!

Jonathan Dollimore

Introduction Shakespeare, cultural

materialism and the new historicism

One of the most important achievements of theory'in English

studies has been the making possible a truly interdisciplinary
approach to -some might say exit from-the subject. Actually, such
an objective had been around for a long time, though largely
unrealised outside of individual and often outstanding studies. With
the various structuralisms, Marxism, psychoanalysis, semiotics and
structuralism, there occurred a significant dismantling of
barriers (barriers of exclusion as well as of containment) and many
critics discovered whar they had wanted to know for some time
how,for example,history and philosophy could be retrieved from
their "background' status and become part of both the content and
the perspective of eriticism. At the same time this was possible only
because quite new conceptions of philosophy and history were
involved. In utilising theory in the field of literarystudies we find that
it has madepossible far more than has actually introduced. By this
it

criterion alone it proves itselfa major intellectual contribution. But

not everyone approves, as the anti-theoretical invective of recent
years has shown. We
don't propose to dwell on this reaction, nor on
the much vaunted 'crisis'in English studies, except to remark that if
there is a crisis it has more to do with this reaction than with theory
itself.

Butof course 'theory'is aserroneous a title as was 'structuralism',

both giving a misleading impression of unity where there is in fact
enormous diversity. We are concerned here with one development
of recent years, cultural materialism; it preceded the advent of theory
but also derived a considerable impetus from it.

The term 'cultural materialism' is borrowed from its recent use by

Raymond williams; its practice grows from an eclectic body of work
in Britain in the post-war period which can be broadly characterised
as cultural That work includes the considerable Output of
analysis.
Williams himself, and, more generally, the convergence of history,

sociology and English in cultural studies, someof the majordevelop

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 Shakespeare, cultural materialism and the new historicism

ments in feminism, as well as continental Marxist-structuralist and

post-structuralist theory, especially that of Althusser, Macherey,
Gramsci and Foucault.!
The development of cultural materialism in relation to Renais
sance literature has been fairly recent although there is already a
diverse and developing work relating literary texts to, for
field of
example, the following: enclosures and the oppression of the rural
poor; State power and resistance to it; reassessnents of what
actually were the dominant ideologies of the period and the radical
countertendencies to these; witcheraft; the challenge and contain
ment of the carnivalesque; a feminist recovery of the actual condi
tions of women and the altered understanding of their literary
representations which this generates; conflict between class frac
tions within the State and,correspondingly, theimportance of a non
monolithic conception of power.
Much of this work is explicitly concerned with the operations of
power. But it is in the United States that most attention has been
given to the representations of power in Renaissance literature. This
work is part of an important perspective which has come to be called
the new historicism," a perspective concerned generally with the
interaction in this period between State power and cultural forms
and, more specifically,with those genre and practices where State
-
and culture most visibly merge for example, pastoral, the masque
°
and the institution of patronage. An analysis by the new histori
cism of power in early modern England as itself deeply theatrical -
and therefore of the theatre as aprime location forthe representation
and legitimation of power -has led to some remarkable studies of
the Renaissance theatre as well as of individual plays, Shakespeare's
included,
According to MarX, men and women make their own history but
not in conditions of their own choosing.'" Perhaps the most signifi
cant divergence within cultural analysis is that between those
who
concentrate on culture as this making of history, and those who
and in
concentrate on the unchosen conditions which constrain
form that process of making. The former allows much to human
agency, and tends to privilege human experience; the latter concen
trates on the formative power of social and ideological structures
which are both prior to experience and in somesense determining of
it, and so up the whole question of autonomy.'
s
la deroence is acknowledged in Stephen Greenblatt's
A similar
new
Renaissance Self-Fashioning, an outstanding instance of the
historicism. In an epilogue Greenblatt tells how he began with an
intention toexplore 'the role of human autonomy in the construction

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 Jonathan Dollimore

) of identity'. But as the work progressed the emphasis fell

more on cultural institutions- family, religion and the State and

'the human subject itself began to seem remarkably unfree, the
more and
-
ideological product of the relations of power in a particular society
(p.256).
In the rest of this introduction I explore some of the other
important and shared concerns of cultural materialismn and the new
historicism as they relate to Renaissance studies generally and part
one of this book in particular.

