The Politics of Renaissance Literature: A Review Essay

Author(s): Jonathan Goldberg

Source: ELH, Vol. 49, No. 2 (Summer, 1982), pp. 514-542
Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press
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THE POLITICS OF RENAISSANCE
LITERATURE: A REVIEW ESSAY

BY JONATHAN GOLDBERG

Only the presentgenerationof literarycriticshas viewed Renais-

sance literatureas a field forformal ratherthan historical,investi-
gation.Beforethe second world war, thingswere exactlythe oppo-
site, and it was against the relentless historicisingthat passed as
literarycriticismthatthe new criticismwas born. In a debate in the
Sewanee Review over Marvell's "Horatian Ode," Cleanth Brooks
faced Douglas Bush, defenderof the faith,to define the termsthat
dominatedliterarycriticismforthe last generation,and defend the
proper modern(ist) approach to Renaissance poems. The debate
followed a challenge Brooks issued in his 1946 English Institute
essay, declaringthatpoems had lives oftheirown and needed to be
rescued fromthe grim literalismof historical critics who would
chain poems to meanings ascertainable outside the text itself.L
Poems were complex human statements, not hidebound re-
positoriesof traditionaltruisms.In the years since this debate, an
ironic reversal has occurred. Now the conservativekeepers of the
faith-and defendersof history-are the heirs of the new criticism,
and the rabblerousersare the structuralists and theirpoststructural
heirs. To furtherthe irony,genuinely historicalcriticismtakes one
impulse fromthe structuralistassertion that everythingis a text,
while ahistoricismis waved by the diehards as theirhistoricalban-
ner. One sign of this can be seen in a recent review essay that
William Empson wrote forthe New York Review of Books (3 De-
cember 1981). As famous as Bush's debate with Brooks was
Rosemond Tuve's withEmpson over the question ofthe originality
of Herbert's imagery.Now, thirtyyears later, Empson locks arms
withJohnCarey and, more significantly, Helen Gardner.But thisis
not, as it would firstappear, a repeat of the old story,the aging
knightof the new facingthe dragon guardingthe historicalcave.
Rather, Empson attacks Dame Helen's edition of Donne's
poems-quite rightly,one must add-for historical inaccuracy.
Ever the bad boy, Empson puncturesthe view of Donne's devel-
opment froml'homme moyen sensuel to respectable gentleman,a

514
ELH Vol. 49 Pp. 51A4-542
0013-8304/8210492-514 $01.00 ? 1982 by The Johns Hopkins UniversityPress

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supposedlytimeless and purportedlyobjective psychologythatig-
nores Donne's specific historical situation and the functionof
poems in his society. History,forGardner,is as timeless as texts
were forBrooks.From such a view, historyneeds to be delivered
and allowed the complexitiesthatbeforeinhered only in texts.
A move in this directioncan be seen in the career of one distin-
guished criticof Renaissance literature,StanleyFish.2 Fish began
as a new criticalmutant;true,everythingthatwas interestinghap-
pened in the reader,not in the text,and the textwas farmoreopen
thanany formalist would have allowed. Fish claimed forhis reader
what Brooks had forthe text.But recently,he has repudiated his
splendidlyisolated reader makingmeaning.Rather,Fish's readers
have joined the communityof interpreters, and the meaningsthey
make are bounded institutionally and historicallyby the rules and
strategiesallowed and accepted as true. This is, of course, to rob
these institutionsof the grand objectivitythat Bush and Gardner
claimed,but it is also to rob the readerofthe autonomyofa textual
status.Fish's move is a symptomofthetimes,a further indicationof
one turnbeing taken in the studyof Renaissance literaturethese
days,the returnto historicalcriticism.It is the subjectofthisessay.
In the pages thatfollow,I have divided these recent criticsinto
three groups. First,the marxists,who avow the place of textsin
materialproduction.Second, a group less easily labelled (and far
more successful),who regard textual and cultural productionas
interlacedactivities.Finally, those criticswho still cling to new
criticalassumptionsabout the texteven as theyclaim to be restor-
ing textsto theirhistoricaland political situations.

Frederic Jameson's The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a

Socially SymbolicAct presentsthe only full scale attempton this
side of the Atlanticto argue fora marxisttheoryof textualproduc-
tion.Informedby the model of such continentaltheoristsas Pierre
Machery, Jameson focuses on the status of the text.3 Following
Althusser, he asks, "is the texta free-floatingobject in its own right,
or does it "reflect"some contextor ground,and in thatcase does it
simplyreplicate the latterideologically,or does it possess some
autonomousforcein which it could also be seen as negatingthat
context?"(38). The last positionis Machery's-texts forhim allow
access to morethanthe replicationoftheculture'sideology-and to

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some extent Jameson's, although he is all too willing to allow liter-
ary texts a status as mere reflections of cultural patterns, what he
terms an allegorical or expressive relationship. Either way, crucial
forJameson is the embeddedness of the text in social structures,in
history and politics; equally crucial is the extension of the struc-
turalist term text to embrace this situation. Practically the last sen-
tence in The Political Unconscious offersthis redefinition of the
structuralist- catchall -"When properly used, the concept of the text
does not, as in garden-varietysemiotic practice today, reduce these
realities to small and manageable writtendocuments of one kind or
another, but ratherliberates us fromthe empirical object-whether
institution,event, or individual work-by displacing our attention
to its constitution as an object and its relationship to the other
objects thus constituted" (297). Jameson's italics highlight the fact
that his position is Althusserian, and that, like Machery, the pro-
duction of the text is also his concern:
The text cannot be sheltered fromhistory; this is where Jameson
begins, holding up for scorn the new critics and their structuralist
heirs, who in imagining forthe text some realm of autonomy really
lock it evermore into one of necessity. Ideology produces such clo-
sure, pretending to account forall things and to place them forever;
hence, the new critical isolation of the text succumbs to an
ideological imperative that blinds the critic fromthe text's political
situation. However, Jameson's marxism also serves as a blinder,
and his belief that marxism is the truthleads to ideological closures
and reductions too. For much as historymust be respected, all texts
must nonetheless be part of a single story,the only true narrative,
the class struggle as it has manifested itself throughouthistory,and
it is that "single vast unfinished plot" (20) that the text must not be
sheltered from. Saying that, his position is in danger of distorting
the texts it reads and the history it uncovers as the "'unconscious"
and silence in texts. This is nowhere more evident than in a recent
essay of his on Milton, which opens with this sentence: "Nothing is
more appropriate, in the second year of the Iranian revolution and
the firstyear of the Islamic Republic, than a return to 1642 and a
meditation on the work of the greatest English political poet."4
Some mightthink nothing could be less appropriate, and perhaps it
is to Jameson's credit that this initial flourish is soon muted. Reli-
gion is politics, he means, then and now, but within two pages, he
takes thatback, making room (as he says) forthe point "that religion
in its strong formin precapitalist societies is functionally and sub-

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stantively distinct from what it is today." By the end of the essay,
Jameson's Islamic fantasy is attached to Milton's position on di-
vorce: "is it ungrateful to suggest something Islamic in this con-
ception of a democratic community of males who are free to re-
pudiate their wives?" Ungrateful does not quite begin to describe
this position.
Jameson argues in "Religion and Ideology" that religion is "the
master-code of precapitalistic society" and that it therefore ought to
be accessible to a reading in which its major themes offer "'mysti-
fied or distorted anticipations of secular and even scientific preoc-
cupations which are ours today." Traduttore tradittore. Again, it
may be to Jameson's credit that he can scarcely maintain his line of
argument. In the course of his presentation, religion is called ideol-
ogy, but then this is withdrawn, since "ideology is a modern term
and a modern phenomenon." Milton's politics are exposed in his
religion, but then it turns out that "Milton's poem is historical, even
though .. . it fails to be political." (Yet, Milton is "the greatest
English political poet"!) This curious statement receives an equally
strange explanation: the poem is the product of a "<post-political
world," something it shares with our own times, Jameson says;
post-1968 is post-1660. Since no period by Jameson's own admis-
sion really could be "Cpost-political," it is difficult to know what he
means, especially since Jameson wants to locate Milton's text in the
context of Iran, and, at the same time, in the failed revolution of
1968. The only way any of that makes sense is if all revolutions are
the same revolution. But if that were true, then history, which
Jameson has been holding up ever since The Prison House of Lan-
guage as the truthagainst which structuralism and modernism must
quail, is a metaphysical notion, an idealist fantasy. Jameson practi-
cally admits this, for defending himself against the possibility that
history might be an optional code, one possible absence to which
the text alludes, rather than its only ground, he insists that "History
.. becomes the ultimate ground as well as the untranscendable
limit of our understanding in general and our textual interpretations
in particular" (100).
In part because of such reductive tendencies, The Political Un-
conscious articulates a systematic program for interpreting texts.
Jameson offers what he calls three concentric frameworks for
analysis. As a theoretical system these are suggestive enough to
warrant summary, although they work to small effect in the Milton
essay. In the firstof these frames, inspired by Levi-Strauss, the text

