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The Shakespeare Conference: SHK 18.0170 Thursdays, 1 March 2007

From: 		Hugh Grady <hughgrady@comcast.net>
Date: 		Saturday, 24 Feb 2007 17:29:17 -0500
Subject: 	SHAKSPER Roundtable: Presentism

This week's Roundtable includes eight posts: brief comments from new 
contributors Edmund Taft (on the "newness" question) and Linda Charnes 
(on definitions and labels), and a longer ones from new contributors 
Alan Dessen (from the point of view of a theatrical historian trying to 
discover stage practices of past theaters) and from Neema Parvini (who 
challenges Presentist critics and others to undertake a renewed interest 
in theory by questioning many of the assumptions inherited by critics 
from the writings of Foucault and Althusser.  In addition previous 
contributor Michael Luskin takes up in detail the issue about 
historically "authentic" musical performances while Larry Weiss, Louis 
Swilley, and Hardy Cook revisit issues discussed in previous 
Roundtables-problems of using critical labels (Weiss and Cook), and the 
issue of "timeless" moral content in great works of art (Swilley).

Your moderator feels he has had his say in plus and overplus over the 
last few weeks and happily will yield the floor to the many readers of 
these posts who might wish to respond to them. Therefore, I am omitting 
this week a commentary (except for two factual notes on the posts by 
Taft and Luskin) in the hope of bringing forth more from readers. I ask 
only that contributors adhere to norms of ordinary civility and to have 
a point (or points) expressed clearly. -Hugh Grady

[1]+++++++++++++++
From:	 	Neema Parvini <N.Parvini@rhul.ac.uk>

I have read the contributions thus far with great interest. I am happy 
that Hugh Grady recognizes that new historicism's and cultural 
materialism's attempts to theorize themselves have been 'suspended' 
leading to the 'intellectual stagnation' of their respective critical 
practices. Indeed, I would argue that there is much theoretical work to 
be done, especially in relation to how theory has been applied in new 
historicist and cultural materialist methodology to date. Whilst I can 
understand 'Presentism's' reticence to oppose historicism completely, it 
surely has an obligation to question methodological assumptions that 
currently dominate literary studies. I am not only referring to the 
importance of establishing a workable theory of aesthetics, as Cary 
DiPietro has argued for, but also to the now unspoken acceptance of 
Foucault's Power/ Knowledge model as the limit of our theoretical 
development. In the 1980s, attacks from the likes of Edward Pechter and 
Frank Lentriccha questioned Foucault's assumptions and methodology. 
Although these attacks were, in the main, ideologically or politically 
motivated, they still had value in demanding that new historicists and 
cultural materialists should work critically, with theoretical rigour. 
It appears that now, dissident voices such as these have faded rather 
than been answered. Deep lying concerns - about, for example, the 
ramifications of employing an overwhelmingly synchronic methodology that 
effectively flat-lines historical moments, a residue of structuralism 
that can be traced back to Althusser - have never been properly examined 
in the way that one would expect. The problems of the 
'power-containment' model that dominated much of the early debates 
surrounding new historicism are in many ways a product of working within 
structuralist assumptions. Whilst Foucault divests himself of the 
theoretical baggage associated with the term 'ideology' by replacing it 
with 'power', he never moves beyond Althusser's view of society as a 
monolithic totality. When it comes to incorporating these assumptions 
into critical practice, the critic is suddenly able to make connections 
between cultural artefacts that do not necessarily exist.  It seems to 
me to be a mistake to suggest that every aspect of a given culture 
necessarily has an impact on every other aspect of that culture. This is 
especially so when working within the necessary but none the less, still 
artificial, periodizations that Fredric Jameson has stressed. Some of 
the linkages, sometimes ranging across different decades and countries, 
even continents, that Stephen Greenblatt makes, whilst masterful and 
fascinating, are only enabled by this overriding synchronicity. Without 
it the links begin to look more forced, even arbitrary. I am not 
suggesting that Foucault and Althusser don't have their uses, just that 
it remains a contradiction that whilst new historicists and cultural 
materialists would probably sneer at the suggestion that they were 
structuralists (emerging, as they did, out of an opposition to formalist 
approaches to literature) their dominant methodology is, ironically, 
rooted in structuralism.  I think that this is partially down to the 
'institutionalization and popularization' that Grady speaks of, as a 
brand of criticism becomes more popular it becomes less and less 
necessary to justify the terms of its practice, let alone question them. 
'Presentism' should not fall into the trap of opposing new historicism/ 
cultural materialism on the issue of recognising the formative nature of 
our present ideology but then replicating their problems in its methodology.

