like the Holy Roman Empire,2
constantly belies its own name. T he Am erican Heritage Dictionary gives
three meanings for the term “historicism”:

1. The belief that processes are at work in history that man can do little
to alter.
2. The theory that the historian must avoid all value judgments in his
study of past periods or former cultures.
3. Veneration of the past or of tradition.

Most of the writing labeled new historicist, and certainly my own work, has
set itself resolutely against each of these positions.

1. T he b elief that processes are at w ork in history that man can do little to
alter. This formulation rests upon a simultaneous abstraction and evacua-
tion of human agency. The men and women who find themselves making
concrete choices in given circumstances at particular times are transformed
into something called “man.” And this colorless, nameless collective being
cannot significantly intervene in the “processes . . . at work in history,” pro-
cesses that are thus mysteriously alienated from all of those who enact them.
New historicism, by contrast, eschews the use of the term “man”; interest
lies not in the abstract universal but in particular, contingent cases, the
selves fashioned and acting according to the generative rules and conflicts of
a given culture. And these selves, conditioned by the expectations of their
class, gender, religion, race and national identity, are constantly effecting
changes in the course of history. Indeed if there is any inevitability in the
new historicism’s vision of history it is this insistence on agency, for even
inaction or extreme marginality is understood to possess meaning and there-
fore to imply intention. Every form of behavior, in this view, is a strategy:
taking up arms or taking flight is a significant social action, but so is staying
put, minding one’s business, turning one’s face to the wall. Agency is virtu-
ally inescapable.

1. A term coined in G reen blatt’s introduction to 2. A G erm anic union of G erm an territories in
T he Power o f Forms in the English Renaissance western and central Europe, founded by Char-
(1982). New C riticism : an approach (champi- lemagne in 8 0 0 C . e . and dissolved in 1806 by the
oned by C L E A N T H B R O O K S , W I L L I A M K. W I M S A T T last Holy Roman Emperor, Francis II; in 1756 it
j r ., and others) that emphasizes close reading of was famously described by the French writer and
the text considered as an autonomous whole; it philosopher Voltaire as neither holy nor Roman
has greatly influenced teaching from the mid- nor an empire.
2 0th century onward.
 R e s o n a n c e a n d W o n d e r / 2033

Inescapable but not simple: new historicism, as I understand it, does not
posit historical processes as unalterable and inexorable, but it does tend to
discover limits or constraints upon individual intervention. Actions that
appear to be single are disclosed as multiple; the apparently isolated power of
the individual genius turns out to be bound up with collective, social energy;
a gesture of dissent may be an element in a larger legitimation process, while
an attempt to stabilize the order of things may turn out to subvert it. And
political valences may change, sometimes abruptly: there are no guarantees,
no absolute, formal assurances that what seems progressive in one set of con-
tingent circumstances will not come to seem reactionary in another.
The new historicism’s insistence on the pervasiveness of agency has appar-
ently led some of its critics to find in it a Nietzschean celebration of the ruth-
less will to power,3 while its ironic and skeptical reappraisal of the cult of
heroic individualism has led others to find in it a pessimistic doctrine of human
helplessness. Hence, for example, from a Marxist perspective one critic charac-
terizes the new historicism as a “liberal disillusionment” that finds that “any
apparent site of resistance ultimately serves the interests of power” (33), while
from a liberal humanist perspective, another critic proclaims that “anyone
who, like me, is reluctant to accept the will to power as the defining human
essence will probably have trouble with the critical procedures of the new
historicists and with their interpretive conclusions.”4 But the very idea of a
“defining human essence” is precisely what new historicists find vacuous and
untenable, as I do the counter-claim that love rather than power makes the
world go round. The Marxist critique is more plausible, but it rests upon an
assertion that new historicism argues that “any apparent site of resistance” is
ultimately coopted. Some are, some aren’t.
I argued in an essay published some years ago that the sites of resistance in
Shakespeare’s second tetralogy5 are coopted in the plays’ ironic, complex, but
finally celebratory affirmation of charismatic kingship. That is, the formal
structure and rhetorical strategy of the plays make it difficult for audiences to
withhold their consent from the triumph of Prince Hal. Shakespeare shows
that the triumph rests upon a claustrophobic narrowing of pleasure, a hypo-
critical manipulation of appearances, and a systematic betrayal of friendship,
and yet these manifestations of bad faith only contrive to heighten the spec-
tators’ knowing pleasure and the ratification of applause. The subversive per-
ceptions do not disappear, but insofar as they remain within the structure of
the play, they are contained and indeed serve to heighten a power they would
appear to question.

