Richard Strier The Unrepentant Renaissance From Petrarch to Shakespeare to Milton 2011

  The Unrepentant Renaissance

  

The Unrepentant

Renaissance

f r o m p e t r a r c h

t o s h a k e s p e a r e

t o m i l t o n

  

Richard Strier r i c h a r d s t r i e r is the Frank L. Sulzberger Distinguished Service Professor in the Department of English and in the College at the University of Chicago. He has coedited

several interdisciplinary essay collections and is the author of many articles and two books,

Resistant Structures: Particularity, Radicalism, and Renaissance Texts and Love Known:

Theology and Experience in George Herbert’s Poetry, the latter published by the University

of Chicago Press.

  The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

© 2011 by The University of Chicago All rights reserved. Published 2011. Printed in the United States of America 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 1 2 3 4 5

isbn-13: 978-0-226-77751-1 (cloth)

isbn-10: 0-226-77751-0 (cloth)

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Strier, Richard.

The unrepentant Renaissance : from Petrarch to Shakespeare to Milton / Richard Strier.

p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn-13: 978-0-226-77751-1 (hardcover : alk. paper)

isbn-10: 0-226-77751-0 (hardcover : alk. paper) 1. European literature—Renaissance,

1450–1600—History and criticism. 2. English literature—Early modern, 1500–1700—

History and criticism. 3. Petrarca, Francesco, 1304–1374—Criticism and interpretation.

4. Shakespeare, William, 1564–1616—Criticism and interpretation. I. Title.

  PN721.s835 2011

809'.89409024—dc22 2010050570

a

This paper meets the requirements of ansi/niso z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

  

To my students, over the years, in

“Renaissance Intellectual Texts” at the University of Chicago

  

c o n t e n t s

Acknowledgments ix

  Introduction: Back to Burckhardt (Plus the Reformations)

  1

pa r t 1 In Defense of Passion and the Body

  1 Against the Rule of Reason: Praise of Passion from Petrarch to Luther to Shakespeare to Herbert

  29

  2 Against Judgment: Petrarch and Shakespeare at Sonnets

  59

  3 Against Morality: From Richard III to Antony and Cleopatra

  98 a p p e n d i x 1 Shakespearean Seduction 125 a p p e n d i x 2 Morality and the Happy Infant: The Case of Macbeth 132

pa r t 2 In Defense of Worldliness

  

4 Sanctifying the Bourgeoisie: The Cultural Work of The Comedy of Errors 153

a p p e n d i x Sanctifying the Aristocracy: From Ignatius Loyola to François de Sales (and then to Donne and Herbert) 187

pa r t 3 In Defense of Pride

  

5 Self-Revelation and Self-Satisfaction in Montaigne and Descartes 207

  

6 Milton against Humility 248

  

a c k n o w l e d g m e n t s

  It was with the help of the students in my graduate seminar, “Renaissance In- tellectual Texts,” given periodically at the University of Chicago since the late 1970s, that I developed the courage to wander beyond the bounds of English literature into the wider world of Renaissance texts and ideas. My experience with these students—some of whom are now famous professors (you know who you are!)—allowed me to feel at home enough in texts by Petrarch, Eras- mus, Loyola, Descartes, and other Continental figures to write about them in detail. I could not have embarked on this project without the experience and support of our shared endeavor. This is truly a significant debt, and one that I am delighted to be able to acknowledge in the dedication of this book.

  But of course that is not the end of my debts. There is a small group of friends and colleagues whose voices and points of view I have internalized so deeply that I feel I am in dialogue with them even if I am not (as I often am) lit- erally so. This group has long included Stephen Greenblatt, Frank Whigham, and Michael Murrin. Kathy Eden has recently entered the circle. My Ren- aissance colleagues in the English department have long been a source of in- spiration and instruction: David Bevington, Joshua Scodel, Michael Murrin (again), and my newest and extremely shrewd and generous colleague, Bradin Cormack. Janel Mueller cotaught the original version of the course that led to this book. William Veeder sat through and responded sagely to accounts of various chapters and readings through many a sacred Wednesday lunch over