  [2]+++++++++++++++
From: 		Edmund Taft <taft@marshall.edu>

Concerning the "newness" of "Presentism," it's instructive to remember 
that shortly after the start of the 1900's, Collingwood and Croce, two 
historians, put forth the theory that the best historians can ever do is 
construct a model of the past, based on evidence interpreted from the 
vantage point of the present. Sounds a lot like "Presentism" to me.

Ed Taft

Moderator's Note:  Thanks to Ed Taft for adding Collingwood to my 
discussion of Croce as a previous theorist of Presentism last week.

[3]+++++++++++++++
From: 		Michael B. Luskin <Luskin@aol.com>

I can't imagine how I in the middle of this, but, as Macbeth more or 
less said, I am in ink stepped in so far that should I write no more . . 
.  I know a bit more about music performance than I do about 
Shakespeare, so I found David Lindley's comments thought provoking.  But 
there are several differences between the questions of early music 
performance and questions of presentism.

First, the question of access. Relatively few actually read Mozart's 
scores, and discuss musical ideas, whatever that might mean, but many, 
if not most, people read Shakespeare's plays, and talk the ideas, etc. 
To say nothing of the meaning!  The debates about using early 
instruments and early music standards deal almost entirely with 
performance, not ultimate understanding.

I must mention pitch.  Every now and then, we discover in an old 
document or letter commenting on a performance, someone mentioning 
amusedly that a particular note made a chandelier, window, or other 
object sound sympathetically.  (I remember at a performance by the 
Guarneri String Quartet, playing a movement ending on a D, while at the 
same time, a police siren outside hit the same note.  Everybody 
laughed.)  From this, assuming we still have the chandelier, window, or 
whatever, we are able to infer standards of tuning and pitch.  It turns 
out that in general we tune, roughly, a half-tone sharper today than 
Mozart did.  There are hundreds of old instruments still extant, lots of 
organs, which demonstrate pitch, which also illustrate that our standard 
of pitch is sharper by about half-tone than Mozart's.  What makes this 
so interesting is that two hundred years ago, certain keys were 
associated with certain emotions or ideas.  For instance, the key of A 
might have been associated, maybe, with sadness, but the key of A sharp 
might have been associated with happiness.  So playing a piece written 
two hundred years ago, with modern tuning, might be in a key with 
exactly the opposite meaning than it was composed with.

But, as students of harmony would say, that is a technical issue.

A rite of passage for students taking what one might call Music 102 is, 
sitting at the piano, taking a piece of music written in one key and 
transposing it to another.  For a thousand laughs, listen to a student 
string quartet doing the same thing with a late Beethoven string 
quartet. I guarantee that you will not do it again unless someone is 
paying you.

Music is a different art.  The ideas in music are more abstract than the 
ideas in literature, there is usually, Strauss notwithstanding, little 
or no distinct poem to the tone.  A play has plot, characters, etc.  And 
musical ideas are not as intellectually nuanced as written ideas.

I wonder if the Wagnerian notion of leitmotif has any parallel to 
historicist contexts.  Without doubt, the cruelest and ugliest thing 
ever done by an artist to another was done by Bartok to Shostakovich. 
In the coda of the Concerto for Orchestra, Bartok quotes a few bars of a 
Shostakovich work and then gives a musical belly laugh.  Sitting in New 
York, Bartok could easily afford to do that.  Sitting in Moscow, waiting 
as he often did, for the midnight knock on the door, Shostakovich knew 
the true value, in more than one sense, of the trite Soviet realist 
music that he hoped would keep him and his family out of an Arctic slave 
labor camp.  That is all you need to know about historicism.

