When the New Historicisms Become Powerful

When the New Historicisms Become Powerful I. Colonizing the Renaissance There is a commonly held belief that thousands of years ago, as the world today counts time, Mongolian nomads crossed a land bridge to enter the western hemisphere and became the people known as the American Indians. The truth, of course, is that the Raven found our forefathers in a clamshell on the beach at Naikun. At his bidding, they entered a world peopled by birds, beasts, and creatures of great power. Bill Reid T his passage, which appears on the back of Through Indian Eyes, published by The Reader’s Digest, merits attention because of the contradiction that it points to in the ideology of contemporary liberalism, a contradiction highlighted by the difference between Reid’s story and The Reader’s Digest’s perhaps surprisingly liberal account of Native American life. Through Indian Eyes does not follow Reid’s lead and provide a narrative that grants to Native American beliefs the status of truth in contradistinction to contemporary Western myth. What the book does, after relating the land-bridge-crossing story relegated to myth by Reid, is explain the Native American resistance to the incursion of Western people into their lands. The purpose of the story is undoubtedly to help us empathize with the Indian’s reaction to these incursions rather than to demonize it in the manner of an old Hollywood “cowboys-and-Indians” movie. But having been promised a 1 2 Renaissance Incorporations look at Native American culture through its own eyes, we are presented with a people who are very much like us. Thus the Native Americans are treated, despite their distinct culture, as a people who were always already essentially Westernized, and our truths or, as Reid describes them, our commonly held beliefs, are the ones given voice through the narrative. For me, the blurb on the back undermined the book’s conventionality. As I read the account within, I kept thinking about Bill Reid and the tantalizing blurb promising an alternative story. The blurb is what had compelled me to begin reading the book. Reid offers the delight of discovering an alternative symbolic universe, which is, for me, the attraction of reading. Later, hoping to share the pleasure of Reid’s manipulation of the concepts of truth and myth, I read the passage to two friends from whom I expected responses other than the ones the Reader’s Digest had tried to elicit for advertising purposes. The first responded to the passage with platitudes about beautiful Indian mythology and how it epitomizes the power of the human imagination. I pointed out that Reid is treating the story as a factual truth, not as some piece of mythology; silence, punctuated with a few gasps of exasperation, followed, and our conversation turned to less troubling topics. If Reid’s story about the origins of the Native American people isn’t posited as myth, we cannot admit it into our discourse as positive knowledge. After situating it as such, we might try to incorporate it into our own belief-system, as Freud incorporates the Oedipus myth into psychoanalysis, but Reid’s story, at least as it appears in the above quotation, does not easily accommodate itself to the process of appropriation. Reid’s mode of articulation almost compels the Western reader to relegate the myth to the status of local color, something tangential to the essential humanness it reveals. The other friend paid attention to what Reid had to say but denied the passage any value whatsoever. I did not, he pointed out, believe that the story was true. He was correct; in fact, I even find it difficult to believe that Bill Reid believes the story is true. Nonetheless, I remain fascinated by the ramifications of believing it. As Stephen Greenblatt remarks in “Invisible Bullets,” “we would, if we took them seriously, find subversive” (39) beliefs that are no longer tenable in contemporary Western culture, and I am fascinated by the radical alterity produced by such subversion. This study is an attempt to articulate the alterity of Elizabethan and Jacobean texts and, in so doing, to call attention to the implications of Reid’s treatment of Native American myth. The implications are more interesting than my initial fascination with Reid’s assertion took into account. By asking us to treat Native American beliefs When the New Historicisms Become Powerful 3 as truth with the “of course” of common sense, Reid challenges the West’s purported commitment to an egalitarian ideal. Although this ideal compels us to recognize the value of cultural beliefs other than our own, our inability to accept mythologies not congruent with our sense of reality often leads us to dismiss such beliefs or to deny them the significance they have for the culture in which they are treated as truth. In both cases, the value of the culture is belittled, but the latter case may be more pernicious. The process by which the significance of a certain myth is denied does not proceed by ignoring the myth but by transforming its meaning into something we believe. Value can then be ascribed to the culture but only because its otherness has been erased. In recent years, literary critics (practicing what Louis Montrose calls the new historicisms1) have attempted to attune themselves to the problems that critics face when they interpret sixteenth-century texts from contemporary perspectives. These attempts have been linked to and produced by a political understanding of myth, but this understanding may reinforce the contradiction that Reid draws to our attention. According to the new historicists, the function of myth, in the sense that we mean when referring to the Raven-and-the-Clamshell story and in the broader sense given to the term by Roland Barthes in Mythologies—that is, ideology—is to compel individuals to conform to the cultural system they live within as if the system were a part of nature. As a result, social change comes to be regarded as a threat to the natural order. The voices challenging such mythologies make the possibility of social change thinkable, illustrating the socially constructed, rather than the metaphysical, status of the social system and undermining the power of mythologies to sustain a social order and manipulate the marginalized into accepting their place. According to the scholars who promote these ideas, Renaissance playwrights challenged the mythologies sustaining what has come to be known as the Elizabethan world picture. An older generation of critics, by contrast, had argued that this “world picture” contained the “thought-idiom of [the] age [that] could have [been] avoided only by not thinking at all” (Tillyard, 21). The power of the sixteenth-century theater, for today’s 1. Montrose’s pluralization of the name new historicism is meant to unite a variety of materialist approaches into a single school of criticism. The approaches include, among others, new historicism, cultural materialism, materialist feminism, and neo-Marxism. 4 Renaissance Incorporations critic, is its ability to demythologize. We get pleasure out of privileging radical voices because we identify with those cut off from the centers of Renaissance authority, who, we believe, would have found liberating implications within the discourses debunking Elizabethan orthodoxies. At least this is the story we have been telling ourselves. Reid’s challenge to Western ideology also challenges the assumptions of these critics. If I am correct about his disbelief in the story he tells, his voice is more profoundly radical than I had initially thought. One of our most cherished beliefs is that the truth will set us free, and despite a post-structuralist desire to destabilize the very notion of truth, this belief directly informs the latest studies of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Reid undermines the belief, offering a critique that can and should hold a place in contemporary knowledge. By treating present day truth, the “alleged” fact that Mongolian nomads crossed a land-bridge between North America and Asia, as our mythology, Reid asks us to recognize that the power of our truth lies in its ability to undercut the value of other cultures as well as to debunk mythologies. In the case of Native Americans, the imposition of Western “truth” led to the suppression and destruction not only of a way of life but a way of thinking about life. In the case of the Renaissance, the possibility of imposing our “truth,” although less destructive, leads to the erasure of the voices we claim to be listening to. Comparing the practices of Renaissance scholars to those of the American colonizers may seem extreme, but the emphasis, by the very critics I am referring to, on the power of discourse to be transformed into praxis impels us to consider the analogies between their accounts of the Renaissance and those accounts of Native Americans sanctioning colonial practices. The comparison is given further weight by the synchronic approaches to history influenced by Michel Foucault’s historical and Clifford Geertz’ anthropological theories. Both Foucault and Geertz have, as Leah S. Marcus remarks, caused us to “think of our subject in terms of such pervasively geographic metaphors: as a ‘terrain,’ an ‘area,’ a ‘field’ that is being ‘remapped’ or ‘explored,’ or as an ‘enterprise’ that, like travel across a space that is not our accustomed terrain, requires us to take along ‘baggage’” (41). The “fields we know, situated in Earth’s three Dimensions,” we have come to believe, “have also their counterparts in Time” (190) to cite Thomas Pynchon’s formulation. When we study the Renaissance, we become engaged with a cultural system that is not our own, traveling back through time as if it were space, but like armchair anthropologists rather than modern ethnographers. When the New Historicisms Become Powerful 5 This analogy between the critic and the anthropologist, it is true, could have always been made, and distinguishing between older and newer historical approaches to Renaissance literature involves more than pointing out that the new historicists acknowledge that critics have a very different cultural perspective from the authors they are studying. I have already briefly alluded to the distinction between the old and the new historicisms, but the description I offered was reductive, based as it was on the difference between reading Elizabethan texts as if they promoted the Elizabethan world picture or challenged it. The distinction is not new. In the 1970s, before new historicist readings became the dominant trend in Renaissance criticism, Norman Rabkin had described Henry V as “a work whose ultimate power is precisely the fact that it points in two opposite directions” (34). In this respect, Henry V is like “the gestaltist’s familiar drawing of a rare beast” (34) that from one perspective appears to be a rabbit but from another appears to be a duck. One must ignore the rabbit to see the duck and ignore the duck to see the rabbit. Rabkin is writing about how critics of Henry V can be divided into two camps. For one camp, Henry V is an ideal king, and Shakespeare’s thought is pre-modern. For the other camp, Henry is a Machiavellian villain, and the play provides evidence of Shakespeare’s modern sensibility. Henry V, Rabkin concludes, is successful because it asks for both responses, something which enables us to situate Shakespeare within either a late medieval or an early modern context. Because the early modern/late medieval distinction predates the emergence of the new historicisms, it does not provide adequate categories to distinguish the new from the old, yet the importance the distinction has taken on within the newer mode of historicism will help clarify the difference between it and the older one. The question over the status of the Renaissance as a late medieval or an early modern culture is an integral part of the new historicisms. The contradiction Rabkin celebrates has assumed a different form, not disappeared, so Rabkin’s metaphor remains a valuable tool for discussing the present state of Shakespeare studies. Ironically, the first indication of the metaphor’s usefulness is its inapplicability to the new situation. To reapply the terms of its vehicle to the contemporary context is, in some ways, to destroy the value of the metaphor. For Rabkin, Shakespeare’s plays ask to be interpreted as representative of both cultural visions. The “rare beast” is a discourse in which the two perspectives appear simultaneously without the cohesion of either being threatened. To allow ourselves to remain content with this position is to ignore the issues that have led to the bent Renaissance studies have taken. 6 Renaissance Incorporations Rabkin’s ability to represent the problem as he does is a result of the function ascribed to history within the old approach. The historical studies Rabkin refers to, such as E. M. W. Tillyard’s Shakespeare’s History Plays (1944) and Harold C. Goddard’s The Meaning of Shakespeare (1960), were primarily interested in explicating meaning and using historical materials as the background—regarded as stable—that would help students arrive at this meaning. The late medieval/early modern debate was a result of privileging different background texts: Sir Thomas Elyot’s The Governor (1531) as opposed to Niccolò Machiavelli’s The Prince (1513), for example. New historicists, on the other hand, have deconstructed the foreground/ background opposition. History is no longer endowed with a stabilizing function, and critics now define literary artifacts as cultural elements actively participating in the formation and reformation of the discourses constituting the cultural matrix. The power of literature to transform the system in some way is assumed, and the most interesting texts, for the new historicists, are those which seem most intent on effecting some kind of transformation, hence the increasing emphasis on alternative or marginalized voices. These alternative voices, however, are really not alternatives at all, or they are not alternatives for the modern-day reader. As Greenblatt admits, “the term subversive . . . designates those elements in Renaissance culture . . . that now conform to our own sense of truth and reality” (39), and in spite of the differences among the various materialist critics, Greenblatt’s definition of the term correctly characterizes the way many of them use it. The “alternatives” consist of the voices of Renaissance thinkers such as Machiavelli and Copernicus, whose conclusions seem to have been predicting, if not laying the ground work for, the world to which we have become accustomed. The problem of late medievalism and early modernism has been transformed into a question of whether the orthodox or the subversive was the more powerful force. In the 1980s, the debate on this issue appeared to differentiate two apparently distinct materialist approaches, allowing the likes of Jonathan Dollimore to offer this rough distinction: American new historicists generally see orthodoxy, or the forces of containment, as a more powerful force, whereas the English cultural materialists grant this status to the subversive elements (see Radical, xxi). Henry V, along with the preceding plays in the Henriad, gained prominence as a privileged site on which to hold this debate, and the gestaltist’s drawing seemed to have become one in which the rabbit tries When the New Historicisms Become Powerful 7 to undermine the cohesion of the duck and the duck veil the presence of the rabbit. But if the power of orthodoxy merely resides in its ability to veil subversion, the containment “position might be said to reinstate,” as Montrose observes, “the Elizabethan world picture but now transposed into the ironic mode” (“New Historicisms,” 403), for if the Elizabethan world picture was imposed, not believed, its status as a world picture loses its validity. This aspect of the subversion/containment debate illustrates the trouble with characterizing the problem in these terms. The function of the late medieval/early modern opposition within materialist discourses needs to be reexamined. In order to do this, I want to return to one of the essays responsible for the debate over the potential of subversion or lack thereof, Greenblatt’s “Invisible Bullets.” Although materialist criticism may have evolved since this text was written, the influence of the essay continues to be felt. The dynamic between contemporary and Renaissance thought established within Greenblatt’s piece remains a dominant characteristic of the materialist project. Indeed, Greenblatt has determined, in part, the manner in which the new historicisms have evolved. In “Invisible Bullets,” Greenblatt turns to Thomas Harriot’s A Brief and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia (1588) to establish “an interpretive model that may be used to understand . . . the problem posed by Shakespeare’s history plays” (23). The model, based on Michel Foucault’s thesis that subversion is evoked or allowed to emerge by those in authority to contain it and display their power, directly addresses the relationship between orthodoxy and subversion. Because Greenblatt’s essay equates Renaissance subversion with early modern thought and Renaissance orthodoxy with late medieval thought, it is also about the function of modern and Elizabethan ideas within recent criticism. Reapplying Greenblatt’s model to his own work to explore the relationship between our own perspective and an Elizabethan one within materialist criticism is simply to follow the argument of the essay to its logical conclusion. To bring it to this conclusion will allow me to demonstrate that if examined carefully, the very strategies that Greenblatt sets out to demystify inform his own response to the texts he sets out to interpret. The model proposed by Greenblatt consists of an ideological or colonial strategy involving three maneuvers—“testing, recording, and explaining” (40). “Testing” is the putting into practice of an hypothesis calling into question those assumptions regarded as essential in justifying the established social order. “Recording” is the recording of alien voices or those voices whose interpretations of certain facts contradict the 8 Renaissance Incorporations explanations sanctioned as orthodox within the recorder’s ideology. “Explaining” justifies both the testing and the recording and is perhaps the central move in the whole procedure, for explaining permits both