   Acknowledgments

  and to audiences at Vanderbilt (especially Deak Nabers), CCNY, Hope Col- lege (especially John Cox), and Emory University (especially Rick Rambuss), to the members of the Chicago-area faculty Renaissance Seminar, and to the gradu- ate workshop on the history of political and social thought at the University of Chicago. A request from Michael Schoenfeldt provided the happy occasion for me to work on Petrarch and Shakespeare. For comments (not always agree- ing, but always helpful) on this material, especially with regard to Petrarch’s

  

Rime, I am grateful to my colleagues in Italian literature, Justin Steinberg and

  Armando Maggi, to the members of the Western Mediterranean workshop at the university, and to Gordon Braden, Michael Murrin, David Quint, Leonard Barkan, William West, and Robert von Hallberg. For further comments, I am grateful to Frank Whigham and Lars Engle. The third and central chapter of this book began as a paper for a terrific conference on Renaissance ethics or- ganized by the late Marshall Grossman at the University of Maryland. The argument benefited from comments (at various times) by Stephen Greenblatt, Glenn Most, Loy D. Martin, and Robert David Cohen, as well as from discus- sion at the Renaissance workshop at the University of Chicago (where Ste- ven Pincus, Joshua Scodel, and Jeffrey Collins were especially helpful), at the Shakespeare Association of America (SAA), and at the Heyman Center for the Humanities at Columbia University, where comments from Akeel Bilgrami, Kathy Eden, and Ed Mendelson were bracing. The appendix on seduction was for an SAA seminar on that fine topic. John Kerrigan commented and disagreed helpfully on the appendix on Macbeth.

  The chapter on The Comedy of Errors began in another excellent SAA semi- nar. I am greatly indebted to that group, especially to the papers and comments of Matthew Steggle and Kent Cartwright. I received helpful responses to later versions from David Bevington and Ted Leinwand, and also at the Waterloo conference on Elizabethan religion and theater, at the University of Chicago So- ciety of Fellows draft group, at the Vanderbilt group on early modern cultural studies, at the Columbia University Shakespeare Seminar (especially from my respondent, Rich McCoy), at the CUNY Graduate Center, and at the Pitts- burgh Consortium for Medieval and Renaissance Studies (where I particularly profited from remarks by Jonathan Arac).

  I accumulated many debts in working on the chapter on Montaigne and Descartes. My experience has been that Montaigne scholars are an especially generous group. I am deeply indebted to my colleague Philippe Desan (not

  Acknowledgments i

  material over a number of years. Kevin Hart and Charles Larmore also gave me the benefit of their views on Montaigne, and Charles directed me to highly rel- evant work of his that I might not otherwise have discovered. Kathy Eden read the chapter with her eagle eye and superb knowledge of Renaissance rhetoric and philology. The chapter began as a keynote address for a Renaissance prose conference at Purdue organized by Charles Ross and Angelica Duran, and I am grateful to the lively audience there, at Carnegie Mellon, and at the early modern workshop at the University of Chicago. Lisa Ruddick and Dr. Jeffrey Stern, two friends who are not Montaigne or Descartes scholars but who are deeply interested in questions of selfhood and identity, also read the chap- ter closely; they both made extraordinarily helpful comments (I wish I knew enough about Kohutian self-psychology to follow up on Jeffrey’s).

  The chapter on Milton began in the East Coast Milton Seminar. I am grate- ful to Regina Schwartz for that invitation and for leading an exceptionally probing discussion spearheaded by Michael Lieb. For written comments and lively conversation about the revised version of that piece (and much else), I am grateful to Victoria Kahn. The appendix on The Reason of Church-Govern-

  

ment began in a session on discipline at the Renaissance Society of America

  organized by Kenneth Graham, who is working on that topic, and who made valuable comments at and after that session and shared some of his own rel- evant work with me. The paper was also helpfully and penetratingly discussed at a meeting of the Northwestern University British Studies group.