History versus the humarn condition

Materialist criticism refuses to privilege literature' in the way that

literary criticism has done hitherto; as Raymond Williams argued in
an important essay, 'wecannot separate literatureand artfrom other
kinds of social practice, in such a way as to make them subject to
quite special and distinct laws'. This approach necessitatesa radical
contextualising of literature which climinates the old divisions be
tween literature and its 'background', text and context. The arts
'may have quite specific features as practices, but they cannot be
separated from the general social process' (Williams, Problems,
p.44). This attention to social process has far-reaching conse
To criticism -
thar nreoAeads
quences. us beyond idealist literary
with supposedly universal truths which find their
counterpart in 'man's' essential nature; the criticism in which his
tory, if acknowledged at all, is seen as inessential or a constraint
transcended in the affirmation of a transhistoricalhuman condition.
It would be wrong to represent idealist criticismas still confidently

dominant in Shakespeare studies;in fact it is a vision which has been

failingfor sometime, and certainly before the advent of theory. In
recent decades its advocates have tended to gesture towards this

vision rather than confidently affirm it; have hestitated over its
apparent absence,often then to become preoccupied with the tragic
sense of life as one which recuperated the vision as absence, which
celebrated not man's transcendent consciousness but his will to
endure and to know why transcendence was itself an illusion. In
short, an existentialist-tragic sense of life was in tension with a more
explicitly spiritualone,the former trying to break with the latter but

being unable to because it had nowhere to go;a diminished meta

physic, aetiolation became the condition of its survival.
Materialistcriticismalso refuseswhat Stephen Greenblatt calls the
monological approach of historical scholarship of the past, one
'concerned with discovering a single political vision, usually identi

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 Shakespeare, cultural materialism and the new historicism

cal to that said to be held by the entire literate class or indeed the
entire population' (The Power of Forms,p.s). E. M. W. Tillyard's
very influential The Elizabethan World Picture, first published in
1943 and being reprinted, is perhaps the most notorious in
still

stance. Tillyard was concerned to expound an idea of cosmic order

'so taken for granted, so much part of the collective mind of the
people, that it is hardly mentioned except in explicitly didactic
pa
objection to this is not that Tillyard was mistaken in identi
fying a metaphysic of order in the period, nor even that it had
ceased to exist by the turn of the century (two criticisms subse
quently directed at him). The error, from a materialist perspective,
is falsely to unify history and social process in the name of 'the
collective mind of the people. And such a perspective would con
struethe didactic passages' referred to by Tillyard in quite different
terms: didacticism was not the occasional surfacing, the o occasional
articulation, of the collective mind but a strategy of ideological
struggle. In other words, the didactic stress onorder was in part an
anxious reaction to emergent and (in)-subordinate social forces
which were perceived as threatening. Tillyard's world picture, to
the extent that it did still exist, was not shared by all; it was an
ideological legitimation of aa existing social order, one rendered
the more necessary by the apparentt instability, actual and imagined,
of that order. If this sounds too extreme then we need only recall
Bacon's remark to some circuit judges in r617: There will be a
perpetual defection, except you keep men in by preaching, as well
as law doth by punishing."$ Sermons were not simply the occasion
for the collective mind to celebrate its most cherished beliefsbut an
attempt to tell sectors of an unruly populace what to think in
order to keep them in their place.
Historians who have examined the effects of social change and
reactions to it present a picture quite opposite to Tillyard's:

In the late sixteenth

hysterical demand
and early
for order at
most of the props of the medieval world picture. The unified dogma

.
seventeenth centuries...this almost
all costs was caused by a collapse of

and organisation of the Catholic Church found itself challengedby a

number of rival creeds and institutional structures
upon the intellectual authority of the Ancients was
the reliance
threatened by
new scientific discoveries. Moreover in England there occurred a
phase of unprecedented social and geographical mobility which
at

the higher levels transformed the composition and size of the gentry
and professional classes, and at the lower levels tore hundreds of
thousands of individuals loose from their traditional kinship and
neighbourhood backgrounds."4

