Imagination in history.

Sacks, David Harris

Practicing New Historicism By Catherine Gallagher and Stephen Greenblatt Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2000

Hamlet in Purgatory By Stephen Greenblatt Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2001

"History," the word, is Greek in origin; it derives from historia, a term whose primary meaning is "inquiry." At its root, it names an intellectual process, not its subject matter or its final result. But it can also mean the knowledge obtained through investigation or study, an account of one's inquiries, or a narrative of events, past or present. Arguably the title of Herodotus's famous book, The Histories, conveys all these meanings. In Latin, historia refers more narrowly to narratives of events or to fictional tales and stories; the same goes for histoiro in medieval French, In modern English, however, the word "history" names two related but distinct concepts: it can be a narrative or study of the past, or it can be the past that is narrated or studied. We "do history" when we research and write about previous times and places; we "make history" when we cause events or participate in process which later may become a subject of historical investigation or story telling.

Nevertheless in the history of the English language, "history" understood as a written narrative represents the earlier usage. In a manner of speaking, therefore, history as written precedes history as lived. Whether the same holds in logical, ontological, or causal terms--i.e., whether a priori models of time and of human interactions within it define, construct, direct, or shape our experience or knowledge of historical events and processes--has been one of the central issues among humanists and historians for the last two decades. Perhaps no group of scholars has done more than the practitioners of New Historicism to make apparent the important role played by literary and institutional convention and by intellectual and ideological presupposition in conditioning our understandings of the past, our reactions to the present, and our aspirations for the future.

New Historicism came into prominence as an interdisciplinary movement in literary studies, history, and related subjects around the year 1980. The term itself was first introduced in 1982 to distinguish its form of text-based historicism not only from traditional literary history, but also from American New Criticism.(1) Assuredly it has already proven itself as a movement, not just in offering insights into a host of specific topics from the self-fashioning of artists and courtiers to the making of the modern body, (2) but also in conveying the utility of construing "cultures as texts" and of thinking of literature and the other creative arts as a "key to particular historically embedded social and psychological formations" (Gallagher and Greenblatt, 7, 9). There is also no doubt that the diverse ways of working of the founding generation of New Historicists have been widely emulated or adapted by colleagues and students in a variety of different fields and disciplines. Almost from the outset, there have been numerous attempts to summarize its accomplishment and criticize its methods; I won't endeavor to cite the huge corpus of commentaries and critiques that have appeared, let alone list all the works of scholars who identify themselves in one way or another as New Historicists. (3) I propose instead to look closely at the two books before us to see where the movement now stands.

I

Practice

According to Catherine Gallagher and Stephen Greenblatt, two of New Historicism's earliest and most important proponents, their movement is not a theory or even a school, but an evolving set of practices applied to particular problems and performed by a loose and changing coalition of practitioners with different purposes and projects. Practicing New Historicism is their attempt to explain the character of this interdisciplinary movement, to offer an account of its intellectual affiliations and major concerns, and to reveal by their practical example some of its paradigmatic methods and moves.

What then is a "practice"? It does not seem to be the sort of activity contemplated in the old joke: A stranger to New York City stops a man on the street who is carrying a violin case and asks "How do I get to Carnegie Hall?" Fritz Kreisler answers: "Practice! Practice!" For Kreisler--for the exemplar of violin virtuosity that he represents--it is possible not just to repeat the same sequence of actions over and over but in doing so to get closer and closer to perfection. There is an external standard of excellence, applicable by neutral observers, and practice makes perfect! New Historicism, as explained by Gallagher and Greenblatt, eschews any such idea. One can do it well or badly, but not asymptotically approach the thing in itself. Nor is New Historicism's notion of a practice the precise equivalent of what Aristotle meant by praxis. For Aristotelians there is an external standard toward which action is directed--namely eudaimonia, human flourishing. Accordingly, praxis involves the exercise of practical wisdom, or phronesis, by an individual who, guided by the moral disposition to act rightly, applies theory to circumstances. Karl Marx, perhaps the greatest of modern Aristotelians, also had a teleological conception of praxis. In his case, it entails the translation of theory into revolutionary action aimed to overthrow bourgeois capitalism and establish communism.

While New Historicism's idea of a practice borrows heavily from this Marxist philosophical tradition of critical-practical activity--nowhere more so than in seeking to undermine established structures of thought and power--New Historicists in general, and Gallagher and Greenblatt in particular, lack the confidence of traditional Marxists that they know the driving force of history or its final end. They are not engaged in actions intended to promote a specific social movement or political cause. In this they would perhaps agree with Marc Bloch: "No one today," he ventured, "would dare to say, with the orthodox positivists, that the value of a line of research is to be measured by its ability to promote action." But like Bloch, they no doubt would also allow that "mere amusement ... is no longer permitted us in our day, even ... when it is the amusement of the intelligence." Writing in 1941, after the fall of France, Bloch said, that

 in this poor world of ours which ... has created so little happiness
 for itself, the tedious minutiae of historical erudition, easily
 capable of consuming a whole lifetime, would deserve condemnation
 as an absurd waste of energy, bordering on the criminal, were they
 to end merely by coating one of our diversions with a thin veneer
 of truth. Either all minds capable of better employment must be
 disuaded from the practice of history, or must prove its legitimacy
 as a form of knowledge. (4)

For Bloch what the study of history offers is understanding and explanation of historical events and developments, not merely the enumeration of factual knowledge. Nevertheless, living in Vichy France and under the menace of Nazism, he concluded that "[a] science will always seem to us somehow incomplete if it cannot, sooner or later, in one way or another, aid us to live better." (5)

The New Historicist program conforms in large measure to this paradigm, as Gallagher and Greenblatt implicitly acknowledge. To use Bloch's formulation, they aim to escape "from mere narrative," to reject the "modern poisons of routine learning and empiricism parading as common sense," and "to penetrate beneath the mere surface of actions." (6) However, in thus seeking "understanding," New Historicists have been more concerned than Bloch and others in the founding generation of the Annales school, to reveal, and sometimes to unmask, the structures of power they see being served by the particular narratives and ideological constructions they examine. They use their work to challenge the master narratives in whose thrall we sometimes have been and can still remain entrapped. In this respect, their writing has a distinct ethical dimension even more explicit than the one Bloch discussed. Nevertheless, they are too aware of the role of accident in human history, too knowledgeable of ways in which cultural forms and habits resist reduction to any one formula, and too devoted to the unpredictable play of the imagination in human activity to be able to offer their own grand narrative to replace those that have fallen under the weight of critique.