  Finally, I want to thank Alan G. Thomas, my editor at the University of Chi- cago Press, for his belief in this project and for finding me excellent readers for both the partial and the whole manuscript. The first reader of the whole was wonderfully appreciative and described the aims and structure of the book bet- ter, I think, than I could have myself. The second reader was extremely useful to me by virtue of loving only “90 percent” of the manuscript. This reader had shrewd comments throughout, but I especially profited from the comments on the baneful 10 percent. This included the appendix on devout humanism, which indeed needed to be rescued from its earlier alliance with the Pascal of

  

The Provincial Letters, and the introduction, which has been overhauled from

  its original state. In these revisions I benefited from the generosity of many friends who offered commentary: Bradin Cormack (most detailed of all!), Wil- liam West, Edward Muir, Joshua Scodel, and again, Lisa Ruddick, and Robert von Hallberg. Though I may be “unrepentant,” I hope not to be ungrateful.

ii Acknowledgments

• Some material in this book appeared previously and in different form in the following publications and is used by permission of the publishers: a version of chapter 1 appeared in Reading the Early Modern Passions: Essays in the Cul-

  

tural History of Emotion, ed. Gail Kern Paster, Katherine Rowe, and Mary

  Floyd-Wilson (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), copy- right © 2004 by University of Pennsylvania Press; part of chapter 2 appeared in

  

Blackwell’s Companion to Shakespeare’s Sonnets, ed. Michael Schoenfeldt (Ox-

  ford: Blackwell, 2007); a version of chapter 3 appeared in Reading Renaissance

  

Ethics, ed. Marshall Grossman (New York: Routledge, 2007); part of chapter 4

  appeared in Shakespeare and Religious Change, ed. Kenneth J. E. Graham and Philip D. Collington (Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), re- produced with permission of Palgrave Macmillan; some material in the appen- dix to chapter 4 appeared in Resistant Structures: Particularity, Radicalism,

  

and Renaissance Texts (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), copy-

  right © 1995 by the Regents of the University of California; a version of chapter 5 appeared in Prose Studies 29 (Fall 2007); a version of chapter 6 appeared in

  

Religion and Culture in the English Renaissance, ed. Claire McEachern and

Debora Shuger (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997).

  

i n t r o d u c t i o n

Back to Burckhardt

(Plus the Reformations)

va l u e s a n d c o u n t e r va l u e s

  Reason, patience, and moderation of anger; a proper understanding of the inferiority of the physical to the spiritual; ordinary decency and morality; a rejection of materialism and worldliness; an assertion of the need for hu- mility—these are certainly recognized and widely voiced values in the early modern or “Renaissance” period. Such values are part of the inherited and continuous Christian tradition, and some were reinforced by key aspects of the classical revival, especially by certain aspects of Stoicism and Platonism. Who could possibly have seriously opposed them? This book is dedicated to discussing some of the movements and texts of the period that, in fact, did so.

  

The Unrepentant Renaissance tries to make apparent, through careful readings

  of particular texts—mostly but not only literary ones—that it was possible in the period to praise the opposites of the worthy qualities listed in my opening sentence. The chapters that follow treat, in order, texts that oppose (or at least do not accept as unquestioned values) reason, patience, and moderation of anger; a proper understanding of the inferiority of the physical to the spiritual; ordinary decency and morality; a rejection of materialism and worldliness; an assertion of the need for humility. That is why these texts are all, as my title suggests, “unrepentant.”

  The works treated span the period in Europe from the early fourteenth to the late seventeenth centuries; they include texts in Latin, but many more in some of the major vernaculars: Italian, Spanish, French, and English. My

   Introduction

  the predominance of the widely voiced (one might say “official”) values and virtues, but I do mean to suggest that alternatives to them were fully and per- haps surprisingly available. What I hope will emerge from all this is a sense of the period as more bumptious, full-throated, and perhaps perverse than that which has prevailed in a good deal of recent literary scholarship, especially with regard to England.

  It might be said, therefore, that this book represents something like a “re- turn to Burckhardt.” There is a sense in which this is true, and I am happy to proclaim it. But where Burckhardt’s great book basically ends its story at the beginning of the sixteenth century and treats only Italy, this study includes the Reformation as well as, let’s call it, the Renaissance, and continues its story well into the period when the two movements are interacting. I argue that the Reformation and the Counter- or Catholic Reformation, as well as the Renais- sance, contributed to the opposition to certain elements of the Christian-Stoic- Platonic synthesis that produced the “official” and, one might wrongly think, unquestioned values of the period. From the perspective of European history as a whole, the Renaissance and the Reformations can all be seen as contribut- ing to the creation of a culture that was no longer, as Burckhardt said of the previous period, “essentially clerical” (1:211).