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 Jonathan Dollimore

In making sense of a period in such rapid transition, and of the

contradictory interpretations of that transition from within the
period itself, we might have recourse to Raymond Williams's very
important distinction between residual, dominant, and emergent
aspects of culture (Marxism and Literatiure, pp. I1-7). Tillyard's
world picture can then be seen as in some respects a dominant
ideology, in others a residualone, with one or both of these perhaps
being confronted and displaced by new, emergent cultural forms.
Nor is this threefold distinctionexhaustive of cultural diversity:
there will also be levels of culture appropriately described as sub
ordinate, repressed and marginal. Non-dominant elements interact
with the dominant forms, sometimes coexisting with, or being
absorbed oreven destroyed by them, but also challenging,modifying
oreven displacing them. Culture is not by any stretch of the imagina
-
tion not even the literary imagination -a
Tillyard was not entirelyunaware of this, though it ispresumably
with unwitting irony that he writes of 'the educated nucleus that
dictated the current beliefs of the Elizabethan Age' and of cosmic
order as 'oneof thegenuine ruling ideas of the age' (pp.22,7; italics
added). Because, forTillyard,the process of ideologicallegitimation
was itself moreor less legitimate,it isa process which in his book
and much more so than his claims about the Elizabethan world
picture itself -
is accepted to the point of being barely recognised.

Further, because Tillyardrevered theperiod ('the"real"Elizabethan

age- the quarter century from r8o-16os- was afterall the great
age', p. 3o) what he discerned as its representative literature is

presented asthe legitimateobject of study. And those literary forms

wherein can be glimpsed the transgression of the world picture
where, that is, we
-
we glimpse subordinate cultures resisting or contest
ing the dominant- theseare dismissed asunworthy of study because
unrepresentative: [Hooker] represents far more truly the back
ground of Elizabethan literature than do the coney-catching pam
phlets or the novel of low-life' p. z2). But whose literature,
whose background? In different respectsall the essaysin PartIof this
book are concerned with the marginalised and subordinate of Eliza
bethan and Jacobean culture. Their exploitation is in part secured
ideologicallyand this deserves some preliminary consideration.
There are several ways of deploying the concept of ideology, and
these correspond to its complex history."7One which in particular
concerns materialist criticism traces the cultural connections be
tween signification and legitimation:the way that beliefs, practices
and institutions legitimatethe dominant socialorder orstatus quo -
the existing relationsof domination and subordination. Such legiti

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 Shakespeare, cultural materialism and the new historicism

mation is found (for example) in the representation of sectional

interests as universal ones. Those who rule may in fact be serving

their own interests and those of their class, but they, together with
the institutions and practices through which they exercise and
maintain power, are understood as working in the interestsof the
community asa whole. Secondly, through legitimation the existing
social order-that is, existingsocial relations -are 'naturalised',thus
appearing to have the unalterable character of natural law. History
also tends to be invested with a law of development (teleology)which
acts as the counterpart of natural law, a development leading
'inevitably' to the present order and thereby doubly ratifying it.
Legitimation further works to efface the fact of social contradiction,
dissent and struggle. Where thesethings present themselves unavoid
ably theyare often demonised asattemptstosubvertthe sociallo order.
Therefore, if the very conflicts which the existing order generates
from within itself are construed as attempts to subvert it from
without (by the 'alien"), that order strengthens itself by simultane
ously repressing dissenting elements and eliciting consent for this
action: the protection of society from subversion. (See especially
Chapters3 and 4 below).
This combined emphasis on universal interests,society as a 'reflec
tion' of the 'natural order of things, history as a lawful' develop
ment leading up to and justifying the present, the demonising of
dissent and otherness, was central to the age of Shakespeare.