3. A central concept in the work of the Germ an emphasize the importance of class struggle and
philosopher f r i e d r i c h n i e t z s c h e (1 8 4 4 -1 9 0 0 ); revolution.
the phrase, which supplies the title of his posthu- 5. Shakespeare’s tetralogies are 8 plays covering
mously collected notes, The Will to Power (1900), the reigns of English kings from Richard II to
appears in his earlier writings as well. Richard III (1377—1485). The second in time of
4. Walter Cohen, “Political Criticism of Shake- com pletion (though portraying earlier events)
speare,” in Shakespeare Reproduced: T he Text in consists o f Richard II (1595), the 2 parts of
History and Ideology, ed. Jean E. Howard and Mar- Henry IV (1597, 1598), and Henry V (1599).
ion F. O ’Connor (New York and London: Methuen, Prince Hal, the young hero o f the Henry IV
1987), p. 33; Edward Pechter, “The New Histori- plays, triumphs as he ascends to the throne as
cism and Its Discontents,” in PMLA 102 (1987), p. Henry V, and then brutally rejects the friendship
301 [Greenblatt’s note]. A perspective inspired by o f his form er com panion, Falstaff. G reenblatt’s
the writings of k a r l m a r x (1818-1883) would not essay is “Invisible Rullets: Renaissance Author-
only analyze the dynamic of pow'er but would also ity and Its Subversion” (1981).
2034 / S t e p h e n J. G r e e n b l a t t

I did not propose that all manifestation of resistance in all literature (or
even in all plays by Shakespeare) were coopted— one can readily think of
plays where the forces of ideological containment break down. And yet
characterizations of this essay in particular, and new historicism in general,
repeatedly refer to a supposed argument that any resistance is impossible.6
A particularizing argument about the subject position projected by a set of
plays is at once simplified and turned into a universal principle from which
contingency and hence history itself is erased.
Moreover, even my argument about Shakespeare’s second tetralogy is
misunderstood if it is thought to foreclose the possibility of dissent or
change or the radical alteration of the processes of history. The point is that
certain aesthetic and political structures work to contain the subversive
perceptions they generate, not that those perceptions simply wither away.
On the contrary, they may be pried loose from the order with which they
were bound up and may serve to fashion a new and radically different set of
structures. How else could change ever come about? No one is forced—
except perhaps in school— to take aesthetic or political wholes as sacro-
sanct. The order of things is never simply a given: it takes labor to produce,
sustain, reproduce, and transmit the way things are, and this labor may be
withheld or transformed. Structures may be broken in pieces, the pieces
altered, inverted, rearranged. Everything can be different than it is; every-
thing could have been different than it was. But it will not do to imagine
that this alteration is easy, automatic, without cost or obligation. My objec-
tion was to the notion that the rich ironies in the history plays were them-
selves inherently liberating, that to savor the tetralogy’s skeptical cunning
was to participate in an act of political resistance. In general I find dubious
the assertion that certain rhetorical features in much-loved literary works
constitute authentic acts of political liberation; the fact that this assertion
is now heard from the left, where in my college days it was more often
heard from the right, does not make it in most instances any less fatuous
and presumptuous. I wished to show, at least in the case of Shakespeare’s
histories and in several analogous discourses, how a set of representational
and political practices in the late sixteenth century could produce and even
batten upon what appeared to be their own subversion.
To show this is not to give up on the possibility of altering historical
processes— if this is historicism I want no part of it— but rather to eschew
an aestheticized and idealized politics of the imagination.