I am not sure of the parallel, but I think you could argue that 
instrumentation, orchestration, harmony, (early) music performance 
standards, the devices of music, are more or less parallel to poetic 
form, vocabulary, etc., in a play.

It would be difficult to look at a Mozart score and see 1770 in it, 
except technically, one would not expect Moussorgskian harmonies in it. 
While 1600 is all over Shakespeare.  While writing this, I read Larry 
Weiss' report of an exchange with Greenblatt at Davidson, discussing a 
reference to the Gunpowder plot in Macbeth.

Finally, the following is tantalizing, but how I wish that authors would 
give web accessible addresses:  Anyone interested might, for example, 
start with Kiernan Ryan's bracing presentist reading of _Troilus and 
Cressida_ in _Presentist Shakespeares_ and compare it with some earlier 
(old or new) historicist essay, like, say, Eric Mallin's excellent new 
historicist essay on the same play "Emulous Factions and the Collapse of 
Chivalry," in _Representations_ 29 (Winter 1990): 145-79 (the essay was 
recontextualized in Mallin's book _Inscribing the Time_).

Mbl

Moderator's Note:  The world of English studies is still not always at 
our fingertips, alas. _Representations_ is available, I believe, through 
many college libraries' electronic subscriptions, but the new work 
_Presentist Shakespeares_ is still only available in bookstores and 
libraries. After all, the piper must be paid.

[4]+++++++++++++++
From: 		Larry Weiss <larry@lweiss.net>
Date: 		Monday, 19 Feb 2007 15:12:27 -0500
Subject: 18.0157 SHAKSPER Roundtable: Presentism
Comment: 	Re: SHK 18.0157 SHAKSPER Roundtable: Presentism

It is, of course, the role of the Roundtable moderator to synthesize the 
participants' contributions.  So it is with some trepidation, but no 
intent to tread on Prof. Grady's toes, that I venture to say that much 
of what he, Michael Luskin, Louis Swilley and I have said make similar 
points.  Where Prof. Grady and I differ is in his faith in the utility 
of labels and my skepticism about whether they help or hinder a 
discourse.  He sums up his position in this regard by saying:

[T]here is the issue of rhetorical effectiveness to deal with. Labels 
can be reductive, but they can also be useful. We have to make judgments 
for each particular case. I and others began using the label 
"presentist" because we had a point to make about the current direction 
of Shakespeare studies, and the use of this label seemed a good way to 
start raising the issue. I hope it is clear how complex the issues 
behind critical methodology are and how a label can hide the 
complexities. But in the give and take of critical discourse, I don't 
see how we can do without them.

True enough that labels can be useful; but they can also be mischievous. 
One way they are, as Prof. Grady points out, is in their tendency to 
conceal the complexities.  Another way, as I shall show, is that they 
create new and unnecessary complexities.  Finally, I will try to answer 
Prof. Grady's implicit question about how we can do without them.

Labels as rhetorical constructs have vitality beyond their descriptive 
function.  If they were merely descriptive, and if the descriptions were 
accurate, they would be unobjectionable.  The problem is that they tend 
to canalize thought and distort the subject material in the process.  I 
hope that is not what Prof. Grady had in mind when he refereed to their 
"rhetorical effectiveness."  As a lawyer, I have a fairly good grasp of 
what makes something effective rhetorically, and it is frequently not 
the accuracy, logic or coherence of the argument.  But more specifically 
with respect to labels:

Every lawyer is familiar with the mischief that can be done when we try 
to shoehorn facts into doctrinal rubrics which were not originally 
designed to cover them.  There is a famous case in England of a man who 
was injured by a safe which fell out of a loft.  He was unable to 
identify any act or omission by the loft owner that caused the safe to 
fall, so under traditional notions of what is required to prove 
negligence he would have been out of court.  The court, however, 
concluded that safes do not ordinarily fall out of lofts without someone 
having done something careless; in other words, the jury might infer 
negligence from the occurrence as the thing speaks for itself.  However, 
the judge who wrote the opinion wanted to show off his classical 
learning, so, instead of just expressing the result in words similar to 
those I just used, he employed the Latin term "res ipsa loquitur." 
Voilá, a brand new legal concept having its own special rules and an 
evolving jurisprudence all its own.  A similar development occurred in 
New York in the last century.  New York's highest court dealt with a 
case in which the plaintiff alleged that the defendant had deliberately 
done something to hurt him but the plaintiff failed to specify the 
category of the tort.  The court held that when someone deliberately 
acts to injure another without justification "it is, prima facie, a 
tort."  The court then looked to see which tort it was.  But, by a 
little presto-chango syntactical transmutation, the quoted term morphed 
into "it is a prima facie tort"; again, a brand new tort having its own 
elements.  I am not arguing that these were bad evolutions, just that by 
creating labels (in these cases by accident) we confer upon them 
peculiar attributes that give them a life quite beyond their descriptive 
function.

But how can we avoid this?  It seems to me that all we need to do is 
decline to put a label on our methodology.  A scholar will normally 
specify the procedures and assumptions underlying his or her 
conclusions, so no necessary function is served by also labeling the 
approach as falling into one school of criticism or another.  That sort 
of thing invites debates over whether the critic has fairly labeled his 
or her work and over what is and is not orthodox scholarship in the 
claimed school.  That has nothing to do with the validity of the 
critical conclusion.  In other words, as I said before, the debate 
degenerates into an academic disputation over what the critics are 
doing, not over what the criticized work did/does.

It is not hard to avoid labeling.  To illustrate -- and also to 
illustrate how labeling tends to put us at odds when we are not actually 
in disagreement -- I take as my text the passage from Macbeth which I 
discussed with Stephen Greenblatt at the Davidson conference.  The 
porter offered an equivocator a place in Hell -- "here's an equivocator, 
that could swear in both the scales against either scale, who committed 
treason enough for God's sake, yet could not equivocate to heaven.  O, 
come in equivocator." It seems clear to me that this passage refers to 
the Gunpowder Plot trials of 1606 and particularly the testimony of Fr. 
Garnet.  However, in the years following the Monica Lewinsky affair it 
would call to an alert audience member's mind President Clinton's denial 
of having "sexual relations" with that woman.  That statement was 
classic equivocation; Clinton would say that it was literally true (as 
he did not regard oral sex as "sexual relations") although the statement 
had the intent and effect of misleading its hearers.  It is perfectly 
appropriate to point out this resonance of the porter's speech on a 
contemporary audience and perhaps even to make the point that 
equivocation is not a thing of the past.  It is also entirely legitimate 
to note that a Jacobean audience would think of Fr. Garnet, not Bill 
Clinton.  Notice that I could express both approaches without labeling 
ether.  Both are correct; but labeling one approach as Presentist and 
the other as Historicist has an unfortunate tendency to invite a 
fruitless, and rather uninteresting, debate over which is a more valid 
approach.

And, what's more, labeling tends to restrict a scholar's scope.  A 
scholar noted for her fidelity to Presentism might feel reluctant to 
write about an interesting historical discovery she has made for fear 
that she will be accused of inconstancy and lose her Presentist cred.

[5]+++++++++++++++
From: 		Louis Swilley <lswilley@houston.rr.com>

Louis Swilley <lswilley@houston.rr.com> wrote,

 >Do Presentism and Historicism both ignore the fact that human
 >constants are expressed in the works, constants that make the
 >classics meaningful to us generation after generation? Those
 >constants - expressed so beautifully in great works - are
 >characters responding to challenges by following or ignoring
 >their consciences. These are not lost in the historical
 >circumstances in which they are expressed, nor are they
 >dependent upon changing factors in present-day experience.
 >However a play may produced to reflect a current problem -
 >Shakespeare in modern dress - the director and actors had
 >better be aware that the real "stuff" of any great play is the
 >"deep-down-diving, long-down-staying, mud-up-bringing"
 >matter of the characters' responses to moral challenges,
 >challenges and responses that remain the same for all
 >generations that were, that are and that will be, until we
 >can leap from the womb totally physically self-sufficient.
 >Only in those circumstances will our human nature change
 >to the degree that the conditions of conscience are altered
 >and that the human image in art is significantly changed.