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is a symbolic act, an ideological structure resolving contradictions
that society fails to overcome. The critic must work to the real con-
tradiction that the text fails to solve. Hence the Milton essay opens
with a call for the "'rereading or rewriting" of Paradise Lost by "de-
concealing" its political content. The same principle governs this
frame of analysis, and is strikingly described as a critical program
that joins structuralist and historical imperatives.
The type of interpretationhere proposed is more satisfactorily
grasped as the rewritingof the literarytextin such a way thatthe
latter may itself be seen as the rewritingor restructurationof a
priorhistorical or ideological subtext,it being always understood
thatthat "subtext' is not immediately present as such, not some
common-sense external reality,nor even the conventional narra-
tives of history manuals, but rather must itself always be (re)-
constructed afterthe fact.
(81)
As every schoolboy knows, some devils too, the crucial problem
in Paradise Lost concerns those twins freedom and necessity, fate
and freewill, which are also crucial to marxist analysis. In Jame-
son s rewriting, one becomes the other. Jameson spends a number
of pages in the essay arguing against the possibility that he will be
accused of making marxism a religion, or turning Christian her-
meneutics and providential history into marxism (he fights that
fight in The Political Unconscious too). So, after growls in the di-
rection of Norman Cohn, Lucien Goldmann and a condescending
glance at Gide ("Consider for instance Gide's little fable, Laf-
cadio's Adventures ... "), he proposes that Milton's solution,
separating God's foreknowledge from predestination, "<is the dis-
torted anticipation, within the religious and figural master-code, of
the idea of historical necessity and historical necessity in historical
materialism." In other words, whatever is had to be, but we only
know it too late, after we've acted; hence, we must keep acting.
Translation: that the revolution has not yet occurred does not mean
that it won't. Jameson suppresses my translation, of course, and
proceeds to establish Milton's marxist credentials by equating him
with Hegel and, immediately after, with Walter Benjamin. It is
simply embarrassing to pursue these pages of "Religion and Ideol-
ogy," to find that Jameson wants "all of" his speculations to be
"'taken as a gloss and commentary on Walter Benjamin'' or that he
wishes merely to " test" Machery against Milton. For, ultimately,
Jameson argues that since Milton's God contains the contradiction
of fate and freewill, and since Milton's God is so deplorable (he's

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 only human, Jameson contends), Milton's solution is merely
ideological, not the marxist truth: "the requirement to give
anthropomorphic figuration to the ideology of Providence ends up
denouncing itself, and undermining the very ideology it set out to
embody. Yet this is an objective and impersonal, what today would
be called a textual, process: by a kind of ruse of reason, Milton's
symbolic act is alienated from itself, turns against itself, ends up
producing the opposite of what it originally intended." In other
words, Jameson likes Milton's God no more than any other reader
has (he tries to make Empson his ally). Among the assumptions
Jameson voices, these need to be questioned: that anthropomorph-
ism was a necessity in the representation of God; that Milton in-
tended to make God jolly but couldn't quite cover up his nastiness;
that figuration in Paradise Lost has, as its objective latency-its
silence-a deconstructive power that Milton knows nothing about;
that Jameson's "textual" process occurs without a reader. Machery
fails Jameson's test, for he would say that texts are not ideologically
straitened; Jameson would say that they are. We are a long way
from any history here except the history of the place of Jameson's
approach to the text.
In the program of The Political Unconscious, the second frame of
textual analysis is the ideologeme, a unit of analysis that involves
the text and everything that it has marginalized or silenced. Again,
this could be a valuable historical approach-to recognize that a
world of other discourses surrounds the text, and that the hegemony
of the text results from impositions and silencing. Jameson's muse
forthis frame is Bakhtin, and the dialogical is the form of contradic-
tion he invokes. This frame, brought to bear upon Paradise Lost,
yields fallacious fruitonce again. Against Satan and God and Adam
and Eve, Jameson reads the history of Milton's time in extraordi-
nary ways. Since God is such a bully, one would expect, Jameson
argues, that Satan would have a few glimmers of Cromwell. Not so,
he says, for Satan is a tyrant, and therefore is-is-Charles. This is
just plain wrong. Satan can illuminate both figures, but never rests
in either equation. For Jameson, Milton is arguing that the revolu-
tion (i.e. God) was right and inevitable (providence is history).
Stated that way, one can scarcely object. Jameson, however, does,
for real politics has been stripped from this schema. Where are the
party workers? where are the revolutionaries? where is the petty
bourgeoisie? All sadly absent from the simplistic equations of Mil-
ton's religious figuration. Why, says Jameson, there is in this view

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"no longer any place for the army of the saints themselves"; all that
wonderful concern for church organization in the prose ("A point-
by-point anticipation of all the most vital problems of political or-
ganization in our own time; problems of the party, of class solidar-
ity, of the soviets .. . "); all gone. Yes, if the poem were only about
God and Satan, Adam and Eve, this might be true in some way. But
it isn't: the angelic host the Satanic crew, the entire course of
history, explicit in Michael's narrative, implicit in every figurative
turn of the narrative, in catalogues and similes, somehow these
have been forgotten, and as for church organization, surely the de-
bate of book 2, its echo in book 3, the council of Satan in heaven,
Abdiel's account, all these might serve as instances of political or-
ganization.
Last frame of all, to end this strange eventful history, the ideology
of form. Here, the text reveals its place in the only true history, that
of the modes of production. History works a perpetual revolution,
and at any time various modes are coexistent, contradictory; texts
reveal this in their very form, and here, at last, the true shape of
history is glimpsed. In Paradise Lost, you see, Satan is a feudal war
lord, as is God, but "Adam is clearly of another species-the com-
moner the first bourgeois." Jameson gives not a hint for the rea-
soning behind the last point (it must be that a seventeenth-century
text true to the modes of production must have a bourgeois gen-
tilhomme somewhere); the routing of feudalism (God deconstructs
himself and Satan too), however, is figured in Milton's text, Jame-
son claims, in that extraordinary moment when Satan voyaging to-
wards the new world (i.e., nascent capitalism) leaves behind the
chaos of old outdated forms of production. Jameson quotes the last
lines of book 2 (the only extended piece of text in his essay) and
says that they demonstrate the moment when "something quite
inconceivable in the previous system springs into being">; incon-
ceivable indeed. The view here is wonderful, breathtaking: but it is
not the joy at the advance of history towards the supremacy of the
proletariat.
Afterthis, it is perhaps only as a kind of comic finale that Jameson
takes on the fall or, rather, Eve's fall, for Adam's is never men-
tioned. Jameson, who begins by praising Milton as "the great poet
of sex" (two and a half lines about sweat are instanced), ends by
denouncing him for sexism. "Eve has to fall, not because she is
sinful or disobedient, but because Milton cannot find it in himself
to imagine and give figuration to an equality between the sexes that

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would open up into a concrete vision of free people." Earlier in the
essay, to prove his nonsexist credentials, Jameson had referred to
"the historian herself"; by the end, he is having his Turkish fan-
tasies. His Adam never falls. But Milton does: he can no longer be
enlisted by liberals, Jameson self-satisfyingly remarks; Milton's
post-political text reveals "the operation of ideological closure," for
it is (this is the last clause of the essay) "a poem in which as we have
said the political is repressed [which] nonetheless ends up pro-
ducing a political reading of itself." Or, to tell the truth, Jameson
produces that political reading in which the poem's closures allow
him to open up what a true poem would tell, the history of the
revolution. The saddest thing about Jameson's reading is that
Paradise Lost could tell that story, and that Jameson's principles
could lead there too.
This is not the place for me to attempt that political reading of the
poem, but I don't want to leave Jameson without pointing to his
most invigorating theoretical contribution, the broadening of the
definition of the text that I have noted. History, Jameson says, along
with Machery, is the absent cause of the text, and all texts are
political. So far so good. But even better is this. History, he says, is
itself a text, or, rather, makes itself available to us only in textual
form. The Real (capitalized a la Lacan) "<necessarily passes through
its prior textualization, its narrativization in the political uncon-
scious. And the text thus brings history with it in the only form in
which history is available to us. The literary work or cultural object,
as though for the first time, brings into being that very situation to
which it is also, at one and the same time, a reaction" (82). The
production of the text is also the reproduction of society, politics,
history-and its production. To repeat: "history is inaccessible to us
except in textual form, or in other words, . . . it can be approached
only by way of prior (re)textualization" (ibid). Jameson, as I've
indicated, does not live up to these ideas. They are, however, im-
plicit in the approach of my second group of critics. Before I turn to
them, however, I want to complete this marxist foray by consider-
ing a text Jameson invokes, "Christopher Hill's great biography" of
Milton.5
Milton and the English Revolution presents views that Hill has
been arguing and developing for the past fortyyears, and this biog-
raphy of Milton furthers his claims about the course of English
history in the seventeenth century. There is much here of value;
the details of the historical narrative are impressively arrayed, the

