Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare

AI 1 HOR OF II'ILL IN THE. WORLD

Holbein, "The Ambassadors" (National Portrait Galle1y, London).

RENAISSANCE SELF-FASHIONING From More to Shakespeare

STEPHEN GREENBLATT

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THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS

Chicago & London

Stephen Greenblatt is associate professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of Three Modt'rn Satirists: Waugh, Orwell, and Huxley (1965) nnd Sir Walta r~alcgh: Tlr~ R!'naissanct• M111r and His Role (1.973).

TK1I UNJVBRSlTY OF CHICAGO PKESS, CBJCJ>.GO

60637

Tltll UNlVERSITY 01' CHICAGO PRESS, lTD., lONOON

o 1980 by The University of Chicago All rights reserved. Published 1980 Printed in the United States of America 84 83 82 81 80 5 4 3 2 1

Library of Congress Cataloging in P ublication Data Greenblatt, Stephen Jay. RenaissQnce self-fashioning.

Includes bibliographical references and index. 1 English Literature-E 2

lntroduciiOII

that there is a new social mobility, 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 heightened awareness of the existence of alternative modes of social, theological, and psychological organization, we must say that there is a new dedication to the imposition of control upon those modes and ultimately to the destruction of alternatives. Perhaps the simplest observation we can make is that in the sixteenth century there appears to be an increased selfconsciousness about the fashioning of human identity as a manipulable, artful process. Such self-consciousness had been widespread among the elite in the classical world, but Christianity brought a growing suspicion of man's power to shape identity: "Hands off yourself," Augustine declared. "Try to build up yourself, and you build a ruin." 1 This view was not the only one available in succeeding centuries, but it was influential, and a powerful alternative began to be fully articulated only in the early modem period. When in 1589 Spenser writes that the general intention and meaning that he has "fashioned" 10 Tile Faerie Qt1ce11e is "to fasllion a gentleman," or when he has his knight Calidore declare that "in each mans self ... I It is, to fashion his owne lyfes estate," or when he tells his beloved in one of the A.moretti, "You frame my thoughts, and fashion me within," 2 he is drawing upon the special connot then are all displaced in

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significant ways from a stable, inherited social world, and they all manifest in powerful and influential form aspects of Renaissance self-fashioning. But the aspects are by no means the same. Indeed my organization in this book depends upon the perception of two radical antjtheses, each of which gives way to a complex third term in which the opposition is reiterated and transformed. the conflict between More and Tyndale is reconceived in the figure of Wyatt, that between Spenser and Marlowe in the figure of Shakespeare. Wyatt does not raise the opposition of More and Tyndale to a higher level, though his self-fashioning is profoundly affected by the consequences of that opposition; Shakespeare does not resolve the aesthetic and moral conflict inherent in the works of Spenser and Marlowe, though his theater is enigmatically engaged in both positions. Rather Wyatt and Shakespeare express in literary works more powerful than any produced by their contemporaries the historical pressure of an unresolved and continuing conflict. Moreover, the issues raised at the theological level in the works of More and Tyndale are recapitulated at the secular level in the works of Spenser and Marlowe, while Shakespeare explores in Otltello and elsewhere lhe male sexual anxielles-the fear of betrayal, the suspension and release of aggression, the intimations of complicity in one's own torment-voiced in Wyatt'5lyrics. We may posit a direction enacted by these figures in relation to power: for the first triad, a shift from the Church to the Book to the absolutist state; for the second triad, a shift from celebration to rebellion to subversive submission. Similarly, we may posit a direction enacted by the works of literature in relation to society: a shift from absorption by commun1ty, religious faith, or diplomacy toward the establishment of literary creation as a profession in its own right. But we must recognize that such approximate and schematic chartings are of limited value. The closer we approach the figures and their works, the less they appear as convenient counters in a grand historical scheme. A series of shifting, unstable pressures is mel with a wide range of discursive and behavioral responses, invenhons, and counter-pressures. There is no such thing as a single "history of the self" in the sixteenth century, except as the product oi our need to reduce the intricacies of complex and creative beings to safe and controllable order. This book wm not advance any comprehensive "explanation" of English Renaissance self-fashioning; each of the chapters is intended to tand alone as an exploration whose contours are shaped hy our ~rt~sp ot the specific situation of the author or text. Wl' m,1y, hoWl'VI'r, conclude by noting a set of goveming con-