2. T he theory>that the historian must avoid all value judgments in his study
o f past periods or form er cultures. Once again, if this is an essential tenet of
historicism, then the new historicism belies its name. My own critical prac-
tice and that of many others associated with new historicism was decisively
shaped by the American 1960s and early 70s, and especially by the opposi-

6. “The new historicists and cultural materialists,” nist Practice and the New Renaissance Dis-
one typical summary puts it, “represent, and by courses,” English Literary Renaissance 18 (1988),
representing, reproduce in their new history of p. 10.] Poignantly or otherwise, I asserted no such
ideas, a world which is hierarchical, authoritarian, thing; I argued that the spectator of the history
hegemonic, unsubvertable. . . . In this world pic- plays was continually tantalized by a resistance
ture, Stephen Greenblatt has poignantly asserted, simultaneously powerful and deferred [Green-
there can be no subversion— and certainly not for blatt’s note].
us!” [C. T. Neely, “Constructing the Subject: Femi-
 R e s o n a n c e a n d W o n d e r / 2035

tion to the Viet Nam War.7 Writing that was not engaged, that withheld judg-
ments, that failed to connect the present with the past seemed worthless.
Such connection could be made either by analogy or causality; that is, a par-
ticular set of historical circumstances could be represented in such a way as
to bring out homologies with aspects of the present or, alternatively, those
circumstances could be analyzed as the generative forces that led to the mod-
ern condition. In either mode, value judgments were implicated, because a
neutral or indifferent relation to the present seemed impossible. Or rather it
seemed overwhelmingly clear that neutrality was itself a political position, a
decision to support the official policies in both the state and the academy.
To study the culture of sixteenth-century England did not present itself as
an escape from the turmoil of the present; it seemed rather an intervention,
a mode of relation. The fascination for me of the Renaissance was that it
seemed to be powerfully linked to the present both analogically and causally.
This doubled link at once called forth and qualified my value judgments:
called them forth because my response to the past was inextricably bound up
with my response to the present; qualified them because the analysis of the
past revealed the complex, unsettling historical genealogy of the very judg-
ments I was making. To study Renaissance culture then was simultaneously
to feel more rooted and more estranged in my own values.8
Other critics associated with the new historicism have written directly and
forcefully about their own subject position and have made more explicit than
I the nature of this engagement.9 If I have not done so to the same extent, it
is not because I believe that my values are somehow suspended in my study of
the past but because I believe they are pervasive: in the textual and visual
traces I choose to analyze, in the stories I choose to tell, in the cultural con-
junctions I attempt to make, in my syntax, adjectives, pronouns. “The new
historicism/’ someone has written in a lively critique, “needs at every point to
be more overtly self-conscious of its methods and its theoretical assumptions,
since what one discovers about the historical place and function of literary
texts is in large measure a function of the angle from which one looks and
the assumptions that enable the investigation.”1 I am certainly not opposed to
methodological self-consciousness, but I am less inclined to see overt-
ness— an explicit articulation of one’s values and methods— as inherently
necessary or virtuous. Nor, though I believe that my values are everywhere
engaged in my work, do I think that there need be a perfect integration of
those values and the objects I am studying. On the contrary, some of the
most interesting and powerful ideas in cultural criticism occur precisely at