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 stages in Milton's development are unexceptionably surveyed. The
suggestion that Hill offered first in an appendix to The World
Turned Upside Down, that Milton's ideas require the contextuali-
zation of contemporary radical thought, was welcome there, and
remains so. Yet, the fault of the extended biography lies in its very
extension; after 500 pages, Hill is no furtherthan he was in his
appendix, and the focus of his original note emerges blurred, dis-
torted,and shapeless. So too does Milton, and in the final pages of
the biography, Hill gives a final turn to a phrase used throughout:
"lthatgreat eclectic," is at last "the great equivocator." It is discon-
certing," Hill continues, "to try to depict a man who has strong
moral principles, for which he would die, without being able to
state clearly what those principles are" (472). Although Hill seems
to think that this problem rests with Milton, it is one he creates
himself. It affectshis historical method and dictates what happens
when he tries to read Milton's poems in the light of history.
AfterJ. H. Hexter's devastating piece on Hill,6 it is hard not to
find Milton and the English Revolution guilty of the sin of "lump-
ing" that Hexter charges Hill with, the inability to make distinc-
tions. It is this fault that causes Hill's final problem with Milton.
Typically, Hill approaches an idea of Milton's only to lose it in a
flood of commonplaces. Thus, of Areopagitica, he first writes,
'4many of its ideas were commonplaces" (150). Servetus on tolera-
tion is instanced and quoted. Then the English radical John
Stoughton is brought in. No sooner is he quoted than Hill adds,
"but Stoughton quoted Pico della Mirandola for the sentiment, so
Milton may have got it direct." Milton is quoted, but Stoughton is
not allowed to disappear. For Stoughton said "some shepherds .
are wolves," and so did . . .. And, next sentence, "Stoughton was a
friend of Dury and Hartlib," and they were Milton's friends too.
And Hartlib published a work of Stoughton's "in which he linked
Bacon, Comenius and Dury." And ... and ... and: the effectof this
paragraph is simply maddening. Hill clearly believes that ideas are
neat little units that anyone may have and repeat; they are radically
decontextualized. But his attempt is to contextualize Milton; this
means that anyone-or so it seems-could be called an influence or
an analogue, and that any connection is as likely as any other.
Equally typical of Hill's method as a historian is the paragraph that
begins this way: "The idea of being a heretic in the truthcan be
found in Giordano Bruno, in Paolo Sarpi and among the Socinians,
as well as in Bishop Carleton, William Chillingworth, John Fry,

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 John Knowles, Robert Boyle, James Nayler, Thomas Hobbes and
Robert Barclay" (154). Naturally, Hill will find himself hard pressed
to know Milton's principles when he can gather all these together
and act as if they spoke with a single voice.
Hill comes up with the formula "in dialogue with" to describe
Milton's relationship with the radicals of the 1640s and 50s. The
phrase waffles; it is a version of cliches about communication that
were rife in liberal political thought a decade or two ago. Hill can-
not quite claim that Milton was influenced by the radicals, nor that
he influenced them, and since those are the only alternatives he can
imagine, he is forced to have recourse to a phrase that could suggest
either but claims neither. "Dialogue" has a lovely dialectical ring to
it too, and although Hill wears his marxism far more lightly than
Jameson, the term no doubt has its ideological appeal. At pains to
disabuse his reader that he is a vulgar marxist-"ideas are not. . . a
reflex of economics" (77), he writes-he substitutes something
equally weak, the desire to find lower-class ideas percolating up to
ivory-tower intellectuals. Hill cannot quite give up the all but dis-
proved notion of the English revolution as a class war, and the
attempt of the book is to associate Milton with the lower classes
intellectually if not actually (Milton's antidemocratic remarks are
too virulent for Hill to be able to establish more than an intellectual
community, although, whenever possible, he tries to imagine Mil-
ton out for a night at a pub or trading offcolor remarks). The book is
full of cheap shots: Milton's visit to Italy is like a western European
behind the iron curtain (56), and the hermetic ideas that Hill thinks
he picked up there filtered, via Fludd ("There is a book to be
written on 'Milton and Fludd' which will be far more important
than any studies of Milton's classical or patristic sources" [6]),
through the radicals, an "underground tradition" that emerges in
Milton. For Milton, Hill twice says, could have shared the horrified
awareness of Hopkins "writing (in 1871, of all years) 'horrible to
say, in a manner I am a communist' " (96; cf. 337); Hill, of course, is
not horrified to suggest, however glancingly, that the years 1640-60
cheer his marxist heart, and from "tantalizing hints" (70), he weaves
a fabric stretching from Milton's radicalism to his own. Milton is
<'astonishingly liberal" for Hill; "some of Milton's verbal play re-
minds us irresistibly of Karl Marx" (259); and "lest we should think
of Milton's lines [PL 3:189-93] too passively," we are asked to
''compare them with Lenin's slogan in a similar post-revolutionary
period after 1905" (389). Indeed, where Hill parts company with

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Jameson is in espousing a liberal marxism; there is no "<post-
political" Milton here. Instead, to the end, ever undaunted,Milton
continuesto believe in the revolution,and honinga paradise within
is no post-politicalposition. In this in factHill is closer to Milton's
politics than Jameson.
Not that Hill takes this insightto the heart of Milton's revolu-
tionarystance; instead, as usual, he waffles.He can find nothing
genuinely strikingin Milton thathe can't find elsewhere, and he
can findso manythingsin Milton thathe is foreverdeclaring Mil-
ton's paradoxes and contradictionsto be a position taken in some
middle ground,a stance of a dialogist between protestantismand
the lunaticfringe.Miltonis a synthesizer,a bourgeois radical; there
is "uncertaintyat the heartofMilton'spersonality"(337). I'm afraid
these are autobiographical rather than biographical comments;
most readers are overwhelmed by the forceof Milton, not by the
waveringthatcharacterizesChristopherHill.
The muddle thatHill makes ofMilton'sbeliefs affectshis reading
of the poems, to which over one hundred pages of the book are
devoted. The problem is not simply that Hill is not a literary
critic-this, indeed, oughtnot to be a problem ifthe aim is to rein-
troduce Milton's texts in history,to findhistoryin Milton's texts.
But the method here, lacking the crabbed theories of Jameson or
Machery,is a swirlofpossibility.Hill doesn't wantto read poems as
politicalallegories,but he has hardlya notionofwhatelse to do. He
tries foranalogies, parallels; but these keep becoming equations.
Paradise Regained turns out to be "about" church government,
Samson Agonistes speaks of the predicament of political action
after1660. Hill sees thatParadise Lost is complex,but he is rarely
up to what he sees. Here are some typicalinterpretiveremarks."A
poem about the Fall would among other things provide explana-
tions of the failureof the godly in the English Revolution. Adam
had been freeto fall,and to fall he chose: the English people had
taken a captain back forEgypt" (349). "The firstbattle in heaven
was as inconclusive as Edgehill" (372). "If Abdiel was Milton the
prose pamphleteer" (356), a sentence begins; to make matters
worse,the if is soon forgotten;"if we take Adam as personifying the
regenerate among the Parliamentarian leaders in the sixteen-
fifties"(377) followsa similarpath. "Satan, like Charles I, raised his
standardin the north"(371). The poem breaks at book 7 because
the revolutiondid in 1660 (365). Enough. Tryingto "<suggestparal-
lels which mighthave been in Milton's mind" (380), but always

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carefulto hedge themwiththe uncertaintywhich mustgovernthis
method Hill tries to serve up a "relevant" Milton an "alternative"
Milton. It is unfortunate,but true, that Hill has only the slightest
notion of how poems function, what their relations to history and
politics are. As I've indicated, the shapeless lump to which he re-
duces Milton reflectsHill's notion of historyall too well. If Jameson
really means that Hill's is a "great biography" it can only be be-
cause it confirmsJameson's predilection to read textsas one-for-one
expressions of society. More often than Jameson, Hill is aware that
Milton is a complicated thinker; he knows that Milton cannot be
dismissed as a sexist, that his God is not there merely to be decon-
structed. But the failure to be able to draw distinctions muddles the
complexity of Paradise Lost, flattens paradoxes until they yield
simple solutions, repeated equations in which Milton's text echoes
the single text of historythat Hill reads, the storyof the revolution
that has not yet quite occurred, but for which we must stand ever
ready, ever waiting. These tendencies to flattencome close to the
oldstyle historicism redevivus that I will return to in the final sec-
tion of this essay. Before doing so, however, I want to turnto those
critics who realize best the aims that marxistcriticism announces.