So, despite New Historicism's well-known resistance to disciplinary canons and its aspiration to bring about cultural reform, the movement's conception of itself seems to share most with the definition of a "practice" as the exercise of a profession. On the whole, its members see themselves as participating in discussions and debates about the past, the present, and the future that engage the wider world of culture and politics. But their base is in university departments and scholarly journals, most notably Representations, and their influence, while very broad for an academic movement, has largely been confined within the world of professional scholarship. While there is no fixed theory to which everyone adheres or a body of incontrovertible findings that all accept, the practitioners of New Historicism share a language, as it were, as well as assumptions and questions that condition their discourse and relations with others.

One feature of New Historicist practice has been reliance on anecdotes, and two chapters of Practicing New Historicism are devoted to describing, explaining, and defending this preoccupation. The first explores the movement's debts to Clifford Geertz's method of "thick description" and to Eric Auerbach's form of literary historicism, especially his attention to "mimesis." Gallagher and Greenblatt argue that New Historicism built a bridge between these two seemingly disparate approaches. Geertz's style of interpretation sought to recover the imaginative world of social groupings or communities in which individual acts could be understood as signs in a common code, while Auerbach's historicism, in effect, conjured out of a particular moment in a literary work "a complex, dynamic, historically specific spirit of interpretation" characteristic of a particular time and place (Gallagher and Greenblatt 37). In the hands of the New Historicists, the result of this union is a disposition to treat cultures themselves as texts and texts as embodiments of whole culture. While Gallagher and Greenblatt seem right in suggesting that this treatment of cultures and texts is traceable ultimately to Herder and German romanticism, whether Auerbach's historicism and Geertz's cultural anthropology belong on the same branch of this evolutionary tree is more open to doubt. But my focus here is on what lessons New Historicists learned from Geertz and Auerbach, not on whether the apparent affinities they discovered can survive close historical or critical scrutiny, and on the former Gallagher and Greenblatt are our native informants, as it were.

The use of the anecdote focuses on the way short, self-contained narratives drawn most often from outside the realm of imaginative literature or from small fragments of larger literary works can be used to "put literature and literary criticism in touch with ... the lived life" outside of literary texts. Anecdotes, Gallagher and Greenblatt suggest, "select or ... fashion, out of the confused continuum of social existence, units of social action small enough to hold within the fairly narrow boundaries of full analytical attention." They convey a "touch of the real," but they also participate in and draw upon the imaginary. Whether anecdotes refer to actual events no matter how carefully recorded, they are "alike fictions in the root sense of things made, composed, fashioned." Just like literary works, therefore, they "are shaped by the imagination and by the available resources of narration and description" in their context (Gallagher and Greenblatt 26, 28, 31). Those facts make it possible to read anecdotes as texts, and to see in them, as Auerbach did so brilliantly in the opening chapters of his Mimesis, the complex, multi-layered, life-world that produced them in the first instance. As is revealed by the four chapters on art, literature, and history with which this volume concludes, the debt to Auerbach's historicism is large.

"The anecdote," Gallagher and Greenblatt say, "satisfied the desire for something outside the literary, something indeed that would challenge the boundaries of the literary. It offered access to the everyday, the place where things actually are done, the sphere of practice that even in its most awkward and inept articulations makes a claim on the truth that is denied to the most eloquent of literary texts." But it also did something more, they argue. By introducing a "touch of the real," it provided a way to "interrupt" what they call "the Big Stories," i.e., the master historical narratives treating the growth of capitalism, the course of modernization, or the triumph of communism as not only the main subject matter of historical study but the inevitable end product of a unitary history process. Anecdotes, then, became the basis for formulating what they call "counterhistories," which could be "counterpoised against more ambitiously comprehensive historical narratives" (Gallagher and Greenblatt, 31, 49, 51, 52, 54).

Here Gallagher and Greenblatt associate New Historicism not only with the interest in anecdotes evinced by "humanist or 'culturalist' British left-wing" historians, such as E. P. Thompson and Raymond Williams, but also with Michel Foucault's use of "the anecdotal rupture" in his grand counterhistorical project (Gallagher and Greenblatt 67). Again perhaps it matters little whether Thompson and Williams would have felt comfortable in Foucault's intellectual company, or he in theirs. For the purposes of Practicing New Historicism, it arguably is enough to know that New Historicists derived one of their most characteristic ways of working by yoking together the divergent aims and approaches that they had learned from these figures. The result is less a method, or even a set of skills, than a disposition to treat the world as composed of a kaleidoscope of fragments, something remote from the historical intuitions of Thompson and Williams, if not always of Foucault.

