Sovereign Historicism: The Case of Shakespeare's Anti-Politics

Abstract

In recent months I have been participating in a graduate course called ‘‘Renaissance Literature and Politics after the New Historicism.’’ Our primary object of inquiry has been the scholarship itself, specifically works of literaryhistorical criticism engaged with not only the literature and political culture of late Elizabethan and early Stuart England, but often equally preoccupied with the history of critical or methodological approaches to those fields. Beginning with Nietzsche’s theories of history and Frank Lentricchia’s extensive overview of twentieth century criticism up to poststructuralism in After the New Criticism, we moved on to programmatic and foundational New Historicist documents written by Stephen Greenblatt and Louis Adrian Montrose before reaching the portion of the syllabus properly ‘‘after’’ the New Historicism. Perhaps unintuitively, it is the preposition that has proved to be the operative term in the course title. What does it mean, we were asked to consider, to go ‘‘after’’ a movement—if we can call it that—so influential in literary studies, and particularly the early modern discipline? Of course the answer to that question is determined in part by the extent to which we assume that ‘‘after’’ implies the closure of the thing it follows. A conception of post-New Historicism which supposes the methodology to be closed would need to concern itself with imagining, or more likely enacting, an approach that would replace it wholesale. But that is the least flexible kind of ‘‘afterness.’’