the heterodox interpretations of the recorded and the heterodox implications of the test to be given a voice and yet, according to Greenblatt, almost completely silences these heterodoxies even as they are being heard. In Harriot’s case, testing involves putting into practice “the Machiavellian hypothesis” that religion originated in an elaborate lie told to a credulous people to compel their obedience, and consequently, religious beliefs are nothing more than elaborate myths constructed in the name of authority to maintain social order.2 Harriot, Greenblatt acknowledges, may not realize his complicity in the test and certainly “does not voice any speculations remotely resembling the hypotheses” (26), but we have to wonder if Harriot intended to explore the principles of this hypothesis. He was, after all, plagued by accusations of atheism throughout his life (see Greenblatt, 21), and Christopher Marlowe seems to have been dangerously aware of the Machiavellian potential of the Report. Marlowe affirmed, as the Elizabethan spy Richard Baines reported in 1593, that “Moses was but a Juggler, and that one Heriots being Sir Walter Ralieghs man Can do more than he” (rpt. in Greenblatt, 21). The connection Marlowe forges between Moses and Harriot implicitly links the Report with Machiavelli’s claim that if examined carefully, the methods used by pagan princes to conquer a people “will not appeare much differing from those of Moyses” (The Prince, 21). Greenblatt’s interpretation presents itself as a valid exploration of the Report as read by Marlowe or anyone, for that matter, who accused Harriot of atheism. The heterodox reading is made possible by Harriot’s description of the functional value of the Algonquian religion. The Algonquians believe, 2. Machiavelli, we should remember, professed belief in God, and although it would have been dangerous not to do so, that fact is not conclusive evidence that Machiavelli was concealing his atheism. In The Prince, Machiavelli briefly touches on Ecclesiastical Principalities, where he argues that “they being sustained by superior causes, whereunto humane understanding reaches not, I will not meddle with them: for being set up and maintained by God; it would be the part of a presumptuous and rash man to enter into discourse of them” (42–43). The editor of the edition I am using remarks in an end note that “Machiavelli is, of course, being ironical in this whole passage in his praise of spiritual, rather than temporal, power” (619n9), a conclusion Greenblatt echos, but the conclusion may be a consequence of our inability to understand fully the power of the spiritual world within Renaissance thought. When the New Historicisms Become Powerful 9 Harriot tells us, in “the immortalitie of the soule, that after this life . . . it is eyther carried to heaven . . . or els to a great pitte hole . . . [and] this opinion worketh so much in manie of the common and simple sort of people that it maketh them have great respect to their Governours” (373– 74). As Harriot sees it, the power of this “false” religion, just as the power of Christianity, is derived from its ability to compel obedience with threats of “otherworldly punishments and rewards” (Greenblatt, 26). Because the observation is coupled with a description of Algonquian society based on categories borrowed from discussions of English social relations, the reader may push the analogy being forged between the two cultures too far, and the falseness of the Algonquian religion may be projected back onto Christianity. Christian claims to truth would then be called into question, and both religions would seem like false doctrines used by those in authority to compel obedience. Another interpretation of the implications of the facts as reported is invoked in “Invisible Bullets,” as Greenblatt begins to report other voices. Greenblatt’s recourse to this procedure is the first indication that his project is becoming implicated in the ideological strategy he has set out to denounce. “A strictly functionalist interpretation even of false religion,” we learn, “was rejected by Christian theologians of the period. . . . Hooker [for instance] argues, ‘lest any man should here conceive, that it greatly skilleth not of what sort our religion be, inasmuch as heathens, Turks, and infidels, impute to religion a great part of the same effects which ourselves ascribe thereunto,’ that the good moral effects of false religions result from their having religious—that is, Christian—truths ‘entwined’ in them” (34). Hooker’s explanation stems from his ability to collapse the profane realm into the sacred or, because the two realms were not inextricably separated, to remind us of the “fact” that the profane world is contained by the sacred, not connected to it in a binary relationship. In this cosmological system, God structures nature, nature structures society, and society structures the individual, so for Hooker, Christian truths will inevitably be inscribed in false religions and profane cultural systems because the material and conceptual elements of all religious and social systems originate in and are contained by the divine word. Harriot’s account of the Algonquians may be grounded in the same assumptions. The Algonquians, we are told, are “instructed by nature 10 Renaissance Incorporations [not religion] to reverence their princes” (26).3 By grounding the “good moral effects” of Algonquian beliefs in nature, Harriot evokes Hooker’s orthodox cosmos, ascribing the positive elements of Algonquian culture to its participation in a larger truth. Even Marlowe’s association of Moses’s practices with Harriot’s may allude to such a cosmos. Marlowe may be combining Hooker’s and Machiavelli’s positions rather than simply negating the orthodox view. As Baines reports it, Marlowe’s equation of Moses with a “juggler” is coupled with the assertion “that the first beginning of Religioun was only to keep men in awe. That it was an easy matter for Moyses being brought up in all the artes of the Egiptians to abuse the Jewes being a rude & grosse people” (rpt. in Greenblatt, 168n9). The arts of the Egyptians, as the Renaissance understood them, were the arts of Hermes Trismegistus. They were magical arts, not scientific—at least as Greenblatt uses this latter term— and their value depended on the same view of the cosmos determining Hooker’s argument. Greenblatt thus needs to dissociate Marlowe, and by implication Harriot, from the hermetic tradition. This need is perhaps why the reference to the art of the Egyptians is relegated to a footnote. More significantly, Greenblatt defines Marlowe’s comments about Moses as an instance of Machiavellian thought because Machiavelli’s texts seem to undermine the magical connotations of the political theory expounded by the spokesmen for Tudor orthodoxy. Machiavelli’s texts can then be regarded as an element “in Renaissance culture . . . that now conform[s] to our own sense of truth” (39), or as subversive in Greenblatt’s terms. Greenblatt also provides an outline of Harriot’s so-called scientific endeavors to dissociate Harriot’s thought from Renaissance magical thinking. Harriot, Marlowe, and Machiavelli have been linked in an associational chain in “Invisible Bullets” to emphasize the possible connection between their thought with a scientific view of the universe in the areas of politics and natural philosophy in contradistinction to the magical view presented by hermetic texts. But if Marlowe is treating Moses as a hermetic figure, the association Greenblatt wants to construct begins to fall apart. Hermetic thought promulgates a magical view of the cosmos, and the reasons Renaissance thinkers were fascinated with it originated with assumptions belonging to the magical tradition. Interest in the hermetic arts derived from a “respect 3. This passage, from the De Bry edition, does not appear in the text I am using. The page number refers to Greenblatt’s essay. When the New Historicisms Become Powerful 11 for the old, the primary . . . as nearest to divine truth” (Yates, Hermetic Tradition, 14) because God’s influence, it was believed, was more powerful the closer one was to the Fall. Those elements of divine truth “entwined” within heathen religions were seen to be a consequence of their ancient origins, and Hermes, for Renaissance readers, was an Egyptian priest who lived around the time of Moses and a gentile prophet who “foresaw the ruin of the early religion and the birth of the new faith, and the coming of Christ” (15). The works attributed to him justified the growing interest in magic flourishing in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Following in this tradition, Giordano Bruno took, in the words of Frances Yates, “the bolder course of maintaining that the magical Egyptian religion of the world was not only the most ancient but also the only true religion, which both Judaism and Christianity had obscured and corrupted” (Hermetic, 11). Bruno was not denying the existence of the Christian God. He was condemning the church for monopolizing the use of magic and thwarting God’s will by preventing us from imitating His divine perfection.4 When Bruno turned to Machiavelli’s topic of political manipulation, expanding it to include all forms of mass manipulation, in Of Bonds in General (De Vinculis in Genere), rather than negate the cosmological laws of the Egyptian arts,5 Bruno celebrates them, detailing the conditions that 4. The Church would not have denied the charge, although they would hardly have characterized their monopoly of magic in negative terms. The Church defended the use of Latin in the mass, as James Bossey points out, because it was believed “that if common folk knew the exact words of the canon they would undoubtedly use them for conjuring and charming” (33). The fear was not misguided; even the church, as Eamon Duffy notes, “recognized that many popular ‘magical’ practices [condemned as unorthodox] . . . were in their origin entirely sacred and were legitimate when applied by pious men” (285). 