"Counterhistory," Gallagher and Greenblatt say, "opposes itself not only to dominant narrative, but also to prevailing modes of historical thought and methods of research" (Gallagher and Greenblatt, 52). Seen in this light, the concept of "counterhistory" shares something with Karl Popper's principle of "falsifiability" in scientific inquiry. According to Popper's formulation, all scientifically meaningful propositions must be open to disproof by contrary cases. In consequence, the truth of positive claims to knowledge is only provisional and in any given instance the demonstration of a contrary case results in the "falsification," i.e. the rejection, of the claim. Counterhistory understood in this manner also draws on the idea of "counterfactual analysis," which represents a standard way of isolating and testing causal explanations. While most historians would resist the implication of Popper's analysis that their only incontrovertibly true empirical statements are in the negative, much of modern historical scholarship proceeds by the invocation of counterfactuals in the course of making counterhistorical arguments. Historians often criticize causal arguments in the form "if X was present, Y follows" by falsifying the counterfactual into which it can readily be translated: "if X is absent, Y does not follow."

But a grand narrative, no matter the end point it identifies as its own, commonly offers no unitary causal explanation for what happened. Instead, it weaves a continuous storyline out of a series of little stories--of anecdotes, if you will--that are seen to build on one another cumulatively to produce the final result. Grand narratives do not offer their explanations in a form testable by counterfactuals, and so cannot be undermined by a single contrary case, no matter how richly resonant that case might be. The best the latter can do is challenge the larger structure and make it problematical. A counterhistory, in the terms offered by Amos Funkenstein, from whom the concept is borrowed, is something else again. (7) It not only seeks to destabilize the larger narrative framework it challenges, but to displace it. Nevertheless, it too offers its explanations in forms not readily amenable to counterfactual refutation. Grand narratives and counterhistories, then, are best understood not as a means for presenting proofs, but as devices for organizing our historical imaginations and understandings. As such they often coexist for long periods in dialogue or conflict before a new paradigm comes along to shift the debate from settled ground.

Despite this limitation, Gallagher and Greenblatt want something more from counterhistory--more perhaps than the latter can provide. "Counterhistories," they say, "have tried to revive" what they call the "alterity within" systems of thought. "The force field of the anecdote," they argue, "pulled even the most canonical works off the border of history and into the company of nearly forgotten and unfamiliar existences. There literature's own dormant counterhistorical life might be reanimated: possibilities cut short, imaginings left unrealized, projects half formulated, might be detected there," and stirred back to life "at 'the touch of the real,'" as they hoped (Gallagher and Greenblatt, 74). The remaining four chapters of the book explore the porous boundaries between the "real" and the "imaginary," alternating in pairs between early modern and modern subjects.

Two chapters focus on the Real Presence in the Catholic Eucharist. Chapter 3 considers belief in the presence of Christ's body and blood in the bread and wine of Holy Communion as a paradigmatic example of representation and its conundrums. Through a thoroughly engaging comparison of Joos van Gent's late fifteenth-century Urbino altarpiece Communion of the Apostles with its predella entitled Profanation of the Host by Paolo Uccello, the chapter explores the relations and tensions between faith and doubt, between Christians and Jews, between membership in a community and exclusion, and finally "between beliefs and representations" (Gallagher and Greenblatt, 107). Chapter 5 returns to the same territory to examine some of the controversies generated in the Reformation era by the doctrine of the Real Presence and to show how Shakespeare's Hamlet can be understood to have been "written in the shadow of these controversies" (Gallagher and Greenblatt, 151). Although few Reformation historians will find anything new here, and some might want a more thoroughgoing familiarity with recent revisionist and post-revisionist scholarship in Reformation studies, the play's links to Reformation themes revealed in this chapter illuminate a number of its dark corners. These two chapters resonate deeply with the renewed interest in the place of religion in shaping modernity that is apparent among scholars of early modern history and culture regardless of discipline.

Two further chapters take us into the world of Victorian England. Chapter 4, devoted to an exploration of "body history" and what Gallagher and Greenblatt call "the materialist imagination" (110), offers commentary on early nineteenth-century debates among political economists and social reformers about the value of the potato in the emerging industrial economy of the age and in the diet of the poor in England and Ireland. The object is to contrast the representational reality of Christ's presence discussed in the previous chapter with the apparent materiality of the potato and the human body and its appetites in order to show that they are themselves products of imaginative representation and provide no stable history or culture-free ground for explanation. For some commentators at the time, the potato seemed capable of breaking the cycle of famine and distress and to be the salvation of the poor, since it grew plentifully, seemingly without exceptional efforts at cultivation, and unlike grain, required no long series of productive processes to transform it into something edible. For others, however, it seemed to be the food of impoverishment, since it appeared to require no skill to grow; it turned peasants, as it were, into beings born directly from the soil, the human equivalent of the potato itself. And for many of the era's political economists, devotees of Ricardo's "iron law of wages," the fact that potatoes could be readily raised on small plots by those who ate them meant that their use would keep wages low, partly by promoting the growth of population beyond the capacity of the economy to support them.

E. P. Thompson makes another appearance in this chapter, this time in a somewhat puzzling discussion of his well-known essay "The Moral Economy and the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century," which Gallagher and Greenblatt honor but fail fully to grasp. (8) Thompson's powerful focus on the interrelationship among political rights, social justice, and the formation of class identity manifested in the activities of English food rioters gives a rather different weight to the concept of "moral economy" than does the culturalist reading provided here. It is true, as Gallagher and Greenblatt say, that Thompson does not mention the place of the potato in the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century economy and in economic thought. He concentrates instead on grain and bread, since these not only were the subjects of the traditional regime of market regulation, but also were the targets of the collective violence of the food rioters. For him, the rioters step in to enforce the ethical and legal principles that underpinned the old system of market control when the officials responsible for assuring fair prices for grain and bread failed in their duties. The rioters focused on rights to bread, not on bread itself; and it was hunger for justice, more than for food that prompted their collective action. There is good reason, therefore, for Thompson's neglect of the potato and of the debates it engendered; and while we have learned much from the history of the body to which Gallagher and Greenblatt refer, it is doubtful that Thompson himself, or we as his readers, would have found consideration of its finding a means to "strengthen the 'culturalism' of his account" (Gallagher and Greenblatt, 126). Thompson's interest was in the mutually constitutive relations between the cultural and the social, not in cultural analysis of symbolic systems undertaken on its own. There is something still to be said for this focus on human sociability and on the ways which peoples make and remake their collective lives in their social interactions, although not always according to their own choosing. (9)