7. As U .S. involvement in the war between North Literary Renaissance 16 (1986), pp. 5—12; Don
and South Vietnam escalated throughout the Wayne, “Power, Politics, and the Shakespearean
1960s, opposition to the war also grew, especially Text: Recent Criticism in England and the United
among draft-age university students. The last States,” in Shakespeare Reproduced: T he Text in
American forces left in 1973, and South Vietnam History and Ideology, ed. Howard and O ’Connor,
fell to the com munist North in 1975. pp. 4 7 -6 7 ; Catherine Gallagher, “Marxism and
8. See my Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From the New Historicism ,” in T he New Historicism,
More to Shakespeare (Chicago: University of Chi- ed. Harold Veeser (New York and London: Rout-
cago Press, 1980), pp. 174-75: “We are situated at ledge, 1989) [Greenblatt’s note].
the close of the cultural movement initiated in the l.Je a n E. Howard, "The New Historicism in
Renaissance; the place in which our social and Renaissance Studies,” in Renaissance Historicism:
psychological world seems to be cracking apart Selections from "English Literary Renaissance,” ed.
are those structural joints visible when it was first Arthur F. Kinney and Dan S. Collins (Amherst:
constructed” [Greenblatt’s note]. University o f M assachusetts Press, 1987), pp.
9. Louis Adrian Montrose, “Renaissance Literary 3 2 -3 3 [Greenblatt’s note].
Studies and the Subject of History,” in English
2036 / S t e p h e n J. G r e e n b l a t t

moments of disjunction, disintegration, unevenness. A criticism that never

encounters obstacles, that celebrates predictable heroines and rounds up the
usual suspects, that finds confirmation of its values everywhere it turns, is
quite simply boring.2

3. Veneration o f the past or o f tradition. The third definition of historicism

obviously sits in a strange relation to the second, but they are not simply
alternatives. The apparent eschewing of value judgments was often accompa-
nied by a still more apparent admiration, however cloaked as objective
description, of the past. One of the more irritating qualities of my own liter-
ary training had been its relentlessly celebratory character: literary criticism
was and largely remains a kind of secular theodicy. Every decision made by a
great artist could be shown to be a brilliant one; works that had seemed
flawed and uneven to an earlier generation of critics bent on displaying dis-
criminations in taste were now revealed to be organic masterpieces. A stan-
dard critical assignment in my student years was to show how a text that
seemed to break in parts was really a complex whole: thousands of pages were
dutifully churned out to prove that the bizarre subplot of The Changeling was
cunningly integrated into the tragic mainplot or that every tedious bit of
clowning in Doctor Faustus3 was richly significant. Behind these exercises
was the assumption that great works of art were triumphs of resolution, that
they were, in Bakhtin’s term, monological4— the mature expression of a sin-
gle artistic intention. When this formalism was combined, as it often was,
with both ego psychology and historicism, it posited aesthetic integration as
the reflection of the artist’s psychic integration and posited that psychic inte-
gration as the triumphant expression of a healthy, integrated community.
Accounts of Shakespeare’s relation to Elizabethan culture were particularly
prone to this air of veneration, since the Romantic cult of poetic genius could
be conjoined with the still older political cult that had been created around
the figure of the Virgin Queen.5
Here again new historicist critics have swerved in a different direction.
They have been more interested in unresolved conflict and contradiction
than in integration; they are as concerned with the margins as with the cen-
ter; and they have turned from a celebration of achieved aesthetic order to an
exploration of the ideological and material bases for the production of this
order. Traditional formalism and historicism, twin legacies of early
nineteenth-century Germany, shared a vision of high culture as a harmoniz-

2. If there is then no suspension of value judg- acknowledgment of engagement and partiality,

ments in the new historicism, there is at the same may be slightly less likely than the older histori-
time a complication of those judgments, what I cism to impose its values belligerently on the past,
have called a sense of estrangement. This for those values seem historically contingent
estrangem ent is bound up with the abandonment [Greenblatt’s note].
of a belief in historical inevitability, for, with this 3. T he Tragical History o f Doctor Faustus (1604),
abandonment, the values of the present could no an English drama by Christopher Marlowe. T he
longer seem the necessary outcome of an irrevers- Changeling (1622), an English tragedy by Thom as
ible teleological progression, whether of enlight- Middleton and W illiam Rowley with a comic
enm ent or decline. An older historicism that rom antic subplot.
proclaimed self-consciously that it had avoided all 4. See especially “Discourse in the Novel” (1934—
value judgments in its account of the past— that it 35; above), by the Russian theorist m i k h a i l b a k h t i n
had given us historical reality w ie es eigentlich (1895-1975).
gewesen [“as it really was”; Germ an]— did not 5. T hat is, Elizabeth I (1 5 3 3 -1 6 0 3 ; reigned 1558—
thereby avoid all value judgments; it simply pro- 1603), who never married and who gave her name
vided a misleading account of what it had actually to England’s Elizabethan era.
done. In this sense the new historicism , for all its
 R e s o n a n c e a n d W o n d e r / 2037