lntrod11clion

ditions common to most instances of self-fashioning-whether of the authors themselves or of their characters-examined here: 1. None of the figures inherits a title, an ancient family tradition or hierarchical status that mighl have rooted personal identity in the identity of a clan or caste. With the partiaJ exception of Wyatt, all of these writers are middle-class. 2. Self-fashioning for such figures invo_)yes submission to an absolute power or authority situated at l~artially outside the self-God, a sacred book, an institution such as church, court, colonial or military administration. Marlowe is an exception, but his consuming hostility to hierarchical authority has, as we shall see, some of the force of submission. 3. Self-fashioning is achieved in relation to something perceived as alien, strange, or hostile. This threatening Otherheretic, savage, witch, adulteress, traitor, Antichrist-must be discovered or invented in order to be attacked and destroyed. 4. The alien is perceived by the authority either as that which is unformed or chaotic (the absence of order) or that which is false or negative (the demonic parody of order). Since accounts of the former tend inevitably to organize and thematize it, the chaotic constantly slides into the demonic, and consequently the alien is always constructed as a distorted image of the authority. 5. One man's authority is another man's alien. 6. When one authority or alien is destroyed, another takes its place. 7. There is always more than one authority and more than one .1Iien in existence at a given time. 8. If both the authority and the alien are located outside the self, they are at the same time experienced as inward necessities, so that both submission and destruction are always already internalized. 9. Self-fashioning is always, though not exclusively, in language. 10. The power generated to attack the alien in the name of the ,1uthority is produced in excess and threatens the authority it sets nu t to defend. Hence self-fashioning always involves some experil'nce of threat, some effacement or undermining, some loss of self. To sum up these observations, before we turn to the rich lives .1nd texts tl1at exemplify and complicate them, we may say that ~clf~fashioning occurs at the point of encounter between an authority and an alien, that what is produced in this encounter parl.lkes of both the authority and the alien that is marked for attack, md hence that any achieved identity always contains within itself llw s•gnf.l of its own subvcrsion or loss

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At the Table of the Great: More's Self-Fashioning and Self-Cancellation

"A Part of His Own"

A dinner party at Cardinal Wo~y's. Years later, in the Tower, More recalled lhe occasion and refashiOned it in A Dialogw· of Comforl Agai11sl Tribu/ati011 as a " merry tale," one of those sly jokes Ihat interlace his most serious work. The story reaches back to a past that, in the guthering daTicness or 1534, might weU have ~~eCmed to More almost mylhlcat, back before the collapse of his career, the collapse of his whole world. Perhaps nslmportant, It t~ach~s b~ck to a time before Mo{e hud decided to cmbnrk upon his c~recr. Ho piolurcs himself as an aqtb ltt0 us, ~leve~ youog man, uagcr to make a good imp ression. but at the same time 'a n Ol(tllider: in his fictionalized ve:rsion, he is A 1-l ungarian visitor to Gennany. 1"he vainglorious prelate-transparently Wolsey-had that day made nn oration so splendid in his own ~stimation that he ··tl as if on thorns until he could l1ear it commended by his guests. Alt!'r casting about in vain for a discreet way of introducing the •ubject, the cardinal finally asked bluntly wh,1t lht' company thnught of his oration. Eallng and conversation came to an abrupt h.llt; "Every man was fallen in so deep a study for the finding of ·•ltt!ry, nnd botJ• m turn wer.e bested by !he lnsl to speak, a ''llllOd ancum l. henoroble fla llerer" who. when he saw that he rnu lti nol lculation but in n sense of the absu:rd: because they are mad, possessed by "fond fantasies," incapable of distinguishing between truth and nction. lt isnol orilyMachiavcllinn calrulation but humanist rc(orm that finds iV;limits in. this madness: political life H1111lllt be n:sQlvcd into undedylng forces, c~nnol be treated as a Hldc that Ihe ipillntcd understand and mampulate, beco~e it is lundnmcntnlly in811ne, it$ practitioners io the grlp of "h·enzi~s." And il is not Qn ly polihcal life, in !·he no1-row sense, that is so 111t.lgucl. bu1 l h~ 11renl body of mao's social rela tions.