II
"Modern theories of pastoral have a way of turning into theories
of literature," Louis Adrian Montrose remarks, opening a recent
essay; like much in Montrose's work, the sentence is self-reflexive,
for in a remarkable series of essays on Elizabethan pastoral, Mon-
trose has been advancing a claim about literature that radically
opposes much that is usually thought.7Against the escapist, nostal-
gic readers of pastoral, both new critical and oldfashioned histori-
cal, who cordon pastoral fromlife, Montrose argues forpastoral play
as real work, that the form has a function. Depending on Put-
tenham, he insists that otium is really negotium, that pastoralists
'Cnegotiat by coulor of otiation." Montrose shows that texts are
events that do real work in a culture. This is, indeed, a theory of
literature, a version of which we have met before. For Montrose,
literature has a mediating-a dialectical-function. Writing of
Spenser's "Aprill" eclogue and, by implication, of courtly pastoral
in general, Montrose says that it illuminates "the dialectic by which
poetic power helps to create and sustain the political power to
which it is subservient" (ELR 168). Radical in this conclusion is the
phrase "'create and sustain," which contains a complex view of the

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production of the text. Similarly, his essay on Peele opens describ-
ing the Araygnement of Paris as a work that "'recreates the culture
which creates it" (ELH 433)-the play on "recreate" condenses an
argument-and ends by pointing to book 6 of The Faerie Queene as
a version of pastoral "markedly analytical and critical in its repro-
duction of Elizabethan court culture" (457). For Montrose, texts are
not autonomous, nor are they repositories of timeless cultural truths
or ideological impositions, nor, finally, is history to be found as an
absence. Rather, Montrose argues that texts articulate the con-
tradictions of the culture and are involved in their production
(Elizabethan culture is, after all, given to us in its texts as much as
in 'events'). Texts serve the needs and desires of those who produce
them, those for whom they are produced, and those who witness
them. Montrose's texts speak in many voices, and the function of
criticism is to restore to the text as many materially specific ele-
ments (the phrase could be Montrose's) as possible.
Montrose aims to insert texts in history. To articulate the inter-
relationships he develops a vocabulary of mediation in which such
terms as dialectic, interaction, interplay, recreation, and repro-
duction recur with frequency. His vocabulary registers the fact that
while texts inevitably constitute the culture in which they operate,
and which they reflect, there is no one pattern to which they sub-
scribe. Some texts, like Peele's Araygnement, are meant mainly to
celebrate the court and its queen; but this does not rule out the
possibility that they also advance the claims of the author, and
constitute a bid for preferment. Others, like Sidney's Lady of May,
insinuate and glance (as Puttenham would say) at discontent even
while they seem to allow the queen to do as she likes. What under-
lies these possibilities (and they by no means cover the case) is the
use of pastoral as a tool for advancement at court, the center of the
social world. Pastorals pay homage to "Eliza, Queene of
shepheardes," not as a lovely game or decorative play-the leisure
class whiling the hours away-but to serve a class forever on the qui
vive. Courts were perilous places; courting was a constant activity;
success was never sure. Moreover, the very fact of aspiration, the
desire for place and power, was potentially a threat to the queen, a
threat to break boundaries and climb out of one's class. Elizabethan
society, as Montrose sees it, was engaged in power struggles be-
tween classes and generations, between the need to preserve order
and the dynamics of change. Literature reflects, engages, and
mediates these conditions.

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 Hence, Montrose's textualization of culture and historicization of
texts implicitly denies Jameson's reduction of texts to ideological
closure and resolution or Hill's simple causality. Montrose does not
prioritize either text or context; both share the symbolic forms of
the culture, both produce and are produced by them. His claims are
nowhere more cogent or invigorating than in the essay on the pas-
toral of power (ELR, 1980) which advances the thesis that "'objects
and relations in the material world of peasant labor are sublimated
into forms of lordly splendor" (160). Sublimation carries religious
and psychological connotations. In this essay, Montrose's predomi-
nant vocabulary is sociological and anthropological, however, and a
"process of containment and decontamination" (165) is central to
his argument. His point, put much too simply, is that courtly pas-
toral is built upon material exploitation of agrarian workers by the
landlords who were also the courtiers surrounding the queen. They
wooed power in pastoral forms, as did poets, for they too were
courtiers, and pastoral advanced middle class young men like
Spenser and Peele as much as aristocrats like Sidney or Lord Chan-
dos, '"King of the Cotswalds," who entertained the queen on prog-
ress as a way of affirming that his workers were happy and that his
local power constituted no threat to the center of power. Montrose
justifies his religious terminology by arguing that another base for
courtly pastoral is the medieval celebration of the shepherds hail-
ing their newborn lord, and that the trick (as Empson has it) of
social equanimity performed by pastoral depends upon that prior
egalitarian tradition. The queen on progress or at court, wooed,
exalted in language amorous and spiritual; this official discourse
carried with it a great deal more: restless energies, disorderly de-
sires, aspiration. Montrose is intent in many of his essays to dis-
cover the homologies linking texts, religious experience, sexual ex-
perience and social experience. But this is not in the service of
reductive equations, but to further his claims for the complex in-
teractions of the overlapping, intersecting and mutually creating
spheres of art and life.
Art and life met in the Elizabethan court and countryside, but not
there alone. As Montrose argues in a suggestive essay that appeared
in Helios, the public theater was supremely a place of purposeful
play.8 "'The drama fulfilled manifold functions," he writes, "to
neutralize social discontent; to assuage personal anxieties; and to
provoke critical reflection upon the nature of society and the self"
(65). Shakespeare was fond of the metaphor that made all the world

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a stage notbecause it reflectsback upon him in some self-satisfying
manner,but because the metaphorexpresses the natureof reality.
"Simply by projectingthe model ofhomo ludens thatis intrinsicto
its own nature, Shakespeare's theatre articulates-and thereby
helps its heterogeneous audience of social actors to adjust and to
control-the ambiguities and conflicts,the hardships and oppor-
tunities, arising from the ideologically anomalous realities of
change" (64). This view recasts a theoryof pastoral as a theoryof
drama, or rather, it too offers a theory of literature. We may see the
shadow of Pierre Machery or Fredric Jameson behind it, for there
is, in Montrose's work, a sophisticated marxist analysis implicit, and
in his approach to the playhouse, he comes closest to finding the
possibility of revolution in Elizabethan culture. The crucial dialec-
tic for Montrose is that between generations, the struggle between
the aspiring young and the conservative old. Change needs to be
accounted for; the possibility that change can occur must be read
into texts that appear to confirm power, and into the institutions-
court, theater-that appear to preserve power. The opening that
Montrose sees rises from below; from bottled frustrations, from
grasping peers, from middle class aspirants to a piece of the pie,
from masterless men and younger sons. The model for Montrose is
thus marxist and Freudian, the repressed rise; and the model for
containment and ideological hegemony is religious. Religion per-
mits sublimation, and it is this function that cultural forms of secu-
lar power also assume. The playhouse, once again, fulfills this for-
mula as readily as the advent rituals surrounding the virgin queen,
for drama arises from religion, and the theater replaced-or was in
danger of replacing-the church as the community gathering place.
It is the theatricality of culture that also informs the most pro-
vocative book about the interaction of Renaissance text and context
to appear in many years, Stephen Greenblatt's Renaissance Self-
Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare.9 In an essay that appeared
in Glyph 8 soon after the publication of this book, Greenblatt ad-
dresses quite directly-and in terms quite different from
Montrose's-the role of theatricality in Elizabethan culture.
Change is a consequent concern for Greenblatt; the real question is
subversion, how it is given a voice in Elizabethan culture, how it is
recognized then and now. Resisting marxist explanations of an un-
derground normally barred from discourse (and with it, most of the
models upon which Montrose depends), for him, in the most radical
sense possible, the text contains everything we can hope to find.