The politics of Renaissance theatre

Iwant to consider next why the socio-political perspective of
materialist criticism is for recovering the
especially appropriate
politicaldimension of Renaissance drama. This entails a considera
tion of the theatre as an institutionand, more generally, literatureas
a practice.
Analysts of literature in the Renaissance were much concerned
with its effect. The almost exclusive pecoccupation in traditional
English studies with the intrinsic meaning of texts leads us to miss,
ignore or underestimate the importance of this fact. Effect was
considered not at the level of the individual reader in abstraction, but
of actual readers- and, of course,
two groups especially onulers and preachers
Ito determine, regulate,
Were only
and perhaps exploit these effects.
As regards the theatre there were two opposed views of its
effectiveness. The one view stressed its capacity to instruct the
obedient. Thus
populace-often, and quite explicitly, to keep them

[7]
 Jonathan Dollimore

Heywood, for Actors, claimed that plays were

in an Apology
to their king'
written and performed to teach 'subjects obedience
by showing them 'the untimely end of such as have moved
tumults, commotions and insurrections" The other view claimed
virtually the opposite, stressing the theatre's power too demystify
authority and even to subvert it; in 1605 Samuel Calvert had
complained that plays were representing 'the present Time, not
sparing either King, State or Religion, in so great Absurdity, and
In an
with such Liberty, that any would be afraid to hear themn',
often cited passage from Basilikon Doron James I likened the king
tO 'one set whose smallest actions and gestures, all
on a
the people gazingly behold'; any 'dissolute behaviour on
his part breeds contempt in his subjects and contempt is the
mother of rebellion and disorder.o The theatre could encourage
such contempt as one contemporary put it in a descripion
by,
of Shakespeare's Henry VIll, making 'greatness very familiar,
if not ridiculous'. A year after Basilikon Doron appeared,
a French ambassador recorded in a despatch home that James
was being held in just the contempt that he feared and, moreover,
that the theatre was encouraging it.
A famous attempt to use the theatre to subvert authority was of
course the staging of a play called Richard II (probably
Shakespeare's) just before the Essex rising in 1601; Queen
Elizabeth afterwards acknowledged
anxiously the implied
identification between her and Richard IIl, complaining also that
"this tragedy was played 4o times in open streetsand houses.* As

Stephen Greenblatt points out, what was really worrying for the
Queen was both the repeatabilityof the representation and hence -
the multiplying numbers of people witnessing it- and the locations
of these repetitions: 'open streets and houses'. In such places the
'conventional containment' of the playhouses is blurred and

reinquished altogether with the that the 'safe'

pernaps
distinction illusion andrealehce blurs: are the
"houses" to which Elizabeth refers public theatres or private
dwellings where her enemies plot her overthrow? Can "tragedy" be
a strictly literary term when the Queen's own life is endangered by
the play?" (ThePower of Forms, p.4)
Jane P. Tompkins has argued that the Renaissance inherited
from the classical period a virtually complete disregard of
literature's meaning and a correspondingly almost exclusive
emphasis on its effect:what mattered, ultimately, was action
not signification, behaviour not discourse. In sense yes: a
Tompkins's emphasis on effect is both correct and important,

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 Shakespeare, cultural materialism and the new historicism

especially when she goes on to show that this pragmatic view of

literaturemade its socio-politicaldimension obviously significantat
the time.4 But Tompkins draws a distinction between effect and
significationwhich is too extreme, even for this period: effectivity is
both decided and assessed in the practiceof signification.Ifwe ignore
this then we are likely to ignore also the fact that socio-political
effectsof literatureare in part achieved in and through the practiceof
appropriation. Thus what made Elizabeth I so anxious was not so
much a retrospectively and clearlyascertained effect of the staging of
Richard II (the uprising was, after all, abortive and Essex was
executed) but the fact of the play having been appropriated- been
given significance for a particular cause and in certain 'open'
contexts. This period's pragmatic conception of literature meant
that such appropriations were not a perversion of true literary
reception, they were its reception.
This applies especially to tragedy, thatgenre traditionallythought
to be most capable of transcending the historical moment of incep
tion and of representing universal truths. Contemporary formula
tions of the tragic certainly made reference to universals but they
were also resolutely political, especially those which defined it as a
representation of tyranny. Such accounts, and of course the plays
themselves, were appropriated as both defences of and challenges to
authority.
Thomas Elyot, in The Governor, asserted that, in reading
tragedies, a man shall be led to 'execrate and abhor the intollerable
life of tyrants', and for Sidney tragedy made "Kings fear to be