ing domain of reconciliation based upon an aesthetic labor that transcends

specific economic or political determinants. What is missing is psychic,
social, and material resistance, a stubborn, unassimilable otherness, a sense
of distance and difference. New historicism has attempted to restore this
distance; hence its characteristic concerns have seemed to some critics off-
center or strange. “New historicists,” writes a Marxist observer, “are likely to
seize upon something out of the way, obscure, even bizarre: dreams, popular
or aristocratic festivals, denunciations of witchcraft, sexual treatises, diaries
and autobiographies, descriptions of clothing, reports on disease, birth and
death records, accounts of insanity.”6 What is fascinating to me is that con-
cerns like these should have come to seem bizarre, especially to a critic who
is committed to the historical understanding of culture. That they have done
so indicates how narrow the boundaries of historical understanding had
become, how much these boundaries needed to be broken.
For none of the cultural practices on this list (and one could extend it con-
siderably) is or should be “out of the way” in a study of Renaissance literature
or art; on the contrary, each is directly in the way of coming to terms with the
period s methods of regulating the body, its conscious and unconscious psy-
chic strategies, its ways of defining and dealing with marginals and deviants,
its mechanisms for the display of power and the expression of discontent, its
treatment of women. If such concerns have been rendered “obscure,” it is
because of a disabling idea of causality that confines the legitimate field of
historical agency within absurdly restrictive boundaries. The world is par-
celled out between a predictable group of stereotypical causes and a large,
dimly lit mass of raw materials that the artist chooses to fashion.
The new historicist critics are interested in such cultural expressions as
witchcraft accusations, medical manuals, or clothing not as raw materials
but as “cooked”7— complex symbolic and material articulations of the imagi-
native and ideological structures of the society that produced them. Conse-
quently, there is a tendency in at least some new historicist writings (certainly
in my own) for the focus to be partially displaced from the work of art that is
their formal occasion onto the related practices that had been adduced osten-
sibly in order to illuminate that work. It is difficult to keep those practices in
the background if the very concept of historical background has been called
into question.
I have tried to deal with the problem of focus by developing a notion of
cultural negotiation and exchange, that is, by examining the points at which
one cultural practice intersects with another, borrowing its forms and inten-
sities or attempting to ward off unwelcome appropriations or moving texts
and artifacts from one place to another. But it would be misleading to imag-
ine that there is a complete homogenization of interest; my own concern
remains centrally with imaginative literature, and not only because other cul-
tural structures resonate powerfully within it. If I do not approach works of
art in a spirit of veneration, I do approach them in a spirit that is best
described as wonder. Wonder has not been alien to literary criticism, but it
has been associated (if only implicitly) with formalism rather than histori-

6. Cohen, in Shakespeare R eproduced, pp. 3 3 - 3 4 the world of human culture was famously drawn
[G reenblatt’s note]. by the French anthropologist c l a u d e l e v i -
7. This distinction between the natural world and s t r a u s s in T he Raw and the C ooked (1964).
2038 / S t e p h e n J. G r e e n b l a t t

cism. I wish to extend this wonder beyond the formal boundaries of works of
art, just as I wish to intensify resonance within those boundaries.