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Contains is the crucial word here, and it houses a fundamental pun,
a paradoxical argument that Greenblatt articulates; Shakespeare's
drama, he says, "contains the radical doubts it continually pro-
duces" (57). Whereas for Montrose, it is in the interests of the op-
pressed to attempt to speak within culturally sanctioned voices-
and there is room in those codes of theater and court to do so-for
Greenblatt, it is in the interest of power to produce its own subver-
sion: the "apparent production of subversion is . . the very condi- .

tion of power" (ibid). Montrose offers several formulas for the way
in which texts reflect cultural heterogeneity, express it, and ulti-
mately deflate revolutionary impulses; Greenblatt, on the other
hand, anatomizes a process that he calls testing, recording, and
explaining, which is in the service of power. He uses two texts to
illustrate, Hariot's account of Virginia and Shakespeare's I Henry
IV. Hariot, who was regularly charged with atheism, offers a lovely
case, for his Virginia account served Elizabethan imperialism. An
official document, it yet produces subversion; as Greenblatt wittily
remarks, the evidence against Hariot is found in this socially
sanctioned text. If, as Greenblatt says, the culture contains subver-
sive possibilities because they are not in fact threatening, it
nonetheless assigns them to others. Such subversiveness actually
furthers the ends of established power, Greenblatt argues, and is
necessary to its impositions. The oppressed masses are not waiting
their turn in history to become the hegemonic voices of the future;
rather, hegemonic power establishes itself in the very form and
practices which it denies. Shakespeare's Prince Hal is Greenblatt's
theatrical example, Hal playing at rebellion, enticing Francis the
drawer only to silence the rebellion he has created, Hal, in short,
making clear that "theatricality is not set over against power but is
one of power's essential modes" (56). Greenblatt's theater ends
with the queen, Montrose's with the common man learning his part
in Elizabethan society. Montrose's conclusion reflects a bias that
Greenblatt exposes-the ease with which we identify subversive
voices because they articulate our beliefs, the complacency that we
bring to descriptions of ideological closure or cultural inscription
precisely because Elizabethan ideas of order offer no threat to our
sense of the world. Greenblatt opposes such divisions of
Elizabethan culture into antagonisms of class, courtiers vs. aliens,
the voices of hegemony and heterodoxy. In this frighteningly to-
talistic and implicitly totalitarian vision, there is a single text, a
dramatic script for life and art alike.

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 In Renaissance Self-Fashioning, he scrutinizes this text as a cul-
tural poetics, extending textual principles to history and politics. As
the Glyph piece suggests, the text is a dramatic script, and this
confirms both its hegemonic character and guards it against pre-
mature closure or ideological fixity. Greenblatt's text, in short,
while not the new critical monolith, is, nonetheless, inescapable,
and this comment on The Faerie Queene typifies his method:
"Spenser's poem is one manifestation of a symbolic language that is
inscribed by history on the bodies of living beings"' (179).
Greenblatt's book thus realizes-ideally-the endeavor that Jame-
son's theories glimpsed, undertaking, as he says, an impure task
that mingles life and art inextricably to disclose "'the social pres-
ence to the world of the literary text and the social presence of the
world in the literary text"' (5).
Greenblatt's drama has an undeniable structuralist element; he
repeatedly invokes an absence beneath this sustained play of the
text, a theatricality played en abt^me. "Strip off the layer of theatri-
cal delusion and you reach nothing at all" (14), he says of Sir
Thomas More's activity in the world, and in Utopia too. "To make a
part of one's own, to live one's life as a character thrust into a play,
constantly renewing oneself extemporaneously and forever aware
of one's own unreality" (31)-this, More's pattern, as Greenblatt
unfolds it, was played out with variations in the lives of Tyndale
and Wyatt, and in the plays of Shakespeare and Marlowe. The latter
insists on "the essential meaninglessness of theatrical space, the
vacancy that is the dark side of its power to imitate any place" (195),
and Jago's subversion of Othello, which is, for Greenblatt, his sub-
mission to narrativity, thrusts him into a play not of his own making.
Greenblatt's scripts do not merely play over a void, they threaten to
absorb the players-and all the world's a stage-or, conversely,
they are all the players have to hold onto. Conventions are lived
realities; at best, the void can be avoided by subscription to the
already written, as in the case of Wyatt. "Wyatt and the other court
poets are as much written by their conventional lyrics as writers of
them" (139), and Wyatt achieves what we call a recognizable voice
through the full participation in the dialectic of his culture: "'his
achievement is dialectical; if, through the logic of its development,
courtly self-fashioning seizes upon inwardness to heighten its his-
trionic power, inwardness turns upon self-fashioning and exposes
its underlying motives, its origins in aggression, bad faith, self-
interest, and frustrated longing" (156). It is one of Greenblatt's ini-

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tial tenets that "'self-fashioning is always, though not exclusively, in
language"' (9), and the model for language is the one held by Gor-
gias or Derrida. Greenblatt's text, unlike a marxist's, refuses to dif-
ferentiate between texts and the Real (i.e., history). There is noth-
ing that is not in the text, and even what might from another
perspective be labelled as outside the text is brought in, is already
in it.
Hence, Greenblatt argues that identity and inwardness, rather
than standing as a sign of self-possession and authenticity, is the
reverse side of what might be said to be outside the self. What is
projected as the demonic-call it Indians, or heretics, name it the
Other, for short-is also within. From this perspective there is no
need for Jameson's second frame in the exploration of the political
unconscious of texts, the inquiry into what the text represses or
makes marginal. "Achieved identity always contains within itself
the signs of its own subversion or loss" (9); what sustains and gives
sustenance to the performance of the self and the production of the
text is also what subverts it, an absorbing drama. Achieved selfhood
in Greenblatt's text would only issue in silence, for it is "the dream
of a cancellation of identity itself, an end to all improvisation, an
escape from narrative" (32). What Jameson calls the Real,
Greenblatt labels as this dream and delusion. There is no world
elsewhere, but there is an intense need for one in which to project
the self, through which to fashion it. This accounts for the cultural
circles in which Greenblatt locates his texts-colonialism in the
new world, inquisatory explorations of the inner worlds of
heretics-and explains why he finds Lacan the best gloss on
Othello's character. For Lacan is acutely aware of the self as a
construct made for and in the shape of an Other, of (as Greenblatt
summarizes his position) "<the dependence of even the innermost
self upon a language that is always necessarily given from without
and upon representation before an audience" (245). In Greenblatt's
view, Renaissance Christianity creates these demands as the form
of inward desire, and Christianity inscribes itself upon Indians and
Africans, or upon Jews like Marlowe's ("Marlowe quickly suggests
that the Jew is not the exception to but rather the true representa-
tive of his society" [203]), or a heretic like Menocchio, the miller
from Friuli, who managed to arrive at his heterodoxical beliefs by
way of the most doctrinaire reading, including the bible. The bar-
barity of nonChristian civilizations justifies the release of just such
barbarity on the part of western invaders. Self-creation, like textual

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production,rests upon what has been excluded, banished to utter
darkness, placed as an absence; Greenblatt calls this contained
substratumsubversion and submission. To the question of Milton's
Satan, "'who can thinksubmission," Greenblattimplicitlyanswers
that no one can and everyone does. We are all already writtenso
that even our rebellion has been prescriptedor at the very least
modelled on that which we would expell. And there is, as
Greenblattdarklyintimates,a way in which the selves we make,
the textswe write,woo destructivity, desire annihilation.
Power, as Greenblatt defines it, lies in the ability "to impose
fictionson the world and . . . to enforceacceptance of fictionsthat
are known to be fictions" (141). In Shakespeare's theater
Greenblattfindswhat More dreamt,a "total" institution(112), the
cultural formof absolute submission and pure dependence. The
education received there, like the fashioningSpenser offeredin
The Faerie Queene, had as its end the imperial designs of
Elizabethan culture.The gentlementhatSpenser imagines are the
planters of Ireland, the voyagers to Guiana. Such texts gave
Elizabethans an identityand taughtthemto identifythemselvesin
ways thatkept them fromseeing thatthey were functionsof these
texts,and functionariesof state apparatuses of power inherentin
these texts,and that they were walking time bombs, having ab-
sorbed withthese textsthe Christianobsession with desire as self-
destruction,and the Christian urge to proselytize by destroying
alien societies. Selves so made are themselves colonized by an
alien-by the Otherness of society-selves so made are alienated
fromthemselves to be themselves. To be able to reiterateknow-
ingly lago's fearfulline-"I am not what I am -this is what the
prospect of Elizabethan power offered,and this is the vision of
culturalpoetics Stephen Greenblattserves.
This is a powerfuland compelling account, farmore persuasive
in its particularsthan any otherconsidered thus far,and masterful
in the design it traces. Greenblatt'sreading of individual works is
oftenastoundingin its penetration,and by refusingthe ideological
imperativesthatmake mostothercritics(even the best) divide the
field intoopposing elements ripe forjuxtapositionand dialectic, he
manifestswhat I would characterizeas an imperialisticand totalis-
tic urge. Mastery,compulsion, power, and submission are over-
arching elements that Greenblatt identifies as the principles of
orderin the period thatcut across all putativeboundaries, all sup-
posed oppositions. His totalisticvision, however, has its price to