5. My discussion of Of Bonds in General is based on Couliano’s discussion of the text in Eros and Magic (see 87-106). I should also emphasize here that I am more concerned with the principles determining the thought of the writers I am discussing—which I will discuss below—than with the actual picture of the cosmos constructed. Bruno believed in an infinite universe, but the belief was a consequence of his belief in an immanent God. In Bruno’s view, it was blasphemous to think that God could be confined to a finite cosmos. Bruno’s relationship to Renaissance orthodoxy is thus a strange one from a modern perspective, because the problem has been obscured by our contrasting the Ptolemaic magical cosmos with the Copernican scientific one. For Bruno, the natural laws of his heliocentric infinite universe continued to be magical. When I turn to the four similitudes below, the principles of the magical universe will become clear. The point here is that although the question over whether the cosmos was heliocentric or earth-centered was a matter of controversy, the division does not always emerge as one between science and magic or superstition. 12 Renaissance Incorporations facilitate a manipulator’s ability to subject a people using magic. Marlowe’s remarks about Moses’s power coming from Egyptian arts rather than divine inspiration, while heresy, may partake of the reality of the Hookerian universe. The word “juggler” in the sixteenth century could signify a real magus or a charlatan (OED), and as Bruno’s thought evidences, the Egyptian arts could not have been practiced outside a divinely influenced cosmos. He actually argues that “theology itself, the Christian faith . . . is set up by magical processes” (Couliano, 93). Situating a people within an ideology, which is, according to Greenblatt, the process Machiavelli is describing, is a mass form of bewitchment in Bruno’s view. This last point brings us to the apparent confirmation of the second part of the Machiavellian hypothesis in Harriot’s text. If, as Machiavelli implies, religion is nothing more than a myth to compel obedience, he understood that one could only attempt to impose religious beliefs for such a purpose on a people who barely had civilization at all. If a people already had a developed civilization with their own strong religious beliefs, securing their obedience by converting them to another religion would be an impossible task. The “primitivism” of the Algonquians makes them seem as if they are such a people. When the Indians saw the products of English technology, such as sea compasses and perspective glasses, Harriot informs us, “they thought they were rather the works of gods than of men, or at the leastwise they had bin given and taught us of the gods” (376). Consequently, they began to suspect that the truth “was rather to be had from us, whom God so specially loved than from a people that were so simple, as they found themselves to be in comparison of us” (376). For Greenblatt, we have the core of the Machiavellian hypothesis here; Harriot finds himself among a people unfamiliar with English technology and who are, for this reason, unable to fathom the means by which the English instruments were constructed. The gods, they immediately assume, must be responsible, and the English come to be seen by the Algonquians as God’s people, who have access to His truth, and whose right to govern becomes, in their minds, divinely sanctioned. This illusion will foster the colonial project. In order to read such observations as a confirmation of the Machiavellian hypothesis, the English must perceive the Algonquians’ beliefs about the origins of English technology as the conclusions of ignorant savages. Harriot and his readers must already believe that English technology originates in the secular application of the laws of nature, but the argument begs the question. Assuming in advance that the laws of nature for Harriot or his Marlovian readers are simplified versions of the laws of nature as When the New Historicisms Become Powerful 13 we understand them, Greenblatt assumes in advance that the Elizabethan world picture has already been subverted. The point of his argument, however, is to reveal the ability of Harriot’s text to subvert the cosmological view Elizabethan readers were more likely to have, the one containing those laws validating the theories of a Renaissance magus. A distinct possibility exists that Harriot or his readers, even those of Marlowe’s disposition if the playwright means that Moses became proficient in the hermetic arts, agree with the Indians’ views. Renaissance science, defined by Cornelius Agrippa as “the active part of natural philosophy” (690), was not separated from the magical cosmos but inextricably linked to it, and others, highly respected for their scientific knowledge in the sixteenth century, did not see the necessity of separating their art from the hermetic tradition. John Dee, the most famous English magus in the Elizabethan years, was respected for his scientific endeavors, and for him, as for Agrippa, science was a revival of the magical arts. In the Monas Hieroglyphica (1564), Dee characterizes his work as a profound addition to what he calls “the natural sciences” (117)—a category including, among other fields of study, grammar, mathematics, astronomy, and mechanics. We can regard Dee’s remarks concerning the addition he will make to mechanics as representative of the value he believed his work would have for all fields of study. Referring to the effects produced by “various devices that are useful to . . . the whole craft of hydraulics” (133) as “feats of magic” (133), Dee notes that this craft merely manipulates the “natural tendencies” (133) of the elements, but “no one out of that profession will claim that any machine would raise the element of earth through the region of water into that of fire. The theories of our monad . . . prove that this can be done” (133). The difference between mechanics as it has been so far practiced and the mechanics made possible by Dee’s theories is the difference between a mechanics manipulating the material elements as in the craft of hydraulics and one manipulating the metaphysical analogues of these materials. “The region of . . . fire” refers not to natural fire but to the elemental sphere separating the sublunar region from the other spheres. As hydraulics is to the physical world, Dee wants us to believe, the craft for which he is laying the theoretical groundwork is to the metaphysical realm. Dee’s hope is to discover a method to transform the sublunar world into a sphere without mutability by raising the element of earth, metaphorically speaking, onto a plain of existence on par with the element of fire. A few years later, Dee continued to affirm the metaphysical uses of his theories in his “Mathematicall Preface” (1570). In this text, he ignores 14 Renaissance Incorporations the importance of the distinction between the physical and metaphysical use of the arts by implicitly connecting our ability to produce the more mundane devices alluded to in the Monas and our ability to perform the more difficult magic made possible by the theories of the monad with our ability to imitate God. Defining mathematics as the foundation of all other arts, he writes, “by numbers, a way is had, to the searching out, and understanding of everything, able to be known” (B4r). Mathematics, he goes on to claim, is, a science . . . used of the Almighty and incomprehensible wisedome of the Creator, in the distinct creation of all creatures: in all their distinct parts, properties, natures, and vertues, by order, and most absolute number, brought from Nothing, to the formality of their being and state. By Numbers property therefore, of us, by all possible means, (To the perfection of the Science) learned, we may both wind and draw ourselves into the inward and deep search and view, of all creatures distinct vertues, natures, properties, and Formes: And also, farther, arise, clime, ascend and mount up (with Speculative wings) in spirit, to behold in the Glass of Creation, the Form of Forms. (B4v−r) Learning mathematics is here represented as means to learn about the cosmos and acquire at least some of the knowledge needed by God to create it. Mathematics will, on this account, allow us to acquire God-like powers. Because Dee calls mathematics a “science,” he relates it to “the active part of natural philosophy.” Mathematics gives us the ability to create devices, and by bringing into being something once nonexistent, we imitate God’s creative act. To learn mathematics is to learn about God, and to use one’s mathematical knowledge is to imitate Him. Dee became an “influential teacher and adviser on scientific subjects in England” (French, 17) from 1558 to the middle of the 1580s, and we should not be surprised to find his name linked to Harriot’s. Harriot, as well as Marlowe, was associated with Dee’s circle at Mortlake,6 and “in the British museum copy of El viaje que hizo Antonio de Espejonen el anno ochenta y tres, the following notation by Dee appears on the title page: ‘Joannes Dee: A 1590. Januarii. 