The sixth and final chapter is the longest and also the most loosely jointed. It takes up the novel in relation to modern skepticism. But unlike Odysseus's scar and the world in Pantagruel's mouth, which Auerbach had used to lay bare the essential features of Homer's epic narrative and Montaigne's Pyrrhonistic doubt, neither the novel as a genre nor skepticism as a philosophical disposition can be treated as representing any one system of signs or as being uniquely expressive of the characteristics of a particular time and place. The novel chosen for close examination is Charles Dickens's Great Expectations and the discussion ranges over a complex array of subjects: relations between modern skeptical doubt and the modern novel; relations between the living and the dead in the creation of ideology; and relations between fathers and sons, or the lack of them, in the shaping of imagination, the formation of personal identity, and development of a concept of society. The moves made are connected by association more than inner logic or a tight sequence of causes and effects, and in consequence the form of the chapter itself replicates several of the features of the modern skeptical outlook discussed within it.

The chapter ends by reminding readers of the place that Shakespeare's Hamlet has in Dickens's novel and of the cultural, intellectual, and literary "distance" between the two (Gallagher and Greenblatt, 204). But apart from invoking the role of modern skepticism in undermining structures of belief in the era of Enlightenment and beyond, no historical explanation is offered to account for the differences. The rise of the modern novel and the development of modern skepticism undoubtedly are implicated in each other's histories, but the novel and skepticism are too varied in their forms and instantiations to lend explanation of their separate and collective histories very well to historicism, old or new.

Practicing New Historicism is a subtly rich and rewarding book. It gives readers a good sense of New Historicism's intellectual and methodological debts as well as of its aims and the approaches that it uses. The discussions of individual works, whether visual or literary, always provide insights, some quite profound, even if at several points their larger arguments may seem a bit muddled or fail fully to persuade. It also gives a very fine sense of New Historicism's contributions to literary criticism. But it is not intended to be a contribution to historical study and is somewhat limited in the sense of historical process it conveys. In keeping with the modes of thought presented in this volume, there is no overarching conclusion. Its final chapter completes the cycle of argument by predicting, and simultaneously demonstrating and lamenting, the continued survival of "disbelief" free "from all ontologies, including materialism" as a mode of addressing the world (Gallagher and Greenblatt, 210).

II

Imagination

I turn now to Greenblatt's Hamlet in Purgatory, a work preoccupied with things imagined and with poetic and historical imagination. (10) History as written is inescapably the work of the imagination--it requires bringing into presence events or developments that are necessarily absent and communicating their presence vividly, or at least intelligibly, to readers who have neither experienced them at firsthand nor examined their traces in the surviving historical record. In some ways, therefore, doing history and reading history share something with the encounters with ghosts with which Greenblatt is engaged in his impressive, insightful, and very substantial discussion of the history of spirit and ghost lore and of the so-called "third place" of Purgatory in Hamlet in Purgatory. We depend for many of our present-day assumptions and presuppositions on conventions, ideas, and images drawn from the past. Sometimes they haunt us, and we must exorcise them from our souls and move on. Sometimes, however, they enter into the very core of our beings and shape or motivate our actions, as did the ghost of Hamlet's father whose presence in Hamlet provides the focus for Greenblatt's subtle and well-crafted reconstruction of the history of purgatorial conceptions before, during, and after the Reformation era.

But as Thomas Babington Macaulay noted long ago, history is also inescapably in the realm of our reasoning powers--i.e., of our skills in discovering and assessing historical records and documents, our abilities in transforming our discoveries into findings, and our capacities in organizing our findings into logical, coherent arguments. "History," Macaulay says, "at least in its state of ideal perfection, is a compound of poetry and philosophy. It impresses general truths on the mind by a vivid representation of particular characters and incidents." (11) "A perfect historian," he argues elsewhere, "must possess an imagination sufficiently powerful to make his narrative affecting and picturesque. Yet he must content himself with the materials he finds, and to refrain from supplying deficiencies by additions of his own. He must be a profound and ingenious reasoner. Yet he must possess sufficient self-command to abstain from casting his facts in the mould of his hypothesis." (12)

Macaulay professed himself to be acquainted with no work of history that was equally obedient to "its two rulers, the Reason and the Imagination," none which "approach[ed] what a history ought to be ... no history which [did] not widely depart, either on the right hand or the left, from the exact line." Given the "insuperable difficulties" in producing such a perfectly balanced history, no one would "think it strange," he said, "that every writer should have failed, either in the narrative or in the speculative department of history." These are somewhat harsh words, but even now it is hard to argue against the conclusion that only the rare historical writer has been able to walk along "the exact line" Macaulay envisioned.

Where does Greenblatt's Hamlet in Purgatory fit on Macaulay's sliding scale? In certain ways, it is much more a history, in the sense that Macaulay meant the word, than Greenblatt's other works, including Practicing New Historicism. In asking us to remember the age in which Hamlet was written, it leans more to the side of the imagination, not just in its subject matter but also in the vividness of its interpretations. But in building up a picture of that distant world from the evidence of the texts studied, it also participates in an act of historical recovery that would have been familiar in its basic elements to Macaulay himself. With the possible exception of Greenblatt's study of the career of Sir Walter Ralegh, (13) none of his books offers so sustained an examination of a single, if complex, historical problem, or tells a single story in so focused a fashion. It is not the perfect history of Macaulay's aspiration, but it lies more toward the middle of the spectrum than what we might call the "pole of imagination" tout court.