  As my mention of the Reformations is intended to suggest, this does not mean that the new culture was therefore fundamentally secular. It does, how- ever, mean that from the early fourteenth to the seventeenth century, the status of the ordinary layperson (to adopt a contested term) was elevated and shifted

  1. It should be said that the problem I am addressing in the scholarship does not, by and

large, exist with regard to a figure like Machiavelli. But I do note that Mark Hulliung, in Citizen

Machiavelli (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), felt that he had to attempt to rescue

Machiavelli from overly respectable readings.

2. The reference is to Jacob Burckhardt, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, intro.

  

Benjamin Nelson and Charles Trinkaus, trans. S. G. C. Middlemore, 2 vols. (New York: Harper

and Row, 1958). Die Cultur der Renaissance in Italien: Ein Versuch appeared in 1860.

  3. I prefer to refer to “the Renaissance” rather than the “early modern” period since the

former term captures the period’s own ideology about itself, and the latter term seems horribly

Whiggish. On the Renaissance’s sense of itself as such, and the importance of this, see Herbert

Weisinger, “The Self-Awareness of the Renaissance as a Criterion of the Renaissance,” Papers

of the Michigan Academy of Science, Arts and Literature 29 (1944): 561–67, and Erwin Panofsky,

“ ‘Renaissance’—Self-Definition or Self-Deception?,” in Renaissance and Renascences in West-

  Back to Burckhardt (Plus the Reformations)

  from the periphery to the center of European culture. As we will see, all three movements—Renaissance, Reformation, and Counter-Reformation—either celebrated or acknowledged this development. Burckhardt’s emphasis on Re- naissance individualism is justly famous, but his recognition of the importance of civic life to the phenomenon he is describing has not been widely seen. This recognition is why he begins his book with a series of chapters on the Italian “states,” meaning city-states “whether,” as he says, “republics or despotisms.” He insisted that “the fact that nobles and burghers dwelt together within the walls of the cities” was a fact of “vital importance,” and even more so was the fact of their relatively fluid interaction (2:353). To make this interaction pos- sible was, for Burckhardt, the fundamental role of Renaissance values and of the revival of the classics (not exactly the same for him).

  So, with the larger chronological, geographical, and religious scope in mind, let me now specify the ways in which this book indeed represents a return to

  4. The first ten chapters of Civilization of the Renaissance are on the Italian states. The

quotation is from 1:143, where Burckhardt attributes the “chief reason” of the phenomena he is

describing to “the character of these states, whether republics or despotisms.” This sentence sug-

gests that while Hans Baron was certainly right to suggest the importance of republican ideology

to the Italian Renaissance, Burckhardt, despite his focus on the great princes, was not entirely

unaware of this. For Baron, see The Crisis of the Early Italian Renaissance: Civic Humanism and

Republican Liberty in an Age of Classicism and Tyranny, rev. ed. (Princeton: Princeton Univer-

sity Press, 1966). For current thinking about the “Baron thesis,” see Renaissance Civic Human-

ism: Reappraisals and Reflections, ed. James Hankins (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,

2004). For Baron on Burckhardt, see “The Limits of the Notion of ‘Renaissance Individualism’:

Burckhardt after a Century,” in In Search of Florentine Civic Humanism: Essays on the Transi-

tion from Medieval to Modern Thought (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988), 2:155–81.

  

5. See also, for instance, Civilization of the Renaissance, 1:143, 180 and 2:401. This empha-

sis seriously throws into question David Norbrook’s insistence on Burckhardt’s elitism and

(supposed) interest in “legitimating inequalities” (see “Life and Death of Renaissance Man,”

Raritan 8 [Spring 1989]: 99). This emphasis also provides me with a way to respond to a

worry raised by Edward Muir as to whether Burckhardt’s analysis of fourteenth- and fifteenth-

century Italy can be applied to sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England. Patrick Collinson’s

emphasis on the amount of local civic participation (and ideology) in England in the period,

amounting to seeing the English polity as a “monarchical republic,” helps make the connection

to Burckhardt plausible. Collinson’s essay, “The Monarchical Republic of Queen Elizabeth I,”

appeared in Bulletin of the John Rylands Library 69 (1987): 394–24; it is reprinted in his Elizabe-

than Essays (London: Hambledon, 1994), 31–58. For responses to and further developments of

Collinson’s thesis, see The Monarchical Republic of Early Modern England: Essays in Response

