Greenblatt on his audience and work: “I've been at this for 40 years. And, as an academic, I've been content with relatively small audiences, with the thought that the audience I long for will find its way eventually to what I have written, provided that what I have written is good enough” ("Meet the Writers").
Greenblatt has written extensively on Shakespeare, the Renaissance, culture and new historicism (which he often refers to as "cultural poetics"). Much of his work has been “part of a collective project,” such as his work as co-editor of the Berkeley-based literary-cultural journal
Representations (which he co-founded in 1983), as editor of publications such as the
Norton Anthology of English Literature and as co-author of books such as
Practicing New Historicism (2000), which he wrote with Catherine Gallagher (Greenblatt,
Greenblatt Reader 1). Greenblatt has also written on such subjects as travelling in Laos and China, story-telling and miracles.
Greenblatt's collaboration with Charles L. Mee,
Cardenio, premiered on May 8, 2008 at the American Repertory Theater in Cambridge, MA. While the critical response to
Cardenio was mixed, audiences responded quite positively. Some audience members even went so far to send the theatre emails to about the unfair treatment of the piece in the press. The American Repertory Theatre has posted audience responses on the organization's blog.
New historicism
Greenblatt is quoted as saying, “My deep, ongoing interest is in the relation between literature and history, the process through which certain remarkable works of art are at once embedded in a highly specific life-world and seem to pull free of that life-world. I am constantly struck by the strangeness of reading works that seem addressed, personally and intimately, to me, and yet were written by people who crumbled to dust long ago" (“Greenblatt Named”).
Greenblatt first used the term “new historicism” in his 1982 introduction to
The Power of Forms in the English Renaissance wherein he uses Queen Elizabeth's “bitter reaction to the revival of Shakespeare’s
Richard II on the eve of the Essex rebellion" to illustrate the “mutual permeability of the literary and the historical” (Greenblatt,
Greenblatt Reader 1-2). New historicism is regarded by many to have had an impact on "every traditional period of English literary history” (Cadzow). Some critics have charged that it is “antithetical to literary and aesthetic value, that it reduces the historical to the literary or the literary to the historical, that it denies human agency and creativity, that it is somehow out to subvert the politics of cultural and critical theory [and] that it is anti-theoretical” (Greenblatt,
Greenblatt Reader 1). Others praise new historicism as “a collection of practices” employed by critics to gain a more comprehensive understanding of literature by considering it in historical context while treating history itself as “historically contingent on the present in which [it is] constructed” (Greenblatt,
Greenblatt Reader 3).
In an interview with Matthew Norris, he says "I didn’t imagine [New Historicism] as a program, or a long-range ten-year plan. Or a twenty-year plan. It was a way of trying to do a new kind of work. Of course, I hoped it would have an impact, but I wasn’t trying to start a school or imagining myself as founding a new movement. I imagined it as expressing this powerful sense that we need to try to do things differently." Paradigm Interview
Greenblatt's works on new historicism and “cultural poetics” include
Practicing New Historicism (2000) (written with Catherine Gallagher), in which Greenblatt discusses how “the anecdote appears as the ‘touch of the real’” and "Towards a Poetics of Culture" (1987), in which Greenblatt asserts that the question of “how art and society are interrelated,” as posed by Jean-François Lyotard and Fredric Jameson, “cannot be answered by appealing to a single theoretical stance” (Cadzow).
Renaissance Self-Fashioning and the Introduction to the
Norton Shakespeare are regarded as good examples of Greenblatt's application of new historicist practices (Greenblatt,
Greenblatt Reader 3).
Shakespeare and Renaissance studies
"I believe that nothing comes of nothing, even in Shakespeare. I wanted to know where he got the matter he was working with and what he did with that matter" (Greenblatt,
Hamlet in Purgatory 4).
Greenblatt states in "
King Lear and Harsnett's 'Double-Fiction'" that "Shakespeare's self-consciousness is in significant ways bound up with the institutions and the symbology of power it anatomizes" (Richter 1295). His work on Shakespeare has addressed such topics as ghosts, purgatory, anxiety, exorcists and revenge. He is general editor of the
Norton Shakespeare.
Greenblatt's new historicism opposes the ways in which new criticism “[consigns] texts to an autonomous aesthetic realm that [dissociates] Renaissance writing from other forms of cultural production” and the historicist notion that Renaissance texts “[mirror] a coherent world-view that was held by a whole population,” asserting instead “that critics who [wish] to understand sixteenth- and seventeenth-century writing must delineate the ways the texts they [study] were linked to the network of institutions, practices, and beliefs that constituted Renaissance culture in its entirety” (Cadzow). Greenblatt’s work in Renaissance studies includes
Renaissance Self-Fashioning (1980), which “had a transformative impact on Renaissance studies” (Greenblatt,
Greenblatt Reader 3).
Shakespearean Negotiations
- "This book argues that works of art, however intensely marked by the creative intelligence and private obsessions of individuals, are the products of collective negotiation and exchange" (Greenblatt, Shakespearean Negotiations, p vii). This book investigates how complex events influenced the works of Shakespeare and how he chronicled them. It takes the form of five essays discussing theory or events of the time and relating them to the plays of Shakespeare. The essays are entitled:
- The Circulation of Social Energy
- Invisible Bullets
- Fiction and Friction
- Shakespeare and the Exorcists
- Martial Law and the Land of Cockaigne
Norton Anthology of English Literature
Greenblatt joined M. H. Abrams as general editor of the
Norton Anthology of English Literature published by W.W. Norton during the 1990s. He is also the co-editor of the anthology's section on Renaissance literature (Gewertz) and the general editor of the
Norton Shakespeare, “currently his most influential piece of public pedagogy” (Greenblatt,
Greenblatt Reader 3).