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To understand More, we most take this h,lunting perception of universol madness very ~eriously, not 1 In o ther words, simply as n rhetorical device or conventional tum of phrase. b ut as a centtal and e nduring respons~ fo exlstencc. 1t I$ a response he shared ,,l\kc so much else, with Ernomos, whose Prni"" of Folly fs its supreme nnd definitive expression. But Tilt' Prnisn nf Folly is a dang.,rous tool for exploiting More's response to life, in part bec~use of the fundnom?ntal d ifferences between Ern$m us nnd More (the former n dissatisfied monk, impatient with confinement; the latter a dis· satisfied layman, impatient wrth lfberty), en part becnuse of the success and familiarity of Erasmus's great work. Only when we p Al

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nonetheless embraced.• But our knowledge of More's participation in a larger cultural mood should not diminish our sensitivity to its actual effect in his life and writingsTo grasp the precise character of what 1 have called More's estr.mgemcnt, we might comp~ it wllh the mood evoked by Holbein's famous work "The AmbassadoTS" (see fronlispi~e). painted In London two ye:srs before More's executaon. Jean de Dintcville, seigneur de Polisy nnd Frands l'sambassador to Ihe English court, nnd his friend Georges de Selve, shortly to be bishop of Lavaur, s t·and at e ither side of a two-shelved tabl. TI1cy nrc young, s uc~essful me n, whose impressively wide-rnngtng Interests and accomplishments are elegantly recorded by the objects scattered \Vith l.tU 1.du l i (.:,J!"HHtln~,:,:, on the table: celestJaJ onl1 teirestrlal

globes, sundials, quad runts and ot'her instnnne.n ls 0 1' astronomy .md geometry, n lu te, a case offlu:tes. a Genna11 book of arll hme tic, kept op 17

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invested this art with far mo~e than tcchnip to a fash· ionable piece of jewelry, a11 enhancement of the self, bu t this re· ductio11 seems ·as much mocked ali confirmed by the large alien presence that has intruded into this supremely civilized world of human athievement. •~ The annmorphic death's-hcad draw~ to it· self ~not her discordant element io the painting: the broken string of the 'Jute, 1111 emblecnotlc play upon the very iden of discord. •• Tugeth••r thest•~u~~gest a subUe but powerful countercurrent to the rem·,., of l!.!rmcmy. r't:·concilintion, ond ~mfiJcnt- ln!t!llcctual

AI tilt T.:ble of tltt~ Grui

achievcm€'nt embodied elsewhere in the picture's objects and figures. Nonl' of these antitypl's isimmediately visible-the ornamental skull and broken string reveal themselves only to the closest scrutiny, only, thai is, if one abandons the large, encompassing view of Ute painting and app·roaches the canvas with such myopic closeness that lfie whole gives way to a mass of individual do;t,Uls. To see the large d('ath's-head requires o still more mdical abandonment of what wt! take to be "normal" vision; we must throw the enli.re pointing out of perspective in order to bring into perspecti ve what out usual mode of perc~ption cannot comprehend. Denth's prcseMe In Holbein's painHng i> at once more ~lusl vc ..auU thvtt· llibhJrlJilli; tl td.n Uu! cunYentional ropt'CHCntutlons of

death in late medieval art. In the familiar trnusi tombs, for example, the putresc€'n l, wo.rm-eaten corpse on the bot·tom level may be
i'"''"t!lry, divinity, .md such other faculties, and sometimes of his Wntldly ~(fir.l, to sit and confer with him. And othl'r while would ll
At flu: J'nbl,. of the Creal

just as Enghmd inhabits the world of book H. Simllarly, the persona More and Hythloda.,us sit in the same garden and conver!;C wHh eoch other, but as m Holbein's painting, they cast shadows in different dir~ctions ·"'d are, in crucial r to repn·scnl That •s. Marin seem~ to underestimate

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More's self--so easily acknowledged ond Jgnoreddeserves~pecial emphasis, for it occupies a ccntrnl role in botb the painting-and the book. The arts of mapmaking, calculafion, ·and measurement that figure so prominently t.n "TI1e Ambass.1dors" and Utopia ba,•e important prnctical functions in everyday life, but they are pro:>sent here as recre.,tion, the elegant play of distio· guishcd and !;cdouc. men. Thitplay-ls notconcQivod by humanh;tc;

as an ~sc.,pc from the serious, but as a mpde of civ ility, an enhancement of specifically human powers. As such. the globes and co[upasses, along will1 the lute and Autes, si l withoul COI\liadicLion next to the bon life and the illusory quality of reality.ll One might '!IgUC that Holbein's palnting signals-the decay of such methods, a loss of intensity that can only be partially recuperated through illusionist tricks, but if so. one must conclude that this decay released a magnificent aesthetic byproduct. And while tllopltl too may owe somethi ng to medita· li\>e techhlqu~. detD.chcd fTom its original purpose, one would l:>.e hm'd pre5Sed from More's works to cbnclud~ that the leclmique was in dl!rov. In almostall his writings. More returns agai.n ond again 10 the unsei:tling of man's sense of reality, U1e questioning of his instruments of mea,uremcnt and represent,,tion, the demonstration

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