Taken as a work of historical analysis, which it is only in part of course, the book presents a remarkably imaginative structure. "I believe that nothing comes of nothing," Greenblatt says, "even in Shakespeare. I wanted to know where he got the matter he was working with and what he did with that matter" (Greenblatt, 4). The first chapter begins with Simon Fish's A Supplication of the Beggars of 1529, reviews the place in English religious life of some of the institutions associated with Purgatory at the time, and examines the extensive early reformation critique of the place as a poet's fiction. The latter claim condemns Purgatory as a fraud, damning it to Hell as it were; but in the second chapter Greenblatt undertakes to evaluate in a religiously neutral way what it means to treat Purgatory as "a vast piece of poetry," i.e., as an imagined reality (Greenblatt, 47). This chapter ranges broadly over medieval literature and art and considers in depth several literary representations of Saint Patrick's Purgatory, a treatise originally dating from the late twelfth century. But Greenblatt applies this broader approach only to his treatment of medieval materials, not to the Renaissance or early modern ones taken up elsewhere in the book, and one may wonder whether a similarly broad, comparative perspective would have further illuminated issues arising later in the book.

The following chapter, the third, takes up the purgatorial claims of the dead to prayer and remembrance and closely examines the medieval narrative known in its fourteenth-century Middle English version as The Gast of Gy. Greenblatt treats these claims as "rights of memory," to quote the chapter's title. The chapter then ends with a detailed reading of Thomas More's A Supplication of Souls, first published in 1529. In The Supplication, More, lord chancellor at the time, mounted his vigorous defense of the intercessory institutions of the Church against Fish and other critics. It is only in the fourth chapter that ghosts finally appear in full Renaissance theatrical garb. Ghosts "do not altogether vanish in the later sixteenth century," Greenblatt argues, although they are "labeled" by Protestants "as fictions of the mind.... Instead they turn up onstage" (Greenblatt, 151). In this fourth chapter we find a wide-ranging overview of the representation of ghosts and spirits in English Renaissance drama, including the corpus of Shakespeare's plays. This discussion then leads in the fifth and final substantive chapter to a brilliant exploration of the way Hamlet draws on and builds upon the materials that Greenblatt has so effectively interpreted in the previous chapters.

As the above account might suggest, Greenblatt's treatment in the early chapters necessarily gives greater weight to the views of those who believed in Purgatory and conformed to the institutions and practices associated with it than to those who opposed the intercessory regime with which it was intimately connected. Scant attention is given to the arguments of John Wycliffe, who believed in Purgatory but not in the worldly institutions of intercession to which it gave rise, and equally little is said about the views and activities of the Lollards. Although Fish and other Protestants who attacked Purgatory, such as William Tyndale and John Foxe, receive very thorough treatments, they appear effectively as outsiders bringing in new ideas with which to overturn the old. It is assumed, correctly of course, that the Protestantism of these figures accounts for their rejection of the purgatorial regime, but whether they received their Protestantism exclusively as an import or derived it in part from native roots does not engage Greenblatt's discussion. Nor does any attempt to account historically for the great paradigm shift demonstrated by the book. In consequence, the Reformation is treated as a given historical fact and only the responses to it are examined as parts of an ongoing historical development. A more satisfactory approach might have been to treat the Reformation itself as a process in which religious identities were formed, and sometimes performed, in and by the clash of rival positions. Viewed in this manner, the debate about Purgatory would be seen as constitutive of the Reformation's history.

The presence of the Ghost in Shakespeare's Hamlet--the presence, that is, of that spectral figure putatively of the prince of Denmark's father, who appears on stage near the beginning of the play asking his son to "Remember me"--gives this probing and stimulating book its intellectual and critical impetus. As Greenblatt convincingly demonstrates, the Ghost's call upon Hamlet to remember repeats language traditionally associated with the regime of intercessory prayer in Catholic practice. How, then, should we understand this and other echoes of Purgatory in Shakespeare's play and, more generally, in the beliefs of his contemporaries? The story Greenblatt tells is meant to answer this deep, if simple-sounding question. Its nexus is located in the early moments of the English Reformation, when Fish's attack on the power and greed of the clergy in A Supplication of the Beggars was answered by More's own defense of traditional intercessory institutions and practices in A Supplication of Souls. Fish's Supplication was written in the voices of the wandering poor, the very same downtrodden beggars and vagabonds to whose plight Thomas More had drawn attention in Utopia. More, in response, presented his Supplication in the voices of dead souls pleading for prayers from kin and neighbors. For Greenblatt, the text of Hamlet, with its pervasive skepticism about things seen and unseen, its probing of the boundary between the imagined and the real, and its frequent references to memory and remembrance, contains within it something of the same contested territory marked out by this important early Reformation debate.

Much of what Shakespeare says in the play reveals his thoroughgoing familiarity with the forms and attractions of the Old Religion. This knowledge is not surprising, perhaps, given that the playwright came from a recusant family and early in his career may well have had personal links with Lancashire Catholics. Greenblatt, however, sensibly does not attempt to settle whether "Shakespeare himself was a secret Catholic sympathizer." Although he explores some important religious issues in considerable depth, his goal is "not to understand the theology behind the ghost, still less to determine whether it was 'Catholic' or 'Protestant'" (Greenblatt, 4, 254). Nor does he enter into current debates among English historians about the pace of the Reformation or the relative strength of Catholicism and Protestantism in the early modern era. He cites some of so-called "revisionists," such as Eamon Duffy, Christopher Haigh, and J. J. Scarisbrick, but does not offer a close treatment of their works or discuss Reformation historians who disagree with them.