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pay. There is in Greenblatt's work always the danger that Jago
manifests, of an improvisatory insinuation that reduces all things
solid to spectres, and that robs life of others in an absorbing theatri-
cality. "Even a hostile improvisation reproduces the relations of
power" (253), Greenblatt writes, and he is forever finding ways in
which distinctions collapse to be absorbed and mastered by the
overriding shape of power. Hence, although his book plots the
careers of six figures over the course of the century, it also aligns
them in pairs, refigures the pairings in third figures, finds that the
opposing pairs resemble each other, that the resolving figures are
also related to each other. The book thus has as its compelling drive
one that Greenblatt identifies in the Glyph essay with Prospero's
acknowledgement of the thing of darkness or Hal's assured refor-
mation, a drive to master, control, and thoroughlyabsorb so that all
others are taken into the self Greenblatt is fascinated with power,
and his fascination tends to produce the effect that Max Scheler
describes: a squirrel rapt by the movements of a snake watches
immobile as it comes to devour him, submits with awe to what he
ought sensibly to flee. Or we could perhaps say of Greenblatt what
he says of Spenser, he worships power (174). For all the amazing
range and brilliance of Greenblatt's book, it keeps returningto the
force that demands submission and renunciation, and there is, I
would suggest, in what is renounced some sense of what
Greenblatt's work omits. Fascination with Hal and Prospero, for
instance, seems to make it impossible to conceive that their plays
do not regard them with equal awe. Spenserian worship of Gloriana
and her court too quickly rules out the possibility that Spenser,
even by imitating and replicating the queen's power, failed to put
his unwavering stamp of approval on it. Greenblatt dismantles sub-
versions upon which Elizabethan power builds as if all discourse
paid homage to the queen; Bakhtin and Foucault might serve as
antithetical models for the discursivity of culture. There is in
Greenblatt's work too great a need not to express the possibility that
what he calls containment may not in fact have been absolute, a
need related to the desire of his project to contain all in a control-
ling frame. Greenblatt's theater thus, at times, can be like Hal's,
offering an "odd blend . .. of spaciousness . . . and claustrophobia"
(Glyph 56). Both dazzle, in the range of knowledge and allusion, in
the force of compression and control. And yet, at times, these im-
pulses produce a fearfulnarrowing of the field, a denial to Shakes-
peare and Spenser of the full range of their energies, to the culture

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as a whole all that does not fit within and that would question
Greenblatt'sculturalpoetics.
A useful correctiveto such masteringimpulses can be found in
the recentworkof some historians.The Essex Sociology of Litera-
tureConference,to which Jamesoncontributed,featurespieces by
structuralistsand feministsas well as marxists,effortssymptomatic
of such work.I do not mean to suggestthattheyuncovernew facts
particularly,since I would agree with Greenblattand Jamesonthat
historyis always available to us in the already narrativizedformof
historicaldiscourse. Rather,the Essex volume suggests possible
ways of reconceivingand recreatingthe period-for thingsdo hap-
pen, however difficultit is to renderevents in words,however the
renderingmakes events into words and subjects them to them.
These essays can be placed beside a recent revisionistmovement
within conventional historicaldiscourse that challenges received
opinion about the seventeenthcentury-forinstance,the work of
Conrad Russell and Kevin Sharpe,10which argues thatcategories
historianshave traditionallymarshalled-court vs. country,kingvs.
parliament-are labels possible only in hindsight.There was no
civil war forthe firstfortyyears ofthe seventeenthcentury,and the
language of opposition was no differentfromthe language of the
majority(in fact,majorityand opposition apply a parliamentary
model fora period in which these termsmake no sense). To label
historyin hindsightmeans to narrativizehistoryin a certainway,to
view itscourse as linear and teleological and to assume thatone can
read back. While the workof a marxistcriticlike Jamesonreplaces
traditionalhistorywith another masternarrative-the storyof the
failed revolution yet to come-radical and revisionist historians
open up the field to a varietyof rewritingsand rereadings.They
suggest that before we can trace a contained cultural poetics we
need to bear in mind how much ofour sense ofRenaissance history
comes to us throughnarrativesthatmust be questioned.
A recent collection of essays, Patronage in the Renaissance,11
addresses one such question by remindingus thata social institu-
tion that is marginalized and somewhat suspect in our own time
was central in the Renaissance. Historians have tended to view
networksof patronage too readily as symptomsof corruptionor
sycophancywhen in factscarcely a segmentof culturalactivityin
the Renaissance remained untouched by it, and alliances of mar-
riage and friendship,readers and writers,kingsand courtpainters,
all come under the general rubricof patronage.As ArthurMarotti

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remarks,opening an essay on Donne's career, all literatureof the
Renaissance is the literatureof patronage.It is not merelythatthe
institutionrequires rethinkingon our part,however, but thathav-
ing grantedits all-pervasiveness,we need not credit it with con-
tainingor regularizingthe shape ofthe culturemorethanit did. For
the ties and links,the networksthatpatronageinvolve,are resistant
to easy generalizations. Gordon Kipling shows, for instance, that
HenryVII established his courtas a centerofartisticpatronagein a
mannerthatwas both ad hoc and thatinvolved massive importation
of culturalforms-and artists-fromBurgundy.Modern historians,
ever since Bacon, have tended to regard Henry as a tightfisted
monarch,loathe to supportthe arts;as Kiplingshows,nothingcould
be less true,but because Henrycreated a bureaucracy,and drew on
a culturalheritagewhich did not ultimatelybecome the dominant
one (humanismopposes Burgundian chivalry),we have tended to
take no notice of Henry's activities.Yet the courtofficeshe created
all were meant to enhance the monarch. Kipling's essay demon-
stratesthateven when a relativelyautocraticrulercreated virtually
out of thinair an establishmentto promotehis rule it could fail to
create a lasting effect.Conversely, in what is probably the most
stimulatinghistoricalessay in the volume, Malcolm Smuts argues
thatCharles IS inheritingthe verymachinerythatHenry got going,
was hamstrungby the bureaucratic structuresthat he inherited.
Thus, Inigo Jones,arguablythe most importantartistat court and
vital to the political uses of art,was given the officeof Surveyorof
the King's Works,a positionthathardlytallied withhis manyroles.
Even more strikingis the career of Gentilleschi, who served as a
courtpainteralthoughon the payrollof Buckingham'swidow until
she finallyforcedthe kingto create a post forhim and relieve her of
the drain on her capital, or Van Dyck, who held the post of court
painter at the same time as Mytens did. As Smuts says, all this is
extraordinary, since the king firmlybelieved in the political func-
tion of art; yet he never developed a bureaucracy to enforce his
views, allowed others to hold the reins of patronage ratherthan
controllingthem himself(he couldn't in factaffordthe autocratic
ideal he believed in). Further,forall ofCharles's efforts to make art
subservientto politics, he tended to produce court extravaganzas
thatinsulated the courtfromthe restofthe country.The resultwas
the paradox that"'an art-lovingking attuned to the values of early
baroque culture,with its emphasis upon the didactic functionsof
artand literature,nonetheless failedto launch a programofcultural

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propaganda and ceremonial display remotelycomparable to those
ofseveral Continentalcourts" (173). Smutsconcludes thata system
of decentralizationthatElizabeth had fosteredhad, by the time of
Charles I, failed; the loose ties of her court always managed to
reflectback upon the monarch,but with Charles, individual ele-
ments fell away fromthe center, and the center turned in upon
itself.It is not,Smutsconcludes, thatCharles was moreextravagant
than Elizabeth-although that is the charge oftenmade-but that
he was less visible thanthe queen had been. He was defeatedby a
systemthathad promotedElizabeth's power and extended it from
queen to courtand countryside.
There was thus in the day to day runningof the court farmore
flexibility(or incompetence) than we usually find when we offer
granddesigns of culturalhegemony.As Charles Hope argues in an
essay on the patronage of the arts, it is art historianswho have
created the notionthatpaintersin the Renaissance were bound by
complicatedand exact commissions,usually providedby humanists
residentat court. In case aftercase, Hope shows that such condi-
tions cannot be found as a regular phenomenon. This need not
mean, I would add, thatwe should substitutesome naive view of
individualism to replace cultural determinism;rather,we should
recognize the possibility of movementwithin the dominantposi-
tion, the existence of other traditions(like Kipling's usually sup-
pressed Burgundianelements); we must realize thatthe views we
place on the Renaissance may serve our ends (the humanistictradi-
tion in arts and lettersprobably has more to do with the second
world war than with anythingthathappened in the Renaissance),
and thatto participantsat the time transactionsin the social system
seemed far more opaque than we can imagine. ArthurMarotti's
essay on Donne reminds us of this, for as he reviews Donne's
career,with its failuresto gain supportof patronsand the ultimate
ecclesiastical prefermentof the king, we can see that Donne's
movementswithinthe systemwere based on miscalculationsthat
nonetheless he musthave had some reason to believe would work.
Marottiappears to thinkthatDonne was blinded by ambition(the
word is used frequentlyin his essay), but this seems to me too
simple an explanation (it also ignores his ultimate success).
Stephen Greenblattwould perhaps argue thatthe systemgave the
illusion thata certain amount of individual latitude was possible,
but that this finally was simply an illusion, self-creationtaking
place over a void, Donne's innermostdesires coming nonetheless