24 Ex done Thomas Hariot, Amici 6. Others associated with this circle at one time or another in their lives include Walter Ralegh and John Donne (See French, 171). When the New Historicisms Become Powerful 15 me’” (French, 172n4), suggesting not only friendship but mutual respect. An alternative associational chain to the one Greenblatt constructs is beginning to emerge. Rather than Machiavelli, Marlowe, and Harriot, we have Dee, Marlowe, and Harriot. By simply replacing Machiavelli’s with Dee’s name, the significance of the association takes on late medieval, not early modern, connotations.7 Greenblatt does give voice to the alternatives that may help us associate Harriot’s scientific endeavors and his confidence in his cultural superiority with Dee’s world, once again reporting the alien voices of Renaissance orthodoxy. Donald Friedman remarks, “It would . . . ‘be just like an established intellectual, or simply a well-placed Elizabethan bourgeois, to accept that his superior “powers”—moral, technological, cultural—were indeed signs of divine favor’” (31–32),8 and in the Novum Organum (1620), Sir Francis Bacon argues, “scientific discoveries” (to use Greenblatt’s phrase) “are like new creations, imitations of God’s handiworks. . . . Consider if you will the difference there is between the life of men in the most civilized province of Europe, and in the most savage and barbarous part of New India, and reflect that the difference is so great as truly to justify the saying ‘Man is a god to man.’ . . . And this difference comes . . . from the arts” (130; also rpt. in Greenblatt, 32). There is something odd about Greenblatt’s use of Bacon and about the passage Greenblatt cites from the Novum Organum. Bacon is traditionally regarded as the founder of an early modern scientific method. If anyone is subversive in Greenblatt’s terms, Bacon deserves to be thought of as such, but in “Invisible Bullets,” Bacon is treated as one of the promulgators of orthodoxy. Greenblatt has, in fact, demonstrated the difficulty with categorizing Renaissance thinkers as early modern. Bacon ascribes value to his arts with an argument Dee would have no problem incorporating into his writings, so even if Bacon, in Jonathan Dollimore’s view, articulates “materialist notions of the ideological” (Radical, 10), he seems to have 7. For a discussion of the relationship between the thought of Bruno, Harriot, Ralegh, Dee, and Marlowe see John Mebane’s Renaissance Magic. Mebane, however, makes a distinction between real sciences and magical practices, even though such a distinction may not have been so clear to those in the sixteenth century. 8. These conjectures, along with the quotation from Bacon’s Novum Organum, only appear in the final version of the essay in Shakespearean Negotiations. Friedman is probably responding to an earlier version, for a footnote tells us the remarks are from Greenblatt’s private correspondence. 16 Renaissance Incorporations done so not with Dollimore’s, but a version of Dee’s, cosmos in mind. The Novum Organum itself attests to the link between Bacon’s thought and that of Dee, for although Bacon establishes a method to reject the content of the traditions associated with Dee, the Novum Organum does not fully abandon the dynamics of the cosmos Dee spent his life refining. Distinguishing between idols and true ideas, Bacon writes, “there is a great difference between the idols of the human mind and the ideas of the divine mind; that is to say, between certain empty opinions and the genuine signatures and marks impressed on created things” (49). His explanation for the emergence of the idols even evokes Bruno’s language. Besides ascribing their presence to the inadequacy inherent in the human condition, Bacon observes that these idols “arise . . . from the mode of impression” (61). Just as God imprinted the ideas on the primordial chaos, it would seem, the idols have been imprinted within us, so we need, Bacon is claiming, to purge from our thought these false idols and allow the “genuine signatures and marks [to be] impressed” on our minds. The goal of this early modern scientific method, like the goal of Dee’s, is to teach us to fashion ourselves into a more accurate reflection of the divine Being, hence the ability of the application of true knowledge to transform “us” into god-like creatures. The connection between Harriot and Dee and between Bacon’s thought and the cosmological system providing a ground for magical belief-systems implies that a logic other than the one that Greenblatt ascribes to the Report can be extrapolated from Harriot’s text. The “alien” voices of the Algonquians may strengthen, as Greenblatt’s own use of sources implicitly confirms, rather than call into question the world view of a Hooker. Harriot may be recording Indian beliefs to demonstrate the ways Algonquian culture already reflects Christian truth instead of merely displaying the naiveté which will facilitate “our” manipulation of the Algonquians. Before describing the Algonquian religion, Harriot observes, “some religion they have alreadie, which although it be farre from the truth, yet beyng as it is, there is hope it may bee the easier and sooner reformed” (italics added, 272). Harriot is asking his readers to observe the Algonquians’ natural propensity to accept the truth, for “being as it is,” their religion simply needs to be reformed, not totally rejected. Their knowledge of Heaven and Hell, for example, will facilitate “our” ability to convert them to Christianity. That they have possession of this truth without biblical knowledge can be interpreted as evidence of their natural participation in God’s universal mind. By adding knowledge of the Bible to the process begun by nature, the English will be aiding When the New Historicisms Become Powerful 17 the natives in a journey toward salvation already begun, and this alone justifies the English presence in Virginia. The respect for the Algonquians that Brian Vickers perceives in the Report takes on considerable force in this context (see 256–57). Furthermore, even if Harriot’s point is to display the naiveté of the Indians, that does not necessarily lead to the conclusion that he would categorize the methods used to subject them as a series of techniques dependent on the use of illusion. Like Machiavelli, Bruno also affirms, It is all the easier to enchain (vincire) people who have less knowledge. In them the soul opens in such a way that it makes room for the passage of impressions aroused by the performer’s [magical] techniques, opening wide windows which, in others, are always closed. (Qtd. in Couliano, 94) The ignorance of the subjects to be manipulated is not important because magic is a “series of clever tricks [and] fraudulent illusions” (24), as Greenblatt argues. Their ignorance indicates that they are pure. Their minds have only been filled with natural impressions, so they are open to the further impressions of the magus’s culture. That the Hebrews were “a rude & grosse” people is only one of the conditions, Bruno might argue, facilitating Moses’s use of the Egyptian arts. The more important condition would have been the power of those arts, and Bruno does imply, in The Expulsion of the Triumphant Beast (1584), that this is the case: Moses, who departed from the court of Pharaoh learned in all the sciences of the Egyptians, who in the multitude of his manifestations surpassed all those who were experts in magic, demonstrate[d] his excellence so as to be a divine emissary to that people and a representative of the authority of the god of the Jews. (245)9 9. John Dee, in the “Mathematicall Preface,” also attempts to distinguish his magic from illicit forms by associating himself with Moses. Addressing those who would condemn him, he writes, “I would wish, that at leasure, you would consider, how Basilius Magnus layeth Moses and Daniel before the eyes of those, which count all such studies Philosophical (as mine hath been) to be ungodly or unprofitable. . . . Moses was instructed in all manner of wisdome of the Aegyptians, and he was of power both in his words and works. You see this Philisophical Power and Wisdome, which Moses had, to be nothing misliked of the Holy Ghost” (N1v). 