It will be easier to grasp the concepts of resonance and wonder if we think

of the way in which our culture presents to itself not the textual traces of its
past but the surviving visual traces, for the latter are put on display in galler-
ies and museums specially designed for the purpose. By resonance I mean
the power of the object displayed to reach out beyond its formal boundaries
to a larger world, to evoke in the viewer the complex, dynamic cultural forces
from which it has emerged and for which as metaphor or more simply as
metonymy it may be taken by a viewer to stand. By wonder I mean the power
of the object displayed to stop the viewer in his tracks, to convey an arresting
sense of uniqueness, to evoke an exalted attention.
The new historicism obviously has distinct affinities with resonance; that
is, its concern with literary texts has been to recover as far as possible the
historical circumstances of their original production and consumption and to
analyze the relationship between these circumstances and our own. New his-
toricist critics have tried to understand the intersecting circumstances not as
a stable, prefabricated background against which the literary texts can be
placed, but as a dense network of evolving and often contradictory social
forces. The idea is not to find outside the work of art some rock onto which
literary interpretation can be securely chained but rather to situate the work
in relation to other representational practices operative in the culture at a
given moment in both its history and our own. In Louis Montrose’s8 conve-
nient formulation, the goal has been to grasp simultaneously the historicity
of texts and the textuality of history.
Insofar as this approach, developed for literary interpretation, is at all
applicable to visual traces, it would call for an attempt to reduce the isola-
tion of individual “masterpieces,” to illuminate the conditions of their mak-
ing, to disclose the history of their appropriation and the circumstances in
which they come to be displayed, to restore the tangibility, the openness,
the permeability of boundaries that enabled the objects to come into being
in the first place. An actual restoration of tangibility is obviously in most
cases impossible, and the frames that enclose pictures are only the ultimate
formal confirmation of the closing of the borders that marks the finishing
of a work of art. But we need not take that finishing so entirely for granted;
museums can and on occasion do make it easier imaginatively to recreate
the work in its moment of openness.
That openness is linked to a quality of artifacts that museums obviously
dread, their precariousness. But though it is perfectly reasonable for museums
to protect their objects— I would not wish it any other way— precariousness is
a rich source of resonance. Thomas Greene, who has written a sensitive book
on what he calls the “vulnerable text,” suggests that the symbolic wounding to
which literature is prone may confer upon it power and fecundity. “The vul-
nerability of poetry,” Greene argues, “stems from four basic conditions of lan-
guage: its historicity, its dialogic function, its referential function, and its

8. Prom inent New H istoricist critic (b. 1941); his “form ulation” appears in “The Elizabethan Subject
and the Spenserian Text” (1986).
 R e s o n a n c e a n d W o n d e r / 2039

dependence on figuration/’9 Three of these conditions are different for the

visual arts, in ways that would seem to reduce vulnerability: painting and
sculpture may be detached more readily than language from both referential-
ity and figuration, and the pressures of contextual dialogue are diminished by
the absence of an inherent logos,1 a constitutive word. But the fourth
condition— historicity— is in the case of material artifacts vastly increased,
indeed virtually literalized. Museums function, partly by design and partly in
spite of themselves, as monuments to the fragility of cultures, to the fall of
sustaining institutions and noble houses, the collapse of rituals, the evacua-
tion of myths, the destructive effects of warfare, neglect, and corrosive doubt.
I am fascinated by the signs of alteration, tampering, even destructiveness
which many museums try simply to efface: first and most obviously, the act
of displacement that is essential for the collection of virtually all older arti-
facts and most modern ones— pulled out of chapels, peeled off church walls,
removed from decaying houses, seized as spoils of war, stolen, “purchased”
more or less fairly by the economically ascendent from the economically
naive, the poor, the hard-pressed heirs of fallen dynasties and impoverished
religious orders. Then too there are the marks on the artifacts themselves:
the attempt to scratch out or deface the image of the devil in numerous late-
medieval and Renaissance paintings, the concealing of the genitals in sculp-
tured and painted figures, the iconoclastic2 smashing of human or divine
representations, the evidence of cutting or reshaping to fit a new frame or
purpose, the cracks or scorch marks or broken-off noses that indifferently
record the grand disasters of history and the random accidents of trivial
incompetence. Even these accidents— the marks of a literal fragility— can
have their resonance: the climax of an absurdly hagiographical Proust exhi-
bition several years ago was a display case holding a small, patched, modest
vase with a notice, “This vase broken by Marcel Proust.”3
As this comical example suggests, wounded artifacts may be compelling
not only as witnesses to the violence of history but as signs of use, marks of
the human touch, and hence links with the openness to touch that was the
condition of their creation. The most familiar way to recreate the openness of
aesthetic artifacts without simply renewing their vulnerability is through a
skillful deployment of explanatory texts in the catalogue, on the walls of the
exhibit, or on cassettes. The texts so deployed introduce and in effect stand in
for the context that has been effaced in the process of moving the object into
the museum. But insofar as that context is partially, often primarily, visual as
well as verbal, textual contextualism has its limits. Hence the mute eloquence
of the display of the palette, brushes, and other implements that an artist of a
given period would have employed or of objects that are represented in the
exhibited paintings or of materials and images that in some way parallel or
intersect with the formal works of art.
Among the most resonant moments are those in which the supposedly
contextual objects take on a life of their own, make a claim that rivals that