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from his culture. The crucial question that this leaves is what one
means by illusion.
The word can take us to a most important contribution to the
patronage volume, Stephen Orgel's essay, "The Royal Theatre and
the Role of King." Orgel's work is important for Greenblatt's model
of cultural theatricality and, as Montrose's frequent acknowl-
edgements make clear, to him as well. Orgel's recent essay, like his
earlier books, stresses the power of illusion. His subject is the traf-
fic between the monarch and the stage, a two-way affair. The first
half of the essay shows how kings depended upon the trappings of
culture, the second how the culture depended upon the king. Yet,
in Orgel's account this is not simply a mirror effect, nor is there
perfect reciprocity between the king and the stage. From the start,
there is complication in his work not to be found in Greenblatt's;
theatricality is more than a metaphor for Orgel. He is concerned
with real stages as well as imagined ones, and he refuses easy
distinctions between the real and the imagined, dismissals of illu-
sion as mere illusion. It is not that Orgel refuses to call an illusion
an illusion, but that he would not on those grounds deny it reality, a
status in the world. The key terms in his account are validation and
its double, legitimization. Orgel shows the processes by which
kings and stages come to have credit in the world; acts of the imagi-
nation are involved, acts that really constitute them. So saying,
Orgel is not guilty of reifying texts; rather, he shows that a culture's
own acts of narrativization constitute a vital part of its reality, con-
tribute to the real workings of power. Whereas Greenblatt would
strip offillusions to find nothing there, and Jameson would uncover
the suppressed story of the suffering proletariat (history is what
hurts), Orgel shows that narrative is one of the things that happens
in history and one of the ways in which history itself takes place.
Acts of the mind are real acts. Kings used the past, used myths and
theater as means of self-creation; they are living embodiments of
words on pages. But words on pages take their life from kings:
mythologies are written as genealogies, from Ovid on, because rul-
ers legitimize their power by creating ancestries that go back to the
gods. Poets then claim power by royal acts of appropriation. The
actual physical theater at the English court offers an image of the
social cosmos, that is, nonetheless, the truth about the organization
of power-or that makes it true by giving it human form. But the
public theater comes ultimately to be replaced by folio volumes. It
becomes legitimate theater when textualized, when the perma-

Goldberg
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nence of printreplaces the evanescent show. Orgel's work under-
mines easy beliefs thatthingsare real and words aren't,or thatthe
translationof events into words, words into events merely reifies
thetextand emptiesrealityofreal contentor mystifiesrealityby nar-
rativizingit.When,in the reignofCharles I, an attackon the theater
is seen as inherentlyan attackon the king,then those strangebed-
fellows, the stage and the monarch, have become inseparable.
Symbolic acts have real forcein the world.
III

AlthoughI do not have space to consider all the recent critical

workthatilluminatesconnectionsbetween literatureand political
life in the English Renaissance-valuable essays by Leonard Ten-
nenhouse, Steven Mullaney, Leah Sinanoglou Marcus and Richard
Helgerson, and Richard McCoy's book on Sidney can only be
mentioned'2-J cannot close withoutremarkingthe persistence of
older modes of criticism,and the sad fact that these representa
historicismvitiatedof the vitalityand intelligence and moral seri-
ousness ofthe workof Douglas Bush or Helen Gardnerand devoid
too of the rigor of a Cleanth Brooks. Exemplary here is Gary
Schmidgall's Shakespeare and the CourtlyAesthetic,' a "milieu
study" (5) of The Tempest which offersno illuminationon either
historical or literarymatters.At the close of Renaissance Self-
Fashioning, Greenblattremarksthatno one would want to repre-
sent Shakespeare as a spokesman forTudor commonplaces; this,
however, is Schmidgall's aim, and he presents The Tempest as a
recasting of Elizabethan homilies and other timeless truths.
Schmidgall claims that Shakespeare's play offersa guide to the
nature of civilization,but to him this means that it recapitulates
commonplace orthodox notions of order and control. Com-
monplaces, Schmidgall avers, are what lurk beneath the
surfaces-so dazzling-of Shakespeare's play. The dazzle Schmid-
gall calls the courtlyaesthetic. This, forhim, is as thneiess as the
truths clothed; courts have always, from time to time, he says,
sought to celebrate themselves in gorgeous works of art, such is
"the congenial, idyllic, and bright superficies of the courtly aes-
thetic" (77). The Jonsonian masque is one such courtly efflores-
cence, and Shakespeare's play is a reflection of that courtly art.
There are so many things the matter with this view that it is
difficultto know where to begin. Let us start with Schmidgall's
explanation forcourtly art: "the Stuarts naturally gravitated toward
the unreal world of art because the realities of courtly finances,

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social change, and burgeoning anti-monarchicalsentimentwould
scarcely supporttheirwishes" (15). Courtlyart-and, perhaps, all
art-for Schmidgall is unreal. Thus, althoughat times he cites such
notable guides to the Stuart court as D. J. Gordon, Roy Strong,
Angus Fletcher,or Stephen Orgel, he has failed to understandthe
real role that art played in the court,its engagement in political
events and its statusas a political event. The dichotomyof artand
realitythat Schmidgall offersis based on furtherdistortionsand
misunderstandings-inhis list of "realities" (always harsh),almost
all depend on interpretationsof the Stuartscene thathave under-
gone extensive revaluationby historiansforthe past twentyyears.
His Jacobeans support "'rose-coloredspectacles" (44) unaware of
the world around them.One would have thoughtno one had taken
such a view fora verylong time; indeed, in an opening attackon the
vapidityof recentShakespeare criticism,Schmidgallyearnsforthe
good old days. His book is resolutelyoutdated.
For Schmidgall,courtlyart is mere prettification, lavish, essen-
tially mindless displays. Shakespeare, Schmidgall says, "'moved
with the mood of the times" (30) toward such courtlinessafteran
initial"drifttowardthe public theatricalarena" (32) (one staggersat
the misunderstandingsabout the kinds of theatersin the time and
the misinformation thatthisview of Shakespeare's career offers-as
if he ever stopped writingforthe Globe, as if he ever wrote fora
plebian audience thathe scorned). He came to it in orderto present
timeless truthsof this kind: "on a political level, Stephano and
Trinculo represent the many-headed monster,all too easily dis-
posed to the monster'smostnotable sin,rebellion" (115): Caliban is
even worse, and Prospero is perfect,an image of temperaterule,
total control. These truths-of good and evil facing each other
across an unfathomablevoid ofunmediated social antagonism-are
the simplicitiesof courtlyart,meant only to flattermonarchsand
confirmthemin theirself-satisfaction. Of course,thereis nothingto
recommend this view of the play or of the culture it supposedly
reflects.In The Tempest, as one would have thoughtany under-
graduate knew, a case can be made for Caliban: he has been
usurped and Prospero's rule is as suspect as Antonio's; ratherthan
being worse than Stephano and Trinculo,Caliban is shown to be a
victim of questionable European habits of colonization;14
moreover,he is allowed the final dignityof choosing to reform.
Shakespeare, in short,is not the snob Schmidgall would have him
be. Nor is he Prospero,whose rages and failuresof controlare not
taken into account, who is not a deity (despite what Schmidgall
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says,the play is evidentlysceptical ofsuch claims,and it is always a
momentof simplicitywhen someone calls anothera god, or imag-
ines the possibility of perfect rule), nor capable of reforming
Antonio and Sebastian (Schmidgall sees perfectjoy at the play's
end). Equally to the point is the factthatthe functionof courtlyart
is not simplisticeither. Schmidgall's account of masques mightre-
flect those trends Jonson sought to stem, trends towards sheer
spectacle; they ignore the fact that Jonsonian masques in both
antimasque and main masque offercomplex reworkingsof the
realities of court rooted in "present occasions." It was not empty
flatteryto tell the king he was a god at court, for fromhim all
bounties flowed; nor did Jonsonfail to portrayhis pleasure-loving
courtbeforeJames'seyes. Schmidgall,however,sees courtlyartin
simplisticdualistic terms,any engagementin real events an unfor-
tunate lapse fromits spectacular vacuity. Fiction is nothing in
Schmidgall's eyes, realitybase, fading,somethingto be scorned
and mourned.
Shakespeare and the CourtlyAesthetic refusesto take historyor
politics seriously, nor does it reveal the slightestability to read
literarytexts.Althoughit pretendsto link literatureand politics, it
reduces bothto emptyformulasabout all worksofliteratureand all
momentsof history.Its view of absolute good facingabsolute evil
leads to the conclusion thatsuch "polaritieswere commonfeatures
of the courtlyaesthetic and offeredwritersfrequentoccasion to
express the view thata healthyand humane courtlylife is society's
greatestgood" (156). In otherplaces, we are told thatsuch figures
as Spenser's Calidore or Shakespeare's Prospero are the verybeau
ideal of courtlywriters.For Schmidgall,political ideals are beauti-
ful constructs,works of art fancifuldreams. Nothing,absolutely
nothing,is real in this aestheticized view, neithertextsnor events.
All fade into a vapid haze.
Schmidgallexhibitsthe reverse side ofthe misguided practiceof
Frances Yates in her final book, in which earlier importantreas-
sessmentsof neoplatonic and hermetic/cabalistic strainsin Renais-
sance culture lead to finding Dr. Dee everywhere.'15 Like Hill,
Yates discoversthe undergroundwherevershe looks, animatingall
literaryfigures;"'the dominantphilosophy of the Elizabethan age
was .. . the occult philosophy" (75), there is a "Dee-Spenser point
ofview," and Dee is reflectedin King Lear and "shadowed through
Prospero" (77). This is the particularisticversion of Schmidgall's
morevacuous lumping.It is also to be foundin the worksofliterary