18 Renaissance Incorporations Although the alien voices of Renaissance orthodoxy, cited by Greenblatt, have made it possible for us to call into question his thesis—just as the alien voices recorded by Harriot allow Greenblatt to mark the instability of the Elizabethan world picture—the argument of Greenblatt’s essay, just as in Greenblatt’s view the argument of Harriot’s Report, demands that these potentially subversive voices be heard. Without these voices, the intention of each text could not be articulated, so these intentions explain the inclusion of the voices alien to each. For Harriot, proving to his readers “that there is good hope they [the Algonquians] may be brought through discreet dealing and governement to the imbracing of the trueth, and consequently to honour, obey, feare, and love us” (381) requires Harriot to describe his own success in this endeavor, showing “us” the qualities of the Algonquian people that will facilitate “our” transformation of them into English subjects: the value of what the Indians say depends not on what their signifiers mean for them but on what their signifiers mean for the desire of the English. For Greenblatt, exploring the dialectic between subversion and orthodoxy requires him to make us aware of some of the ways Renaissance thinkers could contain the historical movement toward the secular cosmos we inhabit. Without quoting from Hooker and Bacon, Greenblatt’s piece would only contain early modern thought, and the relationship between subversion and containment could not be explored. In both Harriot’s and Greenblatt’s texts, the alien voices have been recorded not to be fully heeded, but this fact only partly explains the ability of each text to virtually silence these voices. In order to further explore the dynamic allowing these voices to be both heard and muted, we need to recall the significance of Harriot’s explanation as both Greenblatt and I have interpreted it. Harriot exposes, according to Greenblatt, the credulity of the Indians to demonstrate the ability of the English to use illusions to impose their will and get the Algonquians to accept both Christianity and English rule. I have argued that Harriot may be foregrounding the similarities between the Algonquians and the English to demonstrate that each culture is inscribed in the same God-centered universe, which endows the English with a moral responsibility to convert the Algonquians to Christianity, and consequently, what Greenblatt calls illusions are, from Harriot’s position, truths. Except for the part about the illusionary nature of the divine origin of Harriot’s arts, these interpretations need not be regarded as mutually exclusive. As Bruno’s theories demonstrate, Algonquian naiveté may facilitate the processes of magical as well as secular manipulation, but When the New Historicisms Become Powerful 19 Greenblatt’s representation of them as illusions is important. It suggests that Harriot’s text is mediated through Greenblatt in the same way as the Algonquian voices are mediated through Harriot. Greenblatt thus reveals and unwittingly reiterates a significant colonialist maneuver. Although the discourses sanctioning colonialism may on some level “other” the culture to be colonized, on another level, these same discourses refashion that culture into an imperfect reflection of the discoursing culture. The logic generating this paradox is the force silencing the disruptive interpretations in the end. The contradiction in colonialist discourses derives from a failure to explore the alien voices in the context in which they are given meaning. Greenblatt’s recourse to such a move is suggested by my ability to read as pre-modern the elements of Renaissance thought defined as modern in “Invisible Bullets,” something I have accomplished by relating the material in the text to a larger frame of reference than Greenblatt explores. I have not attempted the same procedure with the Algonquian voices because I simply do not have the same sort of access to the network of associations which would allow me to do so. For me, these voices must be left unanalyzed if I am to avoid misrepresenting them. The Western reader can only interpret these voices by relating them to something he already knows, which would oblige him to transform the different into something similar. Both Harriot and Greenblatt engage in such a maneuver. Harriot does so by treating the Algonquian social structure as an analogue to the one found in England and by defining the Algonquian’s “otherworldly punishments” as the punishment to be found in the Christian Hell. Greenblatt does so by treating the Algonquian notion of “invisible bullets” as a primitive theory of epidemic disease. After making these connections, both Harriot and Greenblatt go on to remind the reader of the inability of the Algonquians to know the meaning of their words, at least as Harriot and Greenblatt understand them, so they call attention to the difference between the primitive and the advanced. We, the readers of the Algonquians’ signs, possess the “correct” interpretation, while they know not what they say. A remark Jonathan Culler makes about the conditions that allow interpretation to proceed will help us to clarify Greenblatt and Harriot’s maneuver; according to Culler, “meaning and reading are . . . produced in processes of contextualization, decontextualization, and recontextualization” (128). By severing signifiers—say “otherworldly punishment and reward” or “invisible bullets”—from their native context (or decontextualizing them), we endow ourselves with the ability to 20 Renaissance Incorporations recontextualize them within our own culture and give them meaning. In the present examples, the signifiers become versions of Heaven and Hell or a metaphorical reference to germs, so the natives are recognized as similar. But since the natives are not members of our culture, they do not have access, we are forced to acknowledge, to the context we have used to endow their signifiers with their “correct” meaning. Similarity has been transformed into simplicity, and the natives have been redefined as “primitive” or “savage” and therefore different. Having transformed the other into the primitive, we endow ourselves with the ability to transform the “primitive” or the different into the advanced or the same. Through a recontextualization of native culture into a Christian or scientific context, in the examples cited here, we transform the inchoate into the fully formed, erasing the obvious differences of the foreign culture and imposing the colonizer’s, or ours. Appropriation is, in effect, an alibi for colonialism. Harriot and Greenblatt not only include potentially disruptive ideas in their texts for the same reason but also try to efface the power of these ideas in the same way. Both writers decontextualize and recontextualize the recorded elements. It is Greenblatt’s participation in this process which fully implicates his project in Harriot’s. Failing to provide a context that would empower the ideas that he cites from Hooker and Bacon, Greenblatt makes these positions merely credulous attempts to contain the subversion “implicit” in Harriot. They are inevitably doomed to become antiquated and so rest comfortably within the pages of Greenblatt’s essay because we can’t help but regard them as the illusions used by the Elizabethans to conceal from themselves their own motives. The smugness of Bacon and of Friedman’s imagined bourgeois gentleman and Hooker’s negotiation of the categories of the secular and the profane seem, in the words of Stephen L. Collins describing similar appeals to Renaissance orthodoxy, a “type of conviction [which] offered psychological sustenance during a time of widespread doubt about authority, order, and unity” (104). Greenblatt’s position in relation to the Elizabethans suddenly seems very similar to the one he represents Harriot taking in relation to the Algonquians. Those Elizabethans who believe what they are saying are naive natives whose truths are easily ignored. But that is not all. Greenblatt’s thesis depends on asserting that the Machiavellian hypothesis—the hypothesis endowing his interpretation with historical specificity—explains Harriot’s remarks on both the Algonquian religion and the effects of the English presence on the Indians, so the position that I have argued Harriot assumes in relation to the When the New Historicisms Become Powerful 21 Indians is also analogous to the one Greenblatt assumes. Greenblatt is an advanced version of Harriot because Harriot’s discourse is already, albeit in a simplified form, participating in modernity. If it is not, the Report does not at once assert and deny the ground on which English authority rests (that is, Christian truth) because if the power is monolithic and does not generate its own subversion, there is nothing to contain. Thus the modernism of the Report must be foregrounded, and just as Harriot can imply that Algonquian beliefs have inscribed within them Christian truths and validate the universality of his truth, “Invisible Bullets” seeks to validate its truth by highlighting the commitment of Renaissance thought to modernity. The process of appropriating Elizabethan culture, inscribing it within our own, and judging Elizabethan thought in accordance with our cultural views acquires value only through the transformation of Renaissance culture into an early modern one. When Greenblatt turns to Shakespeare to explore Foucault’s thesis, his participation in this process becomes fully manifest, and the possibility that another hypothesis is being tested