tyrants'. Puttenham in The Art of English Poesy had said that

tragedy revealed tyranny to all the world', while thedownfall of the
both historical vicissitude
tyrant disclosed (perhaps incongruously)
('the mutability of fortune') and God's providential order (his "just
punishment'), In contrast Fulke Greville explicitly disavowed that
his own tragedies exxemplified God's law in the form of providential

Rather, they were concerned totrace out thehigh ways

retribution.
of ambitious governors'. He further stressed that the true stage' for
his plays was not the theatre but the reader's own life and times
"eventhe state he lives in'. This led Greville actually to destroy one of

his tragedies for fear of incrimination -it could, he said, have been
and
construed as 'personating ... vices in the present Governors,
government'. (It seems he had in mind the events of the Essex

rebellion.)s Raleigh, in his History of the World, warns of the

danger of writing in general when the subject is contemporary
history: if the writer follows it too closely 'it may happily strike out
the idea
his teeth'.16 Those likeGreville and Raleigh knew then that

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 Jonathan Dollimore

of literature passively reflecting history was erroneous; literature

was a practice which intervened in contemporary history in the very
responsible for the
act of representing it. This recognition is partly
form of contextualising attempted by the contributors to Part I of
this book. The essays here aim to give not so much new readings of
Shakespeare's texts as a historical relocation of them, one which
radically alters the meanings traditionally ascribed to them by
criticism preoccupied with their textual integrity. Thus Leonard
Tennenhouse proposes that the opposition between a politicaland a
a modern invention and that
literary use of language is
Shakespeare's plays, like Renaissance literature' generally, dis
played its politics as it idealized or demystified specific forms of
power'and that'such a display rather than the work's transcendence
or referentialitywas what made it aesthetically successful' (p. o).
Especially illuminating is the way Tennenhouse relates the textual
representations of authority to each other and to the institutionsand
actual power struggles of Elizabethan and Jacobean England with
out thereby assuming a simple correspondence of the textto the pre
existent real. The recovery of history becomes, inescapably, a
theoretical' procedure too.

Consolidation, subversion, containment

Three aspects ot historcal and cuitural process hgure prominentiy in

tcriticism: consolidation, subversion and
The first refers,typically, to the ideological means whereby a domi
nant order seeks to perpetuate itself; the second to the subversion of
that order, the third to the containment of ostensibly subversive
pressures.
The metaphysic of order in the Elizabethan period has already been
briefly considered. Those of Tillyard's persuasion saw it as consoli
dating, that is socially cohesive in the positive sense of transcending
sectional interests and articulating a genuinely shared culture and
cosmology, characterised by harmony, stability and unity. In con
trast, materialist criticism is likely to consider the ideological dimen
sion of consolidation- the way,forexample, that this world picture
reinforces particular class and gender interests by presenting the
social order as natural and God-given (and therefore im
mutable). Interestingly, ideas approximating to these contrasting
positions circulated in the period. Those Elizabethan sermonswhich
sought to explain social hierarchy as a manifestation of Divine Law,
and which drew analogies between hierarchy in the different levels of
cOsmos, nature and society, would beanexampleof the first, and the