Greenblatt finds no systematic defense of Catholicism in Shakespeare's play. Nor does he find in it a defense of Protestantism, although elements of a Protestant sensibility and of Protestant usage also abound in the play. Too much in its language and plot, most notably the Ghost's bloody demand for revenge, speaks against the play advancing any established religious movement or advocating a single religious stance. Instead, Greenblatt says, it mixes elements derived from the medieval literature of "wonder" and tales of miracles, in which spirits regularly manifest their presence, with those of Senecan revenge tragedy, where we also find ghosts as standard fixtures of the genre. Purgatory, which provides the foundation for the medieval forms, focuses on the cure of souls in the other world of the dead, where the justice of God is tempered with His mercy. It draws attention to what the living might do for the well being of those who have passed from this world, not to how they might avenge in this world wrongs experienced by the departed while still alive. In revenge tragedy, souls cry out for bloody retribution not spiritual redemption. "[W]hile compatible with a Christian (and, specifically, a Catholic) call for remembrance," Greenblatt argues, Purgatory "is utterly incompatible with a Senecan call for vengeance." Nevertheless in Shakespeare's hands, the tension--the seeming contradiction--between remembrance and revenge, which might otherwise have led "to derision," works, Greenblatt suggests, to "intensify the play's uncanny power." It achieves this effect, "by participating in a violent ideological struggle"--not between confessions, but between sensibilities--"that turned negotiations with the dead from an institutional process governed by the church to a poetic process governed by guilt, projection, and imagination" (Greenblatt, 237,252).

Although Greenblatt does not emphasize the fact, 1529, the year that Fish and More published their rival Supplications, represents a critical moment in England's political and religious history--the point where, as it were, the needs of the state and the requirements of the conscience converged. By then Henry VIII was firmly committed to ending his marriage with Catherine of Aragon, but had not yet decided on the break from Rome. As More clearly recognized, the future course of events lay in the balance, and the power of words to persuade and condemn was concomitantly great. It was a time when the existence of Purgatory was not only of importance to the soul's welfare, but also to the church's and the state's; it was worth a fight. Whatever else Purgatory did, its putative existence emphasized the central (although, as Greenblatt correctly reminds us, not the exclusive) place of the church as an institution in interceding with God through the saints on behalf of sinful individuals living and dead. If the place was a sham--"a poet's fable" as Tyndale put it, or an idle fantasy just like Utopia, as Foxe would later insist--many other claims made by the church and its priests to the possession of spiritual power and to a share of the worldly wealth of its communicants were as well. The highly contested character of this moment therefore comes as no surprise.

The picture was rather different at the time of the first performance of Hamlet in 1601. By then not only had the official doctrine and liturgy of the Church of England erased the name of Purgatory, but the traditional institutions of intercession--the saints' cults, monasteries and chantries, and anniversary masses--also had been dismantled. While some Catholics continued to conspire against Protestant rule in England, and representatives of the rival confessions contested for converts and persisted in their vituperative debates, Greenblatt eschews any treatment of these matters. His interest is in the text, and in what Shakespeare, the author, did to make it what it was. Hamlet, in Greenblatt's view, took no sides in the great religious quarrels of the era, but instead incorporated elements from competing outlooks and used them for its literary purposes, inviting the members of its audience to confront if not resolve the deepest contradictions residing within the conventional concepts and practices by which they lived. Many no doubt took the play in this way, but one may well wonder whether a number might have seen more immediate religious conflicts or controversies at stake with some Protestants perhaps hoping that James VI in Scotland (Elizabeth's likely successor), would follow a more aggressive anti-Catholic stance once installed in England, and some Catholics possibly hoping he would be more tolerant toward them.

Although it is possible to differ over the interpretation of Shakespeare's aims in Hamlet--the play is far too rich to reduce to any single view--Greenblatt surely is correct in concluding that the playwright was not himself seeking to intervene directly in the great confessional disputes of his day. But to a surprising degree in so carefully a contextualized study, little is said about the play's first audiences or early readers and what they might have brought with them to their interpretations. The assumption seems to be that they built their views out of the same materials as Shakespeare. It is perhaps worth keeping in mind, however, that for many of them religious controversy remained fully alive at the time the play was first performed, although in retrospect we might agree, as Greenblatt seemingly does, that the institutional and cultural changes wrought by the Reformation had by then given Protestantism a nearly insurmountable dominion over the scene. Even if most contemporaries had faith in the probable victory of Protestantism, it remained uncertain what sort of Protestantism it would be. Moreover, for English men and women living ca. 1601, whether Protestant or Catholic or those yet to be firmly converted to either camp, the course of Providential history still held out the prospect of a last great battle between the forces of light and of darkness. In 1601, England was still at war with Spain; it had been threatened with the possible return of the Armada as recently as 1599. Whether England or Spain would triumph in the end was not yet certain.

No matter how deep one's faith, treating historical events as reflecting the will of God meant weighing their providential significance case by case and acting according to what one judged God demanded. The evidence was never anything but ambiguous. Was victory a sign of one's rectitude or a temptation to pride? Was defeat a test of one's faith or a warning of one's error? In consequence, among seriously committed Protestants and Catholics there was the belief that the religious convictions of the English remained in play. Indeed, as Peter Lake and Michael Questier recently have been arguing, many philosophically deep and politically important issues had been revivified in the 1590s in the course of clashes between the so-called Puritans and the Church of England's hierarchy and their conformist supporters in which the importance of ceremonies and the doctrine of predestination were once again in hotly contested debate. In these circumstances, room was opened anew for Catholic apologists to intervene on behalf of their own views. Protestants feared Catholic resurgence and felt the need to battle against anything that smacked of popery, while Catholics, or some of them, remained ever hopeful of winning back the faithful. (14) Hence, some in Hamlet's first audience might well have seen the play engaged with these living political and ecclesiological issues of the day and not only with the spiritual and psychological ones to which Greenblatt so effectively draws our attention.