begins to become evident. The project of Foucault and of the new historicists, I should point out, is “to grasp the terms of the discourse which made it possible,” in Jean Howard’s words, “to see the ‘facts’ in a particular way—indeed, made it possible to see certain phenomena as fact at all” (29–30), so “truth,” Greenblatt implicitly accepts, is a historical construct, a product of ideology rather than an ahistorical transcendental reality capable of emerging in all ages and cultures despite the contingencies of history. Bearing this in mind, we should be surprised to discover not only that Shakespeare “understood very early in his career that power consisted . . . in a systematic structure of relationships, those linked strategies” (40) isolated and identified in A Brief and True Report, but also that he understood that Henry V’s ideal image “involves as its positive condition the constant production of its own radical subversion and the powerful containment of that subversion” (41). By attributing a Foucauldian consciousness to Shakespeare, Greenblatt implicitly evokes and thereby tests the humanist hypothesis that there are unalterable universal truths which allow us to read the literature of any age, discover these truths, and impart them to our students. This hypothesis is not in any sense radically subversive, but it does subvert the position from which Greenblatt speaks, transforming modern thought into the transcendental realities that have enabled him to define both the subversive and the orthodox. As a result, modernity begins to function in a fashion similar to the one that Derrida ascribes to the concept of “the center” in 22 Renaissance Incorporations Western philosophy. Derrida argues “that the center . . . constituted [in classical thought] that very thing within a structure which while governing the structure, escapes structurality. This is why classical thought concerning structure could say that the center is, paradoxically, within the structure and outside it. The center is at the center of the totality, and yet since the center does not belong to the totality (is not part of the totality), the totality has its center elsewhere” (Writing and Difference, 279). Turning modernity into the center that is at once inside and outside the cultural text causes the notion of modernity to fluctuate between the terms within the subversion/containment system because the significance ascribed to each is dependent upon the center stabilizing the system. The system has become imbued with modernity (just as the universe becomes imbued with God in a God-centered cosmos), and the late medieval returns as the surface hypocrisy of a society which is at the core modern. This is why Greenblatt can claim that “moral authority” in Renaissance England “rests upon a hypocrisy so deep that the hypocrites themselves believe it” (55). How, we might ask, can someone act in a way that his beliefs tell him is morally correct and at the same time pretend to morality? If he believes in the morality of his actions, he cannot be a hypocrite, not even if ontological moral categories exist prior to the social. The Elizabethans can only be hypocrites if their culture is already essentially modern. Modernity has become an essential aspect of the human condition, uniting our values to the Elizabethans’, and as Barthes might point out, “this means postulating a human essence, and here is God reintroduced into our” materialism (Mythologies, 100). Modernity functions like God, and belief in Renaissance orthodoxy constitutes something analogous to psychoanalytic denial. Unlike the center in Western philosophy as described by Derrida, however, modernity does not escape structurality because it also resides inside the binary system, functioning as the source of subversion. Subversion thereby becomes equivalent to transcendental truth. When Greenblatt turns to the Henriad, having ascribed to Shakespeare an awareness of this transcendental modernity residing above the subversion/ containment opposition, Greenblatt can align Shakespeare to the center that is at once inside and outside the cultural text. But something quite strange happens as the transition from the Report to the Henriad is made. The subversive elements in the plays become a language, in Greenblatt’s words, of “innate grace, limitless playfulness, absolute friendship, generosity, and trust” (41). Notice Greenblatt’s recourse to a religious and metaphysical terminology in this description of the Falstaffian milieu, most notably When the New Historicisms Become Powerful 23 his use of the words “grace” and “absolute.” We have here a language of transcendental value. This move is quite consistent with the logic developing in “Invisible Bullets,” and it allows Greenblatt to represent Hal/Henry V as an anti-essence, embodying a language a Christian would call evil. By rejecting Falstaff, the embodiment of subversion, the prince also rejects this “transcendental” language. Cut off, as it were, from the “divine” essence, Hal becomes the quintessential alien. Greenblatt then proceeds to record Hal’s “secret commitment to disciplinary authority” (48), and here is where the vertiginous shifting of modernity between both terms of the binary opposition comes back to haunt the essay. Hal, as we might have suspected, comes to embody those strategies of “testing, recording, and explaining,” but in doing so, he comes to embody modernity and so subversion. The point of the essay, one might argue, is to demonstrate how Renaissance authority “involves as its positive condition the constant production of its own radical subversion and the containment of that subversion” (41), so there is no contradiction. In a sense, this observation would be correct. But the logic of the essay erases Elizabethan orthodoxy, so Hal’s only option is to embody modernity. By equating modernity not only with subversion but also with transcendental truth, Greenblatt makes Henry V’s ideal image dependent upon his revealing his modernity, and according to the essay, Hal does reveal it. The containment of Elizabethan orthodoxy begins to seem like a fiction, and because of this contradiction, Hal seems to become the representative of those transcendental or modern values that he is said to negate. To conceal this difficulty, Greenblatt must record Hal’s voice in such a way as to align him with Warwick in II Henry IV, so Greenblatt argues, on Warwick’s authority, that Hal “studies his companions/ . . . to gain [a] language” (4.4.68−69) which, once learned, “comes to no further use/ But to be known and hated” (4.4.72−73). Having established that Hal’s hypocrisy is a consequence of this maneuver (learning a language to reject it), Greenblatt goes on to reiterate it. In his mind, once Hal’s language is learned, “it comes to no further use/ But to be known and hated.” Hal’s voice, defined a priori as an absence (in the theological sense of this word), the evidence for which being precisely Hal’s rejection of those absolute (or modern) values embodied by Falstaff, must be denigrated. If it is not, Hal and Falstaff will be too closely aligned, but because the logic of the essay denies the possibility of rejecting modernity, regardless of which side of the subversion/containment opposition Hal is situated on, the only method to differentiate subversion from orthodoxy is constantly to remind the reader of Hal’s hypocritical 24 Renaissance Incorporations and fraudulent behavior. Greenblatt’s own voice thereby becomes aligned not only to the voice of Hal as it is represented in “Invisible Bullets” but also with the voice of Thomas Harman’s cony catching pamphlets (also condemned in the essay). Like Greenblatt’s text, these pamphlets recorded the language of criminals to teach citizens how to recognize a criminal before he succeeded in transforming them into victims. What has changed is the site from which the criminal language emanates; it now comes from the court, not Eastcheap. The possibility of aligning Greenblatt with the very strategies he seeks to displace is to observe him erasing Renaissance orthodoxy and cultural difference even as he asserts its power. This point returns us to Reid, with whom I began, and the implications of his remarks for contemporary criticism. The new historicists deny that Renaissance myths could constitute the truth in the culture in which they are said to function as orthodoxies. Compelled to acknowledge Renaissance mythologies in their discussions of Renaissance texts, they have simply treated these orthodoxies as if they already reflected a modern sensibility, defining them as reflections of our own discourses or as self-conscious lies. In the process, they have not only denied Renaissance culture its value but its existence as well.10 Greenblatt exemplifies this ruse; for him, the world has always been constructed in compliance with the same principles, and even if this were not consciously admitted and people persisted in asserting their difference, unconsciously a modern sensibility has always been available. My focus on “Invisible Bullets” may risk condemning my critique to the inadequacies of prior commentaries on the new historicisms. Montrose has described these inadequacies as the tendency of commentators to “seiz[e] on