   Introduction

  Burckhardt. Aside from believing that there was a major shift in European cul- ture (or “civilization”) beginning in Italy in the late thirteenth century, I accept the view that there were many persons in the period who “knew little of false [or any] modesty” (1:144) and were committed to being recognized as—dare I say it?—“individuals.” Obviously there have always been individuals, but there has not always been individualism—an ideology that placed a value on distinctiveness and personality. Burckhardt notes unico and singolare becom- ing, in the relevant period, terms of praise (1:143n). And he accepts the moral neutrality of this. In commenting on Cellini’s autobiography, Burckhardt re- marks, “It does not spoil the impression when the reader often detects him bragging or lying; the stamp of a mighty, energetic, and thoroughly developed nature remains” (2:330). Burckhardt recognizes that one form of individuality was a deliberate amorality or immorality; he points to “Werner von Urslingen, whose silver hauberk bore the inscription, ‘The enemy of God, of pity, and of mercy’ ” (2:441). Burckhardt may not quite share the delight of his colleague and admirer, Nietzsche, in such figures—Nietzsche asserts that “in the days of the Renaissance, the criminal was a flourishing species of humanity”—but Burckhardt does see such figures as tapping into something central in the pe- riod, and he does not see them merely as “appalling” (2:441). He spends very little time condemning them; he sees their existence as a historical necessity; and he notes, very coolly, that “we shall be more reserved in our judgment of them when we remember that the worst part of their guilt—in the estimate of those who record it—lay in their defiance of spiritual threats and penalties, and that to this fact is due that air of horror with which they are represented as surrounded” (2:441).

  7. On the Hegelian background to this, see William Kerrigan and Gordon Braden, The Idea

of the Renaissance (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), 11. I am happy to say that

Kerrigan and Braden share my sense of the continuing relevance of Burckhardt.

  8. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power (sec. 740), quoted and translated in Wallace K.

Ferguson, The Renaissance in Historical Thought: Five Centuries of Interpretation (Boston:

Houghton Mifflin, 1948), 207–8. For Burckhardt on individuality and wickedness, and on Nietz-

sche, see Richard Sigurdson, Jacob Burckhardt’s Social and Political Thought (Toronto:

University of Toronto Press, 2004), 213. William N. West, in “Jacob Burckhardt’s Untimely Ob-

servations,” Modern Language Quarterly 68 (2007): 27–50, cites Nietzsche calling Burckhardt

“my great, my greatest teacher” (41–42). This seems to me quite important, and I would posit a

more substantive connection between the two thinkers than that of the “full irony” with which

  Back to Burckhardt (Plus the Reformations)

  I also agree with Burckhardt in seeing the period as one in which it was pos- sible to regard enjoyment of the things of this world as something not clearly negative and even, at times, as praiseworthy. In his chapter “The Outward Refinement of Life,” Burckhardt speaks of “the well-paved streets of the Ital- ian cities” and notes that “we read in the novelists of soft, elastic beds, of costly carpets and bedroom furniture . . . of the abundance and beauty of the linen” (2:370). But again, what is important is not so much the fact of these things as the ideology concerning them. In his book on the family, Alberti asserts (through his spokesperson, Lionardo) that “intellect, judgment, memory, ap- petite, anger, reason, and discretion” are among other “divine forces [divine

  

forze e virtú], by which man outdoes all other animals in strength, in speed,

  and in ferocity [velocità e ferocità],” and that these are “capacities given to us to be amply used.” It is very much worth noting, I would argue, that appetite (though l’apetito dell’animo), anger, and ferocity appear on this list along with the more familiar virtues and capacities. Alberti’s basic view is that “[m]an is by nature suited and able to make good use of the world, and he is born to be happy” (136/161). Leonardo Bruni sees the city of Florence as admirable not only in its public spaces and buildings but in the homes of its private citi- zens. Personal pride and civic pride, public and private, went together. Bruni praises the Florentines (in another fascinating list) for being “eager for glory, brilliant in giving advice, industrious, generous, magnificent, pleasant, affable, and, above all civilized” (glorie avide, pollentes consilio, industrii, liberales,

  

magnifici, jocundi, affabiles, maximeque urbani). One of Burckhardt’s main

  examples of a Renaissance figure who lived and articulated the ideal of the full life—in this particular case, without crime—is the “philosopher of practical life,” Luigi Cornaro. Burckhardt quotes passages of total self-satisfaction from Cornaro. His friends “are wise, learned, and distinguished people of good po- sitions”; his city house “is beautiful” and comfortable, as are his villas in the hills and on the plain (from which he has drained the marshes); and his life,

  9. Leon Battista Alberti, The Family in Renaissance Florence, trans. Renée Neu Watkins

(Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1969), 133; I Libri della Famigilia, ed. Ruggiero

Romano and Alberto Tenenti (Turin: Einaudi, 1980), 158. In subsequent citations of this work,

I give first the page numbers of the translation and then of the Italian edition.