Although nothing that Greenblatt says contradicts the above account, it is not his purpose to explore this kind of historical territory. His interests reside elsewhere, namely "in the tragedy's magical intensity" (Greenblatt, 4), i.e., its imaginative capacity to call the spirits of its characters vividly into presence. For him, the text in effect engages in an internal dialogue about the boundary between the living and the dead. Is the apparition that Hamlet saw, or thought he saw, truly the living spirit of his dead father or actually the work of the devil tempting the prince of Denmark to sin? Is the boundary between this life and the next open or closed? How can one decide? In Greenblatt's treatment, these questions also concern the boundary between material and imagined reality, and therefore between experience and art or culture. Is the boundary impervious or porous? Should it be one or the other? These deep questions, which connect to but transcend the great debates of the Reformation, were not yet settled, and it is one of the many successes of this important book that it treats them as living problems for the English as they confronted and accommodated to the reverberating consequences of the religious revolution through which their kingdom was passing.

For Greenblatt "Purgatory exists in the imaginary universe of Hamlet only as what the suffering prince, in a different context, calls 'a dream of passion.'" It gave "its viewers," he says, "many of the deep imaginative experiences, the tangled longing, guilt, pity, and rage evoked by More." But did this "unforgettably vivid dream," also participate "in a secularization process ... in which the theater offers a disenchanted version of what the cult of Purgatory once offered?" Without rejecting the possibility outright, Greenblatt concludes that "the palpable effect is something like the reverse: Hamlet immeasurably intensifies a sense of the weirdness of the theater, its proximity to certain experiences that had been organized and exploited by religious institutions and rituals" (Greenblatt, 252,253). A similar point is made in the book's short but apt "Epilogue," which takes us to Shakespeare's The Tempest. There the playwright famously probed the relationship between dreams and reality, spirits and actors, prayers and applause, the theater and "the great globe itself." Shakespeare seems to be more than playful when he has Prospero say: "As you from crimes would pardoned be, / Let your indulgence set me free." In the face of the desacralization of religious institutions that accompanied the Reformation, Greenblatt seems to be suggesting a migration of the holy to other sites, temporal in character with the theater high among them.

Hamlet in Purgatory addresses the history it considers primarily through the close examination of texts, each seen in relation to a fabric of other texts with which it shares subject matter, concepts, and rhetoric, if not genre or form. The readings offered are as illuminating as they are subtle, and it is one of the great pleasures of the book to follow along as its author makes the connections among seemingly diverse literary motifs and images and draws out their implications. The book asks hard questions, and it presses to answer them. It is also a deeply humane book. In asking us to consider "the afterlife of Purgatory, the echoes of its dead name" (3), it is calling upon us to weigh our own encounters with the spirits of the dead in the traditions or conventions that shape our self-understanding and our actions.

III

History

Although many of the methods employed by historians in the present day might be unrecognizable to the founders of the discipline, history still retains its ancient, Herodotean roots, as a form of inquiry. As with Herodotus and Thucydides, however, the results of historical research most commonly are presented as stories, small, medium, and large. And, as in Macaulay's conception, its ideal form arguably is still a vividly told narrative, or series of interconnected narratives, grounded in the careful discovery, evaluation, and presentation of evidence. Stories, as distinct from descriptions, normally involve change of some kind.

However, in much of the work of New Historicists, such as Greenblatt's Renaissance Self-Fashioning or his often reprinted essay "Invisible Bullets," emphasis was given to the persistent power of political and cultural institutions or structures to contain the forces of change. (15) Change, when it was discussed at all, was understood to proceed by abrupt breaks or ruptures from settled frameworks of practice and power. Between these breaks, the movement of events disappeared entirely or became compressed and flattened. In Shakespearean Negotiations Greenblatt modified this position somewhat. There the emphasis was on the "circulation" of vivid representations in a reciprocal dialogue, rather than on their containment. Nevertheless, little attention was paid to the processes by which cultural forms or ideological structures changed over time. (16) A similar idea is to be found in his Marvelous Possessions, a book especially focused on what Greenblatt calls "the assimilation of the other." There, explicitly adapting Marx, he speaks of "the reproduction and circulation of mimetic capital," a formulation that stresses the accumulation of a stockpile of vivid images that have recognized value under existing "social relations of production" and that can be mixed and matched to make further representations. (17) In many ways the models of historical development embedded in Practicing New Historicism replicate these understandings.

Hamlet in Purgatory, in contrast, is simultaneously an analysis and an account of a long-term, interlocking process of change in some of England's main cultural institutions. On the one hand, it examines the development of Purgatory as an imagined place and its continued presence in Renaissance literature and culture. Although Greenblatt says that his book is about the post-Reformation life of Purgatory, there is at least as much about its long history during the middle ages as about what happened to it during and after the Reformation. On the other hand, the book seeks to explore the emergence of the theater as a major cultural institution in Renaissance England.

In making his case, Greenblatt sees the medieval and Reformation materials from which Shakespeare constructed the Ghost in Hamlet as the same materials from which the theater as a social form established its niche in modern culture and from which the drama and its performances derive their ideological or cultural power. The process is one in which elements from the past, often wrenched from the frameworks in which they were first established, persistently enter into the present, even though typically in different, sometimes quite new, surroundings. Although something of the idea of circulation still remains, conventions and practices from within Western Christendom's own past are transformed by the fires of the Reformation, and not simply transmitted, circulated, and reassimilated.

Viewed in its broadest terms, therefore, Hamlet in Purgatory is a book about how past history lives on in memory and inherited practices and continues to shape present culture. While the book does not represent the rejection of its author's previous views or abandonment of his past positions, it offers--to this reader at least--a significant move away from some of their most problematic features. While the concept of "containment" might help to explain the absence of significant historical change over long periods, it makes its occurrence something of a mystery. Similarly, while the idea of "negotiation" can go some way to account for the circulation of social energies within and between texts, it does so by downplaying the potential for change in social and cultural life. What is transmitted is the characteristic force of the person or thing within the circulating medium, not the transformative effects they might have.