Hugh Grady commented,

 >Louis Swilley voices what was once a commonplace about
 >literary classics like Shakespeare, that they engage us in
 >"timeless" issues, especially moral ones. There are semantic
 >issues at work here as well, and connections between our
 >own cultural assumptions and those of the play's originating
 >moment, I don't doubt. To keep it short, my own view is that
 >the "timelessness" effect comes into play precisely when
 >something in the text resonates strongly with our own current
 >cultural concerns and that a review of the history of almost any
 >Shakespeare text will demonstrate how views on what ideas
 >are most "timeless" turn out to shift as we move through historical
 >change. _King Lear_, for example, was once considered a play in
 >which a few precious bits of poetry could be discovered in a junk
 >pile of "barbarous" excesses and egregious violations of poetic
 >justice. Nowadays it is held by many to be the most profound of
 >the tragedies.

=============================================================

I should have made the point that the morality of a character's choices 
are *as he/she sees it*. As John Henry Newman points out, our individual 
consciences are "imperial," and it is essentially this individual 
estimate - right or wrong in external moral philosophical terms - and 
experience that forms the lasting, ever repeated, ever recognizable 
matter in great works. Our further judgment of the wisdom or foolishness 
of such moral views is another dimension - for example, I think Francis 
Macomber is a damned fool for insisting on "testing his courage" by 
facing a charging lion, but that is not what *he* thinks and *his* 
judgment of the matter, *his* posing of the challenge to himself becomes 
his central moral issue for him. I suppose it is possible to say that 
that *further judgment* is subject to the fits and starts of estimates 
by succeeding cultures and by individual readers,  but the experience of 
conscience, however ill-formed from the perspective of one moral 
philosophy as opposed to another, is what we see and should see in all 
works, especially in great ones.( Incidentally, Lear's ill-conceived 
idea of splitting up the country as though it were his private property 
rather than his public responsibility is one of those cases where there 
has been little if any disagreement among critics of any historical 
period, and Lear's idea of it is universally accepted as both his honest 
but erroneous expression of his conscience *and* a disastrous move, 
morally/politically/philosophically conceived. Both of these estimates 
are repeated from age to age, and although there may be other aspects of 
the play's argument that are subject to interpretations inspired by the 
times, *these central ideas remain* and move us to return to the play, 
generation after generation.

L. Swilley

[6]++++++++++++++
From: 		Linda Anne Charnes <lcharnes@indiana.edu>

I'd like to offer a few thoughts about the challenge to "define 
Presentism in twenty-five words or less."

Presentism is not a methodology but rather a sensibility, one that always
poses the following question:  why should anyone care about this now?

I would add two more words, for emphasis, between "why" and "should," to 
reach my twenty-five, but fear the Editor would decline to post my 
definition.

As someone who has been writing in this vein since the term "presentist" 
was first flung about as a descriptive pejorative fifteen years odd ago, 
it's interesting to see Presentism emerge as yet another "ism."  I don't 
think I've ever called myself a Presentist, but have had it thrust upon 
me.  I don't shrug it off, but think that coinage suggests a 
methodological exclusivity, with clearly defined borders, that does not 
accurately describe what practitioners associated with the term actually 
do.  Hawkes, Fernie, Grady, myself, and many others are certainly 
historicist insofar as we always run our claims through historical 
filtration: we always, as good scholars, ask if our arguments can also 
be supported by what we know about early modern history.  Some of us are 
quite partial to using psychoanalysis as a tool; others are still deeply 
Marxist at heart.  I would describe myself as a materialist 
psychoanalytic political theorist, but it's a real clunker as a label.