10. Leonardo Bruni, Panegyric to the City of Florence, in The Earthly Republic: Italian Hu-

  

manists on Government and Society, ed. Benjamin G. Kohl and Ronald G. Witt (Philadelphia:

University of Pennsylvania Press, 1978), 140.

   Introduction

  up to and through advanced old age, is filled with pleasure and thoroughly worldly enjoyment (2:332–33).

  

w h e n c e t h e g l o o m ?

  The picture of the Renaissance and Reformations that I have sketched is deeply at odds with the picture that has characterized a great deal of literary study of the period, certainly with regard to England, for the past few decades, and indeed for decades before that. One doesn’t hear much, in this scholarship and criticism, of man being “born to be happy” in this world. Being “civilized” is equated with being repressed rather than being “jocund,” “affable,” or “lib- eral.” One might think that this is because, in England, the Renaissance and the Reformation are temporally and culturally coincident, but I have already suggested that the two great movements need not and should not be seen, in large cultural effect, as in opposition (though certainly they were in opposi- tion in some important respects). There are signs that the dour picture may be changing—one critic has risked “being a messenger of good news”—but I believe (though I would be jocund to be wrong about this) that the dark view still largely predominates.

  But where does the dour picture come from, the picture of the period as conservative (dedicated to law and order, reason and moderation, and so forth)

12. Here the influence, along with Foucault (see note 18 below), is Norbert Elias, The Civiliz- ing Process, trans. Edmund Jephcott, 2 vols. (1939; New York: Pantheon Books, 1978).

  13. Nietzsche saw the Renaissance and the Reformation as “born of related impulses.” See

section 93 of The Will to Power, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Ran-

dom House, 1967), 57.

  

14. Leonard Barkan, Transuming Passion: Ganymede and the Erotics of Humanism (Stan-

ford: Stanford University Press, 1991), 3. Barkan’s work points to two (often conjoined) fields in

which the view of the period tends to be less dour than it is in the work of the New Historicists:

in the work of scholars of English literature who are deeply involved with Renaissance art his-

tory, and (sometimes) in the field of gay and queer studies. Stephen Orgel’s Impersonations:

The Performance of Gender in Shakespeare’s England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,

1996) generally treats English culture in the period as less anxious about sexual and gender is-

sues than it is usually taken to be, especially given the period’s own condemnations of the dread

practice of “sodomy” and our period’s insistence on the power and pervasiveness of patriarchy.

Jonathan Goldberg’s The Seeds of Things: Theorizing Sexuality and Materiality in Renaissance

Representations (New York: Fordham University Press, 2009) asserts the presence in English

  Back to Burckhardt (Plus the Reformations)

  and dominated by various kinds of anxieties and repressions? I would see it as coming from both “Old” and New Historicism, and from the surprising resur- gence of Old Historicism in what might be called “the new humoralism.” The conservatism of works like Tillyard’s The Elizabethan World Picture (1943) and Shakespeare’s History Plays (1946) or Lily Bess Campbell’s Shakespeare’s

  

Tragic Heroes: Slaves of Passion (1952) hardly needs, at this point, to be dem-

  onstrated. These works are simply not in play—in their own names at least—at this point. Much more important, and still relevant as an influence and model, is the picture of the period put forth by the scholars and critics whose work constitutes the New Historicism.

