King Lear under Two Different Lights:Contextualization and Its Discontent

King Lear under Two Different Lights: Contextualization and Its Discontent

While a considerable amount of commentaries on the similarities and differences of new historicism and cultural materialism has been enunciated in their aftermath, most of them remain focused on their political orientations and critical agendas. What is left largely unexplored is the methodological assumptions of the allegedly ‘historical’ scholarship, which, this paper argues, reveals an insufficient if not inappropriate conception of history and historical writing. As an investigation of some limitations of the new historical criticism of the 1980s as a discipline of history, this study offers a historiographical perspective on the methods of historical contextualization deployed in the two contrastive interpretations of King Lear by Stephen Greenblatt and Jonathan Dollimore, the leading proponents of new historicism and cultural materialism, respectively. Conducting a ‘thick description’ espoused by the anthropologist Clifford Geertz, the new historicist writing interprets the Shakespearean text by analyzing one of its ‘source’ texts and finding an analogous relationship between the two, which under a scrutiny turns out tenuous. By contrast, the cultural materialist contextualization draws upon the tradition of intellectual history, uncovering the intertextual network of ‘ideas’ between Renaissance philosophy and Shakespearean drama. The two modes of historical writing entail quite different interpretations of King Lear, with respective emphases on its aesthetics and politics. More significantly, a further step in each writing, towards the wider ‘context’ of the early modern society, reveals that both are entrenched in unquestioned historical formulations already established by social historians of 1970s, which began to be interrogated and re-formulated with more rigorous historiographical methodologies adopted by their successors in the 80s and 90s. In brief, the new historical critics were lagging behind the radical shift in the discipline of social and cultural history, grounding their ‘literary’ text upon ‘historical’ contexts that were crumbling down.

While a considerable amount of commentaries on the similarities and differences of new historicism and cultural materialism has been enunciated in their aftermath, most of them remain focused on their political orientations and critical agendas. What is left largely unexplored is the methodological assumptions of the allegedly ‘historical’ scholarship, which, this paper argues, reveals an insufficient if not inappropriate conception of history and historical writing. As an investigation of some limitations of the new historical criticism of the 1980s as a discipline of history, this study offers a historiographical perspective on the methods of historical contextualization deployed in the two contrastive interpretations of King Lear by Stephen Greenblatt and Jonathan Dollimore, the leading proponents of new historicism and cultural materialism, respectively. Conducting a ‘thick description’ espoused by the anthropologist Clifford Geertz, the new historicist writing interprets the Shakespearean text by analyzing one of its ‘source’ texts and finding an analogous relationship between the two, which under a scrutiny turns out tenuous. By contrast, the cultural materialist contextualization draws upon the tradition of intellectual history, uncovering the intertextual network of ‘ideas’ between Renaissance philosophy and Shakespearean drama. The two modes of historical writing entail quite different interpretations of King Lear, with respective emphases on its aesthetics and politics. More significantly, a further step in each writing, towards the wider ‘context’ of the early modern society, reveals that both are entrenched in unquestioned historical formulations already established by social historians of 1970s, which began to be interrogated and re-formulated with more rigorous historiographical methodologies adopted by their successors in the 80s and 90s. In brief, the new historical critics were lagging behind the radical shift in the discipline of social and cultural history, grounding their ‘literary’ text upon ‘historical’ contexts that were crumbling down.