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 Shakespeare, cultural materialism and the new historicism

assertion in Ben Jonson's Sejanus that'tis place,/Not blood, discerns

the noble, and the base27 of the second.
Important differences exist within materialist criticism of Renais
sance literature between those who emphasise the process of consolida
tion and those who discover resistances to it. Here the disagreement
tends to be at distinct but overlapping levels: actual historical
process and its discursive representation in literature. So, for ex
ample, within feminist criticism of the period, there are those who
insist on its increasing patriarchal oppressiveness, and, moreover,
insistthat the limiting structuresof patriarchy are also Shakespeare's.
Kathleen McLuskie summarises this perspective as follows: 'Shake
speare... gave voice to the social views of his age. His thoughts on
women were necessarily bounded by theparameters of hagiography
and misogyny'.# Conversely, other feminist critics want to allow
that there were those in the period, including Shakespeare, who
could and did think beyond these parameters, and participated in
significant resistance to such constructions of women." But this
se at least in its materialist version, is united with
secoingathird
the first in position, namely that which sees
Shake
speare's women as exemplifying the transhistorical (universal)
qualities of 'woman',with Shakespeare's ability to represent these
being another aspect of a genius who transcends not only his time but
also his sex.McLuskie's essay in this book insists onthe constraints
of the literarytradition, the ideological and material conditions from
which the plays emerge. A
materialist feminism, rather than simply
co-opting or writing off Shakespeare, follows the unstable
gender and patriarchy back to
the contdi
tions of, for example,
of the
tions of their historical moment. Only thus can the authority
patriarchal bard be understood and eticctively challenged.
In considering in that same historicalmoment certain representa
tions of authority, along with those which ostensibly subvert it, we
discover not a straightforward opposition but a process much more
complex. Subversiveness may for example be only, the
it bur nadint
it may
dominant order not only containing
s

seem, actually producing it for its own ends. An important article

arg
rguing this that by Stephen Greenblatt, who takes as his
is

example theposielian proposition that religion was a kind of

ruled in
false consciousness perpetuated by the rulers to keep the
their place. If authority does indeed depend on such mystifications
demystification
for its successful operation, then the Machiavellian
Yet, in Thomas
of such a process is also a subversion of authority.
to be
Harriot's account of the first Virginia colony the reverse seems
the case. One conclusion in a sophisticated argument extended to

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 Jonathan Dollimore

Shakespeare's history plays is that the power Harriot both serves

and embodies not only produces its own subversion
but is actively
built it: in the Virginia colony, the radical undermining of
Christian order is not the negative limit but the positivecondition for
the establishment of that order (below, p. 24).
To some extent the paradox disappears when we speak not ofa
monolithicpower structure producing itseffects but of one made up
of different,often competing elements, and these not merely produc
ing culture but producing it through appropriations. The importance
of this concpt
naking or transfor
of
o s
that it indicates
a process
If we talk only of power producing the
of

discourse of subversion we not only hypostatise power but also

efface the culturaldifferences--and context-which the very process
ofcontainment presupposes. Resistance to that process may be there
from theoutset or itself produced by it. Further, although subversion
may indeed be appropriated by authority for its own purposes, once
installed it can be used against authority as well as used by it. Thus
the demonised elements in Elizabethan culrure for example,
masterless men - are, quite precisely,identified as such in order to
ratify the exercise of power, but once identified they are also there as

a force to be self-identified. But this didn't make them a power in

their own right; on the contrary, for masterless men to constitute a
threat to order it was usually - though not always -
necessary that
they first be mobilised or exploited by a counter-faction within the
dominant.
But appropriation could also work the other way: subordinate,
marginal or dissident elements could appropriate dominant dis

courses and likewise transform them in the process. I have already

suggested what Essex may have been trying to do with Richard i:
another recently rediscovered instance is recounted in Carlo Ginz
burg's The Cheese and the Worms,1e This book relates how
Menocchio, an Italianmiller and isolatedheretic,interpreted seem
ingly very orthodox texts in a highly challenging way -
construing
from them, for example, a quite radical materialist view of the
universe. Ginzburg emphasises the 'one sided and arbitrary' nature
of Menocchio's reading, and sees its source as being in a peasant

culture, oral, widespread and at once sceptical, materialist and

rationalist. It is this culture and not at all the intrinsic nature of the
texts which leads Menocchio to appropriate them in a way subver

sive enough to incur torture and eventually death by burning for

heresy.
The subversion-containment debate is important for other reasons.
It isin part a conceptual or theoreticalquestion: what, forexample,