In Hamlet in Purgatory, the focus is on how individuals and communities come to live with, participate in, and accommodate the fact of historical change. We do so, Greenblatt now seems to be saying, by adaptation and reinterpretation, rather than by destruction or replacement. In effect, the ghost of Hamlet's father becomes a figure for the continuing hold the spirit of the past has on the present. Just as for Shakespeare, so for us, "nothing comes from nothing" (Greenblatt, 4). While many historians would not endorse this view in its entirety, there is no doubt that it captures a large measure of the truth about historical processes.

Notes

(1.) Stephen Greenblatt, "Introduction," in Genre Special Topic 7: The Power of Forms in the English Renaissance, ed. Stephen Greenblatt, Genre 15, nos. 1-2 (Spring-Summer 1982), 5. This volume was reprinted as The Power of Forms in the English Renaissance, ed. Stephen Greenblatt (Norman, OK: Pilgrim Books, 1982). The term "new historicism" was not an entirely new coinage in 1982; see Wesley Morris, Toward a New Historicism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972).

(2.) Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980); The Making of the Modern Body: Sexuality and Society in the Nineteenth Century, ed, Catherine Gallagher and Thomas Laqueur (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1987).

(3.) I associate myself with both sides. I made my first attempts to comment critically on certain features of this movement in two review articles published in the later 1980s: "History in Literature: The Renaissance," Journal of British Studies 26, no. 1 (January 1987): 107-23; "Searching for 'Culture' in the English Renaissance," Shakespeare Quarterly 39, no. 4 (Winter 1988): 465-88. My book The Widening Gate: Bristol and the Atlantic Economy, 1450-1700 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1991) is number 15 in the University of California Press's New Historicism series, edited by Stephen Greenblatt.

(4.) Marc Bloch, The Historian's Craft, intro. Joseph R. Strayer, trans. Peter Putnam (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., 1953), 9.

(5.) Ibid., 10.

(6.) Ibid., 13. For Gallagher and Greenblatt's comments on New Historicism's associations with aspects of the Annales school's program, see Practicing New Historicism, 53, 59. It is worth noting as well that New Historicism at its founding was especially concerned to reject what it saw as the moral obtuseness of "the mainstream literary history practiced in the first half" of the twentieth century. See Greenblatt's early comments on "The Political Background of Shakespeare's Richard II and Henry IV," delivered in 1939 by Dover Wilson before the German Shakespeare Society at Weimar; Greenblatt, "Introduction," Power of Forms, 5-6.

(7.) See Amos Funkenstein, "History, Counterhistory, and Narrative," in Probing the Limits of Representation: Nazism and the "Final Solution," ed. Saul Friedlander (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992), 66-81; Amos Funkenstein, Theology and the Scientific Imagination from the Middle Ages to the Seventeenth Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986), 202-89, esp. 273-89. Gallagher and Greenblatt discuss Funkenstein's idea on p. 52.

(8.) Gallagher and Greenblatt cite this 1971 Past and Present article from E. P. Thompson, Customs in Common: Studies in Traditional and Popular Culture (New York: New Press, 1991), 185-258.

(9.) For a recent critique of cultural analysis as practiced by anthropologists such as Geertz, see Adam Kuper, Culture: The Anthropologists' Account (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999). For a somewhat similar critique from the perspective of literary study, see Terry Eagleton's "Blackwell Manifesto": The Idea of Culture (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000).

(10.) I have also discussed Greenblatt's Hamlet in Purgatory in similar terms in "Exercising the Imagination," an H-ALBION review on H-NET, which also comments on Carlo Ginzburg, No Island Is an Island: Four Glances at English Literature in a World Perspective (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000); Davis Harris Sacks, "Exercising the Imagination," H-Album Review, for H-NET, August 2002, http://www.h-net.msu.edu/reviews/showrev.cgi?path = 204381032241906.

(11.) Thomas Babington Macaulay, "Hallam," in The Works of Lord Macaulay Complete, ed. Hannah More Macaulay, Lady Trevelyan, 8 vols. (London: Long-roans, Green and Co., 1873), 5: 162; a review of Henry Hallam, The Constitutional History of England, from the Accession of Henry VII. to the death of George II, 2 vols. (1827), first published in the Edinburgh Review in September 1828.

(12.) Macaulay, "History," in Works, 5: 122-23; a review of Henry Neele, The Romance of History. England (London, 1828), first published in the Edinburgh Review in May 1828.

(13.) Stephen Greenblatt, Sir Walter Ralegh: The Renaissance Man and His Roles (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1973).

(14.) See Peter Lake and Michael Questier, The Antichrist's Lewd Hat: Protestants, Papists, and Players in Post-Reformation England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002).

(15.) Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning. For the earliest version of "Invisible Bullets," see Stephen Greenblatt, "Invisible Bullets: Renaissance Authority and Its Subversion," in Glyph: Textual Studies #8, ed. Waiter Benn Michaels (1981) 40-61.

(16.) Stephen Greenblatt, Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988).

(17.) Stephen Greenblatt, Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 3, 6.

DAVID HARRIS SACKS is Professor of History and Humanities at Reed College. Among his works on the history and culture of early modern Britain and the Atlantic world, The Historical Imagination in Early Modern Britain: History, Rhetoric, and Fiction, 1500-1800 (1997), a collection of essays coedited with Donald R. Kelley, appeared in paperback in fall 2002. He is presently at work on two books: The Sweet Name of Liberty: The Culture of Freedom in Early Modern England, and Restoring the Distracted Globe: Richard Hakluyt and His World.