Linda Charnes

[7]++++++++++++++++
From: 		Alan Dessen <acdessen@email.unc.edu>

As an old-style theatre historian (who nonetheless devotes much energy 
to today's productions of Shakespeare's plays) I have been following 
with interest the discussion of Presentism.  Although the term itself is 
not part of my working vocabulary, many of the questions raised in the 
various posts are important to me.  Rightly or wrongly I like to think 
of myself as one of those practitioners cited by David Evett who "make 
strenuous efforts (not necessarily successful) to become self-conscious 
about the elements in their own thinking that belong peculiarly to their 
own times and places."  If (as with me) the goal is to recover or 
reconstruct the original theatrical practice, the historian must somehow 
transcend notions of theatre contemporary to today's readers and 
theatrical professionals but often alien to the 1590s and 1600s so as to 
unlearn what we know or think we know about how a play should or must 
work onstage (the absence then of anything comparable to our variable 
onstage illumination for night and darkness scenes remains the best 
example).  Here is my rationale for obsessing over the stage directions 
that survive from the professional repertory theatre, for to build upon 
those signals as evidence is to stay within the realm of the possible: 
what was or could have been done in the original productions.

I agree with Hugh Grady that there is little point in concentrating 
solely on the pejorative sense of Presentism whose proponents "denied 
historical difference and naively imposed their own concepts and 
rationality onto an understanding of the past," as opposed to "work 
based on the understanding that all our knowledge of the past, including 
that of Shakespeare's historical context, is shaped by the ideologies 
and discourses of our cultural present."  I would prefer to believe that 
"Far from being an impediment to our knowledge, this understanding is 
its enabling foundation."  Again, "simply assuming the worst about 
Presentism" leads nowhere, for I readily agree that "There is in fact no 
way to insulate any critical method from misuse or insure that it will 
not be employed by the shallow, the ignorant, or the malevolent."

In response to Andrew Wilson's request, I will briefly cite three 
specific examples from my bailiwick, none of which may prove to be 
helpful or on target.  First is what may be no more than a pet peeve: 
that commentators today when talking about the drama popular before Kyd, 
Marlowe, and Shakespeare regularly refer to "the medieval Vice."  Yes, 
various vices and sins are prevalent throughout the well known 
fifteenth- and early sixteenth-century plays, but (to my knowledge) the 
earliest appearance of the Vice as the allegorical prime-mover of a play 
is found in the 1530s, and the biggest cluster of examples in extant 
plays is to be found in items from the 1560s and 1570s along with many 
allusions to this figure in the 1590s and thereafter (e.g., in Jonson's 
*The Devil Is an Ass* and *The Staple of News*).  Perhaps in this case a 
distaste for allegorical and didactic effects in drama has trumped the 
actual evidence, though just as likely is a verdict (to borrow Hugh 
Grady's term) that a "shallow" shortcut has been invoked.

My second example is a classic case for the theatre historian: the 
postulation of an "inner stage" at the Globe and comparable venues, a 
formulation that lasted for several generations and may be found even in 
some landmark studies (e.g., G. R. Reynolds' 1940 book on the Red Bull). 
Here I would invoke the opening paragraph of Bernard Beckerman's 
*Dynamics of Drama* (1970) that when we pick up a book containing the 
printed words of a Shakespeare play we simultaneously put on a pair of 
spectacles "compacted of preconceptions about what constitutes drama and 
how it produces its effects."  In the case of the supposed "inner 
stage," those spectacles included assumptions about staging linked to 
the fourth wall convention that dominated much theatrical presentation 
up through the 1950s or later that in turn could easily be read back 
into a re-imagining of Globe dramaturgy.

