SHAKESPEARE , CULTURE , NEW HISTORICISM UDC 821 . 111 . 09 : 821 . 111 - 2 Shakespeare

In the 1980s, New Historicism was a strikingly innovative way of examining literary history, as well as practicing literary theory. Greatly influenced by the work of Louis Althusser and Michel Foucault, New Historicists in America and their British counterparts, Cultural Materialists, set to rewrite the history of Western literature in such a way as to challenge what they considered the socio-politically determined literary canon of the past. In practice, this meant that classical texts from Renaissance and Romanticism Shakespeare's plays in particular were re-viewed from a far less favorable perspective; great works of art were discovered to have been reproducing the discourses of power and sustained the system, without ever seriously challenging it asserting thus the oppressive omnipotence of culture. This paper explores not so much the theory of New Historicism/Cultural Materialism but the potentially dangerous uses of both the assumptions these critics start from and the conclusions at which they arrive. The works examined closely are several essays by Stephen Greenblatt and Alan Sinfield in which they attempt to demonstrate that Shakespeare's plays, from King Henry IV to Othello, are the most powerful instruments for the promotion of culture. These interpretations are necessarily contrasted with the humanist tradition that set up Shakespeare as the most passionate explorer (by no means the promoter) of Western culture and its many crimes. The whole literature of the past will have been destroyed. Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Byron – they'll exist only in Newspeak version, not merely changed into something different but actually changed into something contradictory of what they used to be. George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four New Historicism has more in common with Newspeak than the explicit verbal link (the word "new"). The sole aim of Newspeak, as one of the characters in the novel unwittingly remarks, is to narrow the range of thoughts, this being the basis of successful long-term domination and exploitation. This essay will attempt to demonstrate that New Historicism, richer, subtler, seductively profound, seemingly non-ideological (to say the least), ironically performs the same function. Received September 24, 2004