9. Thom as G rccnc, T he Vulnerable Text: Essays on 1. W ord, sp e ech ; reason (G reek ).

Renaissance Literature (New York: Columbia Uni- 2. Literally, “destroying religious im ages.”
versity Press, 1986), p. 100 [Greenblatt’s note]. 3. M arcel Proust (1 8 7 1 -1 9 2 2 ), major French
Greene (1926—2003), American scholar o f English novelist.
and comparative literature.
2040 / D o n n a H a r a w a y

of the object that is formally privileged. A table, a chair, a map, often seem-
ingly placed only to provide a decorative setting for a grand work, become
oddly expressive, significant not as “background” but as compelling represen-
tational practices in themselves. These practices may in turn impinge upon
the grand work, so that we begin to glimpse a kind of circulation: the cultural
practice and social energy implicit in map-making drawn into the aesthetic
orbit of a painting which has itself enabled us to register some of the repre-
sentational significance of the map. Or again the threadbare fabric on the old
chair or the gouges in the wood of a cabinet juxtapose the privileged painting
or sculpture with marks not only of time but of use, the imprint of the human
body on the artifact, and call attention to the deliberate removal of certain
exalted aesthetic objects from the threat of that imprint.
For the effect of resonance does not necessarily depend upon a collapse
of the distinction between art and non-art; it can be achieved by awakening
in the viewer a sense of the cultural and historically contingent construc-
tion of art objects, the negotiations, exchanges, swerves, exclusions by
which certain representational practices come to be set apart from other
representational practices that they partially resemble. A resonant exhibi-
tion often pulls the viewer away from the celebration of isolated objects and
toward a series of implied, only half-visible relationships and questions.
How have the objects come to be displayed? What is at stake in categorizing
them as of “museum-quality”? How were they originally used? What cul-
tural and material conditions made possible their production? What were
the feelings of those who originally held these objects, cherished them, col-
lected them, possessed them? What is the meaning of my relationship to
these same objects now that they are displayed here, in this museum, on
this day?
* * «

1990

DONNA HARAWAY
b. 1 9 4 4

In the introduction to her book Simians, Cyborgs, and W omen: The Reinvention o f
Nature (1991), Donna Haraway describes her transformation from a “proper, U.S.
socialist feminist, white, female, hominid biologist” into a “multiply marked cyborg
feminist” whose writings range freely from cyborgs and monsters to apes and dogs,
productive assemblages that in her later work she comes to call “companion spe-
cies.” Haraway s challenging and innovative theoretical work is part of the cultural
studies of science and technology, a thriving subdiscipline interested in the history,
sociology, and politics of technoscience. Her best-known text, “A Manifesto for
Cyborgs” (1985), has been hailed as the central text of cyberfeminism— an often
iconoclastic wave of feminist theory and practice that is seeking to reclaim techno-
science. As she attempts to understand the place of technology within a postmod-