  Preeminent among these, of course, is Stephen Greenblatt, whose most important book explicitly announces itself as a retreat from Burckhardt’s pic- ture of the period. The title Renaissance Self-Fashioning has caused a good deal of confusion—with Greenblatt often taken to be expounding the posi- tion that he is critiquing—but there is no doubt that he meant to ironize the notion that self- (or any other) “fashioning” is something that an agent can do. Burckhardt took the project of treating selves, states, and all activities “as works of art” to be the hallmark of the period. Greenblatt claims, and I see no reason not to believe him, to have begun his project from a Burckhardtian point of view. He had intended to study “the role of human autonomy in the construction of identity” in sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century England. He found, however, that in all the texts and documents he examined care- fully, the human subject “began to seem remarkably unfree” (RSF, 256). The Foucault of Discipline and Punish, in tandem with Clifford Geertz, displaced the Burckhardtian framework. A culture is seen, borrowing from Geertz, as

  15. In this paragraph and elsewhere, I take “New Historicism” to be contrasted with Old

Historicism, not with New Criticism. On this ambiguity, see Richard Strier, Resistant Struc-

tures: Particularity, Radicalism, and Renaissance Texts (Berkeley: University of California

Press, 1995), 67–68.

  16. Renaissance Self-Fashioning from More to Shakespeare (Chicago: University of Chicago

Press, 1980; reissued with a new preface, 2005). Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text as

RSF.

  17. The opening section of Burckhardt’s Civilization of the Renaissance is entitled “The

State as a Work of Art”; it includes a subsection on “war as a work of art.” For courtly and public

social life as “a matter of art,” see 2:377; for domestic life as “a matter of deliberate contrivance,”

2:397.

   Introduction

  “a set of control mechanisms”; self-fashioning became “in effect the Renais- sance version of these mechanisms” (RSF, 3). It became something done to the self rather than something the self does; the self is the object rather than the agent of such “fashioning.”

  My aim in this section of the introduction is to propose a way of reading the texts of the period that allows for the genuine existence and affirmation of the things that Burckhardt saw in the period, and even of those that Nietz- sche did. I will contrast this way of reading, which shows such things to be present without being undermined or ironized, with ways of reading that ei- ther insist on such ironies or deny the historical existence of such features. I will consider Renaissance and Reformation texts. In relation to New Histori- cism, the Renaissance work that I will examine is one of the most “apparently” (as Greenblatt would say) radical of humanist texts, Thomas More’s Utopia (1516); Reformation values will be considered with regard to William Tyndale (1494–1536) and to Shakespeare’s Othello (1603–4). For the “new humoralism,” I will consider the readings in Michael Schoenfeldt’s Bodies and Selves in Early

  

Modern England. The issue here is not so much the interpretation of par-

  ticular texts—though that is the acid test—as it is of contrasting ways of read- ing. As my title suggests, this book argues that expressions of self-assertion, perversity, and worldly contentment can be truly “unrepentant” in the period, and that the texts expressing such attitudes need not be fissured, anxious, or self-contradictory.

  Greenblatt does not describe himself as a deconstructive reader or as a reader “against the grain”; his approach to every figure and text in the period is, rather, “resolutely dialectical”: “If we say that there is a new stress on the executive power of the will, we must say that there is the most sustained and relentless assault upon the will; if we say that there is a new social mobility,

  19. The phrase is taken from Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures (New York:

Basic Books), 44. It might be said that in Greenblatt’s account, Geertz’s views are darkened

in much the same way that the figures and texts of the Renaissance are. Geertz’s conception of

cultural “control mechanisms” is intended to explain the development of individuals, through

choices, not to deny their self-fashioning ability. Geertz is trying to defend the study of particular

cultures and individuals against generalized norms. He sees cultural constraints, as opposed

to biological ones, as leaving the objects of them “much less precisely regulated.” Becoming

human, says Geertz, “is becoming individual, and we become individual under the guidance

of cultural patterns” (52). “Guidance” is a much less determining notion than “control mecha-

  Back to Burckhardt (Plus the Reformations)

  we must say that there is a new assertion of power by both family and state to determine all movement within the society; if we say that there is a height- ened awareness of the existence of alternative modes of social, theological, and psychological organization, we must say that that is a new dedication to the imposition of control upon those modes and ultimately to the destruction of alternatives” (RSF, 1–2). In each of these formulations, the clauses that repre- sent what “we say” (or are likely or tempted to say) represent versions of what might fairly be called the Burckhardtian view of the period; the clauses that sternly represent what we “must” say represent the corrective view (or oppos- ing forces). This does represent a more complex picture of the period than Burckhardt’s, and may indeed highlight post-fifteenth-century developments (centralized monarchies, the Council of Trent, etc.). But what is notable about Greenblatt’s presentation of this “dialectic” is that in each case he is commit- ted to demonstrating the triumph of the right-hand (negative, coercive) clauses in each of the pairings over the left-hand (affirmative) ones. The picture is less of a dialectic than an undermining. His effort is not simply to show that these forces coexist in the period, but to show that they coexist in such a way that the Burckhardtian positive features can never be seen as existing, within a text or an individual, in a non-undermined way.