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 Shakespeare, cultural materialism and the new historicism

are the criteria for distinguishing between, say, that which subverts
and thatwhich effects change? Stephen Greenblatt provides a useful
working definition here: radical subversiveness is defined as not
merely the attempt to seize existing authority, but as a challenge to
the principles upon which authority is based," But we are still
faced with the need for interpretation simply in making this very
distinction: theoretical of necessity involves histori
clarification

cal enquiry and vice versa. And the kind of enquiry at issue is in
extricably bound up with the question of perspective: which one,
and whose? How can we explain why what is
else for example
experienced as subversive at the time may retrospectively be con
strued as a crucial step towards progress? More eextremely still, how
is it that the same subversive act may be later interpreted as having

contributed to either revolutionary change or anarchic disintegra

tion?
Nothing can be intrinsically or essentially subversive in the sense
that prior tothe event subversiveness can be more than potential; in
other words it cannot be guaranteed a priori, independent of articu
lation,context and reception. Likewisethemere thinking ofa radical
idea is not what makes it subversive: typically it is the context of its
articulation: to whom,how many and in what circumstances; one
might go further and suggest that not only does the idea have to be
conveyed, it has also actually to be used to refuse authority orbe seen
by authority as capable and likely of being so used. It is, then,
somewhat misleading to freely and only of 'subversive
thought'; what we are concerned with (once again) is a social
process. Thus the 'Machiavellian' demystification of religion was
circulating for centuries before Machiavelli; what made it actually
subversive in the Renaissance was its being taken up by many more

than the initiated few.Even here interpretation and perspective come

intoplay: we need to explain why it was taken up,and in so doing we
will almost certainly have to make judgements about the historical

changes it helped precipitate.Explicitness about one's own perspec

tive and methodology become unavoidable in materialistcriticism
and around issue
this especially: as textual, historical, sociological
and theoretical analysis are drawn together, the politics of the
practice emerges.
The essays by Leonard Tennenhouse, Paul Brown and Jonathan
Dollimore all attend to representations of subversiveness. Tennen

house's is partly concerned with the complex relations in the Henry

plays and A Midsummer Night's Dream between authority and the
figures of misrule, carnival and festival. Concentrating on The
Tempest, Brown, like Greenblatt, addresses the power and com

[13]
 Jonathan Dollimore

plexity of colonial discourse. His analysisof thewayit constructs the

threatening 'other is especiallyrevealing.This production of other
ness is seen,as essential to colonialism yet fraught with internal
contradiction since 'it produces the possibility of ...resistance inthe
other preciselyat the moment when it secks to impose its captivating
power' (p.s9). The radical ambiguity of the colonial stereotype,
and the instability of the civil / savage opposition so central to the
colonial project, help to focus the ideological contradictions of the
play's political unconscious. If, then, asJonathan Goldberg has
argued, contradictions are the very means by which powerachieves
its aims (James I, esp. pp. 2,
55, 186), they also generate an
instability which can be its undoing
Dollimore also considers t construction of the other, now in the
e
form of the sexual deviant. In this period deviancy is regarded by
many as radicallysubversive. Yet here too,especiallyin Measure for
Measure, that which apparently threatens authority seems to be
produced by it. An apparent crisis in the State is attributed to its
deviant population whose transgressions, far from undermining
authority, enable its relegitimation. At the same time those whose
exploitation permits this reaction areendlessly spoken ofand for,yet
never themselves speak; they have no voice, no part.
All thecontributors to this book would endorseFrank Lentrichia's
contention that 'Ruling culture does not define the whole of culture,
though it tries to, and it is the task of the oppositional critic to re-read
culture so as to amplify and strategically position the marginalised
voices of the ruled,
here quoting
,
expioted, oppressed, and excluded
|
Lentricchia,
Williams, rightly insists that cultural domi
nation is not a staticunalterable thing; it is rather a process, one

always being contested, always having to be renewed. As Williams

puts it: "alternativepolitical and cultural emphases, and the many
forms of opposition and struggle, are important not only in them
selves but as indicativefeaturesof what thehegemonic process has in

practice had to work to control" (Marxism and Literature, p. I13).