the provocative argument of ‘Invisible Bullets,’ misleadingly ascrib[e] to the essay the claims of a cultural law, and then inaccurately represen[t] it as the central tenet of the new historicism . . . using it to characterize the work of those who have been explicitly engaged in contesting Greenblatt’s thesis” 10. A reading of the Raven-and-the clamshell story following the maneuvers determining Greenblatt’s reading of the Algonquian’s “invisible bullets” could be offered along these lines: the story is from the Haida tribe, who inhabit islands off the coast of Alaska, so their origin story could be represented as a story about the time when the sea closed off the passage uniting Asia to the Americas. Conjecturing that those closest to the coast were the last to arrive, one could further conjecture that the beach from which they emerged is the beach created by the flood. We can find contained within the traditional account clues that will replace it, but to foreground these clues is to redefine Haida culture as our own, and thereby, to assert the superiority of our truths. When the New Historicisms Become Powerful 25 (“New Historicisms,” 403). I have not, it should be noted, represented Greenblatt’s thesis concerning subversion/containment as a cultural law but have claimed that the ideological maneuvers allowing the argument to proceed typify the methods of the new historicists in general. To prove this point, we need only observe those places in which our thought is described as the explicit and intentional meaning of the Elizabethans, especially by those critics “engaged in contesting Greenblatt’s thesis.” When commenting on texts unambiguously expounding orthodoxy, cultural materialists treat expressions of orthodoxy as if they were produced by a given writer’s emerging modern consciousness. Dollimore and Alan Sinfield, for example, criticize Tillyard for failing to make anything “of the fact that the writers he discusses were members of the class faction of which the government of the country was constituted, or were sponsored by the government, or aspired to be” (207). This fact, for Dollimore and Sinfield, suggests that the writers discussed by Tillyard understand their function as the purveyors of a false ideology but are self-consciously propagating lies to keep the commoners in ignorance and maintain their positions or flatter those in such positions. Modern, or should I say postmodern, ideas are eventually confirmed as universal truths. In “The Introduction to the Second Edition” of Radical Tragedy, Dollimore surprisingly contradicts the central tenet of materialist criticism and writes, “we can say that poststructuralism rediscovered what the Renaissance already knew: identity is powerfully—one might say essentially—informed by what it is not” (italics added, xxxi). A good portion of the book to which we are being introduced denounces non-materialist readings of Renaissance literature because they fail to acknowledge the historical production of “truth,” so Dollimore’s own pretension to the possession of an essential truth condemns his criticism by its own standards. The concept of materialism, used by Dollimore to overturn essentialism, has been, to cite a concern Derrida has expressed about much materialist discourse, “reinvested with ‘logocentric’ value . . . [and so has been] reconstituted as a ‘transcendental signified’” (Positions, 64−65). Following their assumptions to their logical end, the new historicists have produced a view of the late sixteenth century as a period in which few if any men or women found themselves inscribed within “the dominant ideology.” Rabkin’s duck seems to have disappeared from the gestaltist’s drawing altogether, and the early modern/late medieval problem has become a fiction of both old style historicists and hypocritical power hungry Elizabethans. If such is the case, there is never any subversion at all, 26 Renaissance Incorporations and the alternative voices are merely verbalizations of a collective disbelief. In order to legitimize the project of exploring the deterioration of a late medieval ideology, the Elizabethan world picture must be reintroduced through the back door and endowed with dominance. The objection to Tillyard must be modified; it is not that he “was mistaken in identifying a metaphysic of order in the period, nor even that it had ceased to exist by the turn of the century.” Rather, he falsified “history and social process in the name of ‘the collective mind of the people’” (Dollimore, “Shakespeare, Cultural Materialism,” 5). The dominance of the so-called Elizabethan ideology is at once asserted and denied, so regardless of whether or not materialists are representing the forces of containment or subversion, they inevitably find texts generated by an early modern consciousness. Rabkin’s gestaltist’s drawing has now turned into a rare beast that from one perspective appears to be a rabbit and from another appears to be the same rabbit thinly disguised as a duck. Montrose’s characterization of posing “the problematic of ideology . . . [in terms of subversion and orthodoxy as] simplistic, reductive, and hypostatized” (“New Historicisms,” 402), while accurate, also seems to be an avoidance of a contradiction, not simply a move toward theoretical sophistication. It would be just as valid to say that if subversion means early modernism, the category denies the subversive quality of many practices condemned by sixteenth- and seventeenth-century authorities. As late as the second half of the seventeenth century, according to Keith Thomas, “scientists, anxious to shake off overtones of sectarian radicalism” (270) did so by rejecting or ignoring the premises of the hermetic tradition. Magic was just as much a part of revolutionary thought as materialism. Montrose is uninterested in such concerns. He wants to convince us of the need to theorize a more sophisticated vision of cultural dynamics, not a more sophisticated view of Renaissance thought. Historical contexts, in this view, can be replaced by a meta-cultural theoretical paradigm. The penchant, which I have identified in “Invisible Bullets” and have briefly been commenting upon in other materialist texts, of the new historicists to assert and deny the power of the dominant ideology makes one of the most problematic aspects of materialist criticism unsurprising. As Debora Kuller Shuger points out, although the new historicists represent late medieval thought as the orthodox “body of ideas roughly identical to those of the ‘Elizabethan World Picture,’” which was undermined by a “host of subversive, marginalized voices, whether those of the oppressed When the New Historicisms Become Powerful 27 or skeptical” (1),11 they “consistently ru[n] up against the fact that radical questioning, alternative voices, and perception of contradiction manifest themselves within supposedly orthodox texts” (2). The new historicists cannot help but find radical questioning because everything they observe is already inscribed in an early modern context. The possibility of different world views being generated by the same late medieval epistemological assumptions is not even considered, so Franco Moretti can argue that Shakespeare “demonstrates inexorably how, [by] obeying the old rules [that is, Tillyard’s], which are the only ones he knows, the world can only fall apart” (68). Such assertions are problematic because, due to a lack of interest, we no longer bother to explore the principles of orthodoxy, but if “radical subversiveness,” as Dollimore says, is “a challenge to the principles upon which authority is based” (“Shakespeare, Cultural Materialism,” 13),12 we need to understand these principles before we can even begin to find subversion. A host of critics now writing would probably interpret Bruno’s rejection of Christianity as radical, but by Dollimore’s definition, it is not “radical subversion” because Bruno does not reject but reutilizes the principles upon which Renaissance Christianity rests. Heretical he was, but one did not need to be a proto-modern to commit heresy. II. What Is To Be Done? To clarify what we mean by orthodoxy, it will be useful to return to Michel Foucault’s archeological studies. The content of Foucault’s early work has often been ignored by Anglo-American critics because interest in French theory did not become intense until after Foucault’s later genealogical work on power and sexuality. Our own will to novelty has made this later work more influential. Returning to Foucault’s earlier work will enable 11. New historicists and cultural materialists, it should be added, are not practicing a brand of deconstruction: the texts, or the authors, perceive the contradictions or present alternative voices and radical questioning. For the deconstructionist, the text and author are unaware of the contradictions that undermine the intended position being argued. Further, the position a particular text is arguing is not the interest of these historicists: they are interested in what is being said about the “Elizabethan world picture.” The texts do not deconstruct themselves but undermine a larger cultural perspective. 12. The implied distinction between a significant and an insignificant subversion is often ignored.