My third example (and here I fear I may be opening Pandora's box) is the 
notion of "character"-psychological realism-"inner life" frowned upon in 
some parts of the academic community but still alive and well in the 
classroom and among theatrical professionals.  Here is an arena where 
Presentism and Historicism (and probably several other -isms) can go to 
it.  Does it matter that the primary meaning (or meanings) of the term 
"character" then has little in common with its meaning or meanings 
today? When I was growing up, A. C. Bradley was at the center of 
Shakespeare interpretation, but now . . . ?  Are the many Freudian and 
post-Freudian tools an "enabling foundation" or a blockage?  I am not 
the right person to formulate the pros and cons, but this particular 
controversy (as opposed to rival approaches to *Troilus and Cressida*) 
might be a fruitful test case.

Alan Dessen

[8]+++++++++++++++

From: 		Hardy M. Cook <editor@shaksper.net>

In the February 19, Roundtable digest 
<http://www.shaksper.net/archives/2007/0155.html>, Larry Weiss responded 
to my comments of the previous week:

 >I think Hardy makes my point for me when he observes in his reply
 >that "My remarks about the morphing of "New Historicism" are in
 >part my response to being unable to describe or to categorize the
 >methodology that Stephen Greenblatt used in his _Will in the World .... "
 >
 >Why is it necessary to categorize that methodology?  Does a taxonomy
 >of critical techniques make any of them more or less valid?  Do labels
 >add to the persuasiveness of any given approach?  Or, in other words,
 >aren't we really just discussing what critics do, not what the authors 
did?

He then added that

 >At the conference held at Davidson College last weekend, Stephen
 >Greenblatt and I had a brief colloquy about what I believe is a topical
 >allusion in Macbeth.  . . .  However, at no point did our entirely
 >civilized colloquy invoke labels.  Did I adopt a classical Historicist
 >approach? (If I did, I would be as astounded as I was when I was first
 >told I was writing prose.)  Was Greenblatt's skepticism a function of
 >New Historicism?  Who cares?  Would I be wrong and Greenblatt
 >correct to be skeptical if we decide that New Historicism is preferable
 >to a more traditional approach?  Does the critical question cease to
 >be interesting if we all decide to be Presentists?

Although efforts at labeling cannot encompass the complexity of a 
methodology, an approach, an ideology, and so on and although labels 
themselves are, at times, reductive and overly simplistic, I find, 
nevertheless, them useful, when their limitations are acknowledged. 
Labels can and do assist us (or at least me) in our (my) understanding 
and in our (my) ability to explain to others.

For example, "New Criticism," a direct challenge to the theoretical 
assumptions of the "Old Historicism," represented its interpretations as 
being grounded in "Reality," in the "Universal Truth," in "Human 
Experience." I would quote exactly the language from some of the 
numerous essays exchanged between New Critics and Historicists, for 
those texts are at my office. Historicists argued that the author's 
intentions are the ONLY reliable determiner of the meaning expressed in 
an imaginative text and that understanding of the author's intentions is 
discernable from knowledge of the author's other works and of the 
literary, social, and historical milieu in which he lived and wrote. New 
Critics countered that all that is necessary to understand the meaning 
of a work is the work itself, an understanding achieved by close reading 
of the inseparable connection between the form and content of that text.

New Criticism dominated literary studies for decades and decades. It was 
not until Structuralist analysis challenged and Deconstructive readings 
exposed the agenda of the New Critics - that what they argued was 
universal was, in fact, the belief system of those ensconced in 
positions of power: privileged men of European extraction. Yes, I use 
labels to help me explain the assumptions that underlie and drive 
critical methodologies.

Stephen Greenblatt employed a methodology in his brilliant criticism of 
the early 1980s that came to be labeled "New Historicism" and that came 
to be widely adopted by others. In 2004, as "New Historicism" now known 
as "Historicism" appeared to be fading in influence, Greenblatt 
published _Will in the World_ using a methodology that I have difficulty 
identifying. Yes, I find labels useful.

Trying to identify "critical techniques" does not "make any of them more 
or less valid," but employing them aids me in understanding the critical 
assumptions upon which they are based and thus to better understand the 
agendas underlying them.

_______________________________________________________________
S H A K S P E R: The Global Shakespeare Discussion List
Hardy M. Cook, editor@shaksper.net
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