At the same time, 'the merepluralizationof voices and traditions(a
currently fashionable and sentimental gesture) is inadequate to the
ultimate problem of linking repressed and master voices as the agon
of history, theirabiding relation of class conflict (Lentricchia,
Criticism and Social Change, p. 1g1). Arguably an oppositional
criticism will always be deficient, always liableto despairing col
lapse, if it underestimates the extent, strategiesand flexible com
plexity of domination,3 The instance low-life sexuality in
of

Measure for Measure suggests that we can never find in a repressed

sub-culture that most utopian of fantasies: an alternative to the

[14]
 Shakespeare, cuitural materialismand the new historicism

dominant which is simultaneously subversive of it and self-authen

ticating.Of course one can, sometimes, recover history from below.
But to piece together its fragments may be eventually to disclose not
the self-authenticating other, but the self-division intrinsic to (and
which thereby perpetuates) subordination. At other times we will
listen in vain for voices from the tor search for their traces in a
'history' they never officiallyentered. And in the case of those who
sexually trangressed in the carly seventeenth century, what we
recover may well tell us more aboutthe society that demonised than
aboutthe demonisedthemsclves. But even to be receptive to that fact
involves a radical shift in awareness which is historically quite
recent. And it is a shift which means that if we feel as do several of
the contributors to this book- the need to disclose the effectiveness
and complexity of the ideological process of containment, this by no
means implies a fatalistic acceptance that it is somehow inevitable
and that all opposition is hopeless, On thecontrary the very desire to
the
disclose thatprocess is itself oppositional and motivated by
knowledge that, formidable though it be, it is a process which is
historically contingent and partial-never necessary or total. It did
not, and still does not, have to be so.

Notes

I Raymond Williams, Problems in Materialsm and Culnure (London: Verso, 198ol,

Marxism and Literature (Oxford University Pres, 1977). Calture (Glasgow:
Fontana, 1981):Janet Wolff,The Social Productiom of Art (London: Macmillan,
1981):Terry Lovell, Pictures of Reality: Aesthetics, Politics, Pleasure (London:
British Flm Institute, 198o):Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory: an Introduction
(Oxford.: Blackwell, 1983): Tony Bennett et al., Culture, ldeology and Social
a
Process: Reader (Batsford and the Open University, 1981), Alan Sinfield,
LiteraryTheory and the 'Crisis in English Studies',CQ,z5,no y, 1983, 35-47.
,
Raymond willams The Coutry and pheCiy (London Chato t973)
1L.W.Lever, The Tragedy of State(London:Methuen, 1971): Franco Moretti,
,
Sogns Takem for Wonders :Essys im the Socology f Literary Formss (London:
Verso, 983), chs. I and z.
4 David Aers, Bob Hodge and Gunther Kress, Literature, Language and Society in
England, rs&o-168o (Dublin:Gill and Macmillan, 1981);Margot Heinemann,
Paritanism and Theatre: Thomas Middleton and Opposition Drama Under the
Early Starts (Cambridge University Press, 198o);Alan Sinfield, Literature
inm

Protestant England i6o-166o (London: Croom

Helm, r982),"The Cultural
Politics of Sidney's Defence ofPoetry, in Sir Philip Sidneyin HisTime
and Ours,
ed. Gary Waller and Michael Moore (London: Croom Helm, 1984): Jonathan
Dollimore, Radical Tragedy: Religion, ldeology and Power in the Drama of
Shakespeareand His Contemporaries (Brighton: Harvester, 1984, University of
Court
Chicago Press, 1984);Marie Axton, "The Tudor Mask and Elizabethan
Marie Axton and
Drama', in English Drama: Forms and Deelopment, ed.

Raymond Willams (Cambridge Universitry Press, 1977), Pp.4-47; Graham

Holderness,Shakespeare'sHistory (Dublin:Gill and Macmillan, forthcoming).