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historians-I think of Barbara Lewalski's recent Protestant Poetics
and the Seventeenth-Century Religious Lyric 16 -who produce
timeless formulas, which they call history, and fit poems into them
so that they all emerge as examples of a manageable and un-
threatening pattern. The debate between Brooks and Bush can dis-
solve in this view, as it does when Annabel M. Patterson finds in
Marvell and the Civic Crown17 that the "Horatian Ode" "mediates
not between two political camps but between two interdependent
theories (which rhetoric has always recognized as pathos and ethos)
of how language works upon the human mind" (68). Such impulses
of containment are all versions of the old historicism infused, how-
ever, by the desire of formalism to remove poems from the world.
In these historical accounts, history becomes formalism, and texts
are safely relegated to a courtly aesthetic, or to Patterson's figure of
"Marvell the Writer" in whom "irony and detachment about him-
self remained his characteristic mode" (10), or to Lewalski's "com-
mon aesthetics" (12) and "widely accepted schema" (13) of a bibli-
cal poetics and a protestant paradigm for salvation, or even to the
"occult philosophy of the Elizabethan Age." Each of these con-
structs has the vaguest of relations to history, literary history, or
particular texts, new pigeonholes for old truths, the beautiful, the
good and the true. In these old truths, old style history and new
criticism meet, and the modernist text has become history. For
critics with these beliefs, history is timeless, and literary texts re-
peat eternal truths. In such a view, neither history nor texts are real.

Temple University
FOOTNOTES
'Cleanth Brooks, "Marvell's 'Horatian Ode,"' English Institute Essays 1946
(N.Y.: Columbia University Press, 1947), pp. 127-58; Douglas Bush, "Marvell's 'Ho-
ratian Ode,"' Sewanee Review 60 (1952):363-76; Brooks, "A Note on the Limits of
'History' and the Limits of 'Criticism,"' Sewanee Review 61 (1953):129-35.
2 For a synopsis of the career see Is There a Text in this Class? (Cambridge, Mass.:
Harvard University Press, 1980).
3 Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic
Act (Ithaca:Cornell University Press, 1981); for Machery, see A Theory of Literary
Production, tr. Geoffrey Wall (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978).
4"Religion and Ideology," in 1642: Literature and Power in the Seventeenth
Century, Proceedings of the Essex Conference on the Sociology of Literature, July
1980, ed. Frances Barker et al. (University of Essex, 1981). pp. 315-36.
5 Christopher Hill, Milton and the English Revolution (Penguin, 1979 [1977]).
6 J. H. Hexter, "The Historical Method of Christopher Hill," On Historians: A
scrutiny of some modern practioners (London: Collins, 1979), pp. 227-51.
7 Louis Adrian Montrose, "Celebration and Insinuation: Sir Philip Sidney and the

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 Motives of Elizabethan Courtship," Renaissance Drama, n.s.8 (1977):3-35; " 'The
perfecte paterne of a Poete': The Poetics of Courtship in The Shepherdes Calender,"
Texas Studies in Literature and Language 21 (1979):34-67; "Gifts and Reasons: The
Contexts of Peele's Araygnment of Paris," ELH 47 (1980):433-61; "'Eliza, Queene
of shepheardes,' and the Pastoral of Power," English Literary Renaissance
10 (1980):153-82; "Interpreting Spenser's February Eclogue: Some Contexts and
Implications," Spenser Studies 2 (1981):67-74; "Of Gentlemen and Shepherds: The
Social Matrix of Elizabethan Pastoral Form," circulated forthe 1981 MLA session on
"The Politics of Renaissance Literature."
8 "The Purpose of Playing: Reflections on a Shakespearean Anthropology," Helios
n.s. 7 (1980):51-74; for furtherdevelopments of the argument, cf. "'The Place of a
Brother' in As You Like It: Social Process and Comic Form," Shakespeare Quarterly
32 (1981):28-54.
9 Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980); "Invisible Bullets: Renaissance Au-
thority and Its Subversion," Glyph 8: Johns Hopkins Textual Studies (Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981), pp. 40-61.
10 Conrad Russell, Parliaments and English Politics 1621-1629 (Oxford: At the
Clarendon Press, 1979); Kevin Sharpe, ed. Faction and Parliament: Essays on Early
Stuart History (Oxford: At the Clarendon Press, 1978); Sir Robert Cotton 1586-1631;
History and Politics in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1979).
11 Guy Fitch Lytle and Stephen Orgel, ed. Patronage in the Renaissance (Prince-
ton: Princeton University Press, 1981): see esp., Gordon Kipling, "Henry VII and
the Origins of Tudor Patronage," pp. 117-64; Malcolm Smuts, "The Political Failure
of Stuart Cultural Patronage," pp. 165-87; Arthur F. Marotti, "John Donne and the
Rewards of Patronage," pp. 207-34; Stephen Orgel, "The Royal Theatre and the Role
of King," pp. 261-73; Charles Hope, "Artists, Patrons, and Advisers in the Italian
Renaissance," pp. 293-343. To this should be added the persuasive rereading offered
by Roger Lockyer's Buckingham (London: Longmans, 1981).
12 Leonard Tennenhouse, "Sir Walter Ralegh and the Literature of Clientage,"
Patronage in the Renaissance, pp. 235-58; Leah Sinanoglou Marcus, "'Present Oc-
casions' and the Shaping of Ben Jonson's Masques," ELH 45 (1978):201-25; "The
Occasion of Ben Jonson's Pleasure Reconciled to Virtue," SEL 19 (1979):271-93;
"Masquing Occasions and Masque Structures,"' Research Opportunities in Renais-
sance Drama 24 (1981):7-16; Steven Mullaney, "Lying Like Truth: Riddle, Repre-
sentation and Treason in Renaissance England," ELH 47 (1980):32-47; Richard Hel-
gerson, "<The Elizabethan Laureate: Self-Presentation and the Literary System," ELH
46 (1978):193-220; "The New Poet Presents Himself: Spenser and the Idea of a
Literary Career," PMLA 93 (1978):893-911; Richard McCoy, Sir Philip Sidney: Re-
bellion in Arcadia (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1979).
13 Gary Schmidgall, Shakespeare and the Courtly Aesthetic (Berkeley and Los
Angeles: University of California Press, 1981).
14 For arguments along these lines, see Peter Hulme, "Hurricane in the Caribees:

The Constitution of the Discourse of English Colonialism," 1642: Literature and

Power, pp. 55-83; Stephen Greenblatt, "Learning to Curse: Aspects of Linguistic
Colonialism in the Sixteenth Century," First Images of America, ed. Fredi Chiap-
pelli (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1976), pp. 561-80.
15 Frances A. Yates, The Occult Philosophy in the Elizabethan Age (London:
Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1979).
16 Barbara Kiefer Lewalski, Protestant Poetics and the Seventeenth-Century Reli-

gious Lyric (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979).

17 Annabel M. Patterson, Marvell and the Civic Crown (Princeton: Princeton Uni-

versity Press, 1978).

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