  So let me proceed now to my first test case in what might be called affirma- tive rather than undermining reading: More’s Utopia. For Greenblatt, More’s aim in book 2 of Utopia—the detailed account of the imagined society—is to construct a society in which “modern individuality,” in fact all individuality and inwardness, becomes impossible (RSF, 37). In abolishing private prop- erty, the Utopians are eliminating private selves—indeed, they are eliminat- ing selves: Utopia is “a society designed to reduce the scope of the inner life” (RSF, 53). The first thing that should be said is that this is a very odd way to understand the goal of Utopian communism. More (or his imaginary narrator, Hythlodaeus) goes out of his way to stress the elimination of material scarcity and of the pervasive and devastating moral, psychological, and sociological effects of such scarcity. But Greenblatt is constantly in the position of argu- ing against the text. He acknowledges that the Utopian workday of no more

  21. See Thomas More, Utopia, ed. Edward Surtz, S.J. (New Haven: Yale University Press,

1964), 77, 147, et passim. This is the paperback edition. For the Latin, I have used The Complete

Works of St. Thomas More (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1965), vol. 4, Utopia, ed. Edward

10 Introduction

  (“often” less [75, 135]) than six hours—an astonishing idea in the early modern period—could be seen as “far from discouraging individuation . . . but rather designed to permit its greatest flourishing” (40). But he quickly goes on to discount this possibility. He notes that some Utopians end up working a longer day. What he does not mention is that those who do this choose to do so (“if anyone should prefer to devote himself to his trade” [70]; si quis arte suae

  

malit insumere [128]). And these people too, like all the Utopians, enjoy the

  sumptuous communal meals with music, fancy desserts, and so forth. Green- blatt emphasizes the limitations on Utopian choice in leisure activities, but the text states that the Utopians spend their (universally distributed) leisure time according to individual choice (suo cuiusque arbitri [126]). The main enter- tainments offered to them are indeed public lectures, but the text emphasizes, again, that there are many different sorts of lectures precisely to accommo- date differences in taste and “natural inclination” in different persons ( prout

  

cuiusque fert natura [128]). Throughout this passage on leisure, the variety of

  preferences and natural inclinations among individuals is highlighted (note the repetition of cuius).

  In the society imagined, freedom of choice, on the basis of individual pref- erence or capacity, is accommodated not only with regard to leisure activi- ties (which include games, conversation, and music as well as lectures), but also with regard to occupations (69/127); travel (82/147); possession of fools (113/193); farming (where everyone is required to do some, but those who by nature enjoy it [natura delectat (114)] can stay longer [62/115]); health care (home or hospital [78/141]); the end of life (suicide in extremis is an option [108/187]); marriage (110/188); and religious beliefs and practices (133/221, 142/233). From this point of view, what is striking about the imagined society is how deeply—within its multifarious rules and structures—individual choice and respect for individual “natures” is built into it.

  22. For a brilliant discussion of the way in which the word cui works in Utopia as contrasted

with the way in which it works in Cicero (particularly, in De Officiis), see Bradin Cormack, A

Power to Do Justice: Jurisdiction, English Literature, and the Rise of Common Law, 1509–1625

(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 107–9.

  23. Humanist pedagogy might be seen as having this same mixture of set structures and

respect for individual difference. See, for instance, Erasmus, De Pueris Instituendis, in William

Harrison Woodward, Desiderius Erasmus Concerning the Aim and Method of Education (New

York: Teachers College, Columbia University, 1964), 195–96; Erasme, Declamatio de Pueris

  Back to Burckhardt (Plus the Reformations) 11

  But where the Greenblattian (New Historicist) approach is even more mis- leading—and characteristically so—in darkening the text is with regard to the “theoretical celebration of pleasure” in Utopia (RSF, 52). Along with commu- nism, the commitment to pleasure is a central feature of the society presented. Like Alberti, the Utopians believe that the soul is “born for happiness” (Uto-

  

pia, 92/161–63). This might be seen as a distinctly “Renaissance” orientation