SHAKESPEARE ‘This is a hugely impressive, far-reaching, lucidly written book. Parvini’s thorough and incisive disclosure of the theoretical underpinnings of cultural historicism is essential reading for all literary theorists and historians. His subsequent rethinking of history and Shakespeare’s history plays balances subtlety with a refreshing clarity RETHINKING and candour.’ SHAKESPEARE ’ S Andrew Mousley, De Montfort University ‘Shakespeare’s History Plays does what it promises: it rethinks historicism, joining the HISTORY PLAYS ranks of the fine recent work that rejects the rejection of any common human nature. Excellent, informed, and exciting, it is highly critical of recent critical assumptions ’ but highly judicious and creative in its own critique of recent criticism and in its S RETHINKING HISTORICISM HISTORICISM insights into Shakespeare’s creativity. No other battlefield in literary studies is as HISTORY intensely contested as Shakespeare. Like a Tolstoy of scholarship, Parvini traces the ebb and flow of Shakespearean and theoretical battles over the last thirty years, and offers a chance for light to replace smoke.’ Brian Boyd, University of Auckland Boldly moves criticism of Shakespeare’s history plays beyond PLAYS anti-humanist theoretical approaches This important intervention in the critical and theoretical discourse of Shakespeare studies summarises, evaluates and ultimately calls time on the mode of criticism that has prevailed in Shakespeare studies over the past thirty years. It heralds a new, more dynamic way of reading Shakespeare as a supremely intelligent and creative political N thinker, whose history plays address and illuminate the very questions with which cultural historicists have been so preoccupied since the 1980s. In providing bold and EE original readings of the first and second tetralogies (Henry VI, Richard III, Richard M II and Henry IV, Parts 1 & 2), the book reignites old debates and re-energises recent bids to humanise Shakespeare and to restore agency to the individual in the critical A readings of his plays. PAR Neema Parvini is a Visiting Lecturer at Royal Holloway, University of London, UK and an Adjunct Assistant Professor at Richmond University, UK. V I N Cover image: Sketch of the skull of Richard II, 1871 © National Portrait Gallery, London I Jacket design: www.hayesdesign.co.uk ISBN 978-0-7486-4613-5 NEEMA PARVINI www.euppublishing.com Shakespeare’s History Plays PPARVINIARVINI PPRINT.inddRINT.indd i 117/02/20127/02/2012 112:232:23 PPARVINIARVINI PPRINT.inddRINT.indd iiii 117/02/20127/02/2012 112:232:23 Shakespeare’s History Plays Rethinking Historicism Neema Parvini PPARVINIARVINI PPRINT.inddRINT.indd iiiiii 117/02/20127/02/2012 112:232:23 © Neema Parvini, 2012 Edinburgh University Press Ltd 22 George Square, Edinburgh www.euppublishing.com Typeset in 10.5/13 Adobe Sabon by Servis Filmsetting Ltd, Stockport, Cheshire, and printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 0 7486 4613 5 (hardback) ISBN 978 0 7486 4614 2 (webready PDF) ISBN 978 0 7486 5496 3 (epub) ISBN 978 0 7486 5495 6 (Amazon ebook) The right of Neema Parvini to be identifi ed as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. PPARVINIARVINI PPRINT.inddRINT.indd iivv 117/02/20127/02/2012 112:232:23 Contents Acknowledgements vi A Note on Texts vii 1 Introduction 1 2 New Historicism 10 3 Cultural Materialism 33 4 An Argument Against Anti-humanism 52 5 Solutions 72 6 Shakespeare’s Historical and Political Thought in Context 84 7 Personal Action and Agency in Henry VI 122 8 Ideology in Richard II and Henry IV 174 9 Conclusion 215 Bibliography 218 Index 236 PPARVINIARVINI PPRINT.inddRINT.indd v 117/02/20127/02/2012 112:232:23 Acknowledgements I would like to thank: Ewan Fernie and Robert Eaglestone, who helped me form some of the central ideas of this book; Roy Booth, who located a troublesome reference; Joanna Kershaw, who gave me some vital guid- ance on the religious debates of the medieval period; Brian Boyd, for his kind words and reading recommendations for evolutionary criticism; Andy Mousley, for his continued help and support; and Jackie Jones and Jenny Daly at Edinburgh University Press, for their enthusiasm for this book and organisation. Most importantly, my mentor, Kiernan Ryan, will have my eternal gratitude for being such an exacting, demanding and thoroughly excellent supervisor and editor. Without his invaluable advice, this book would not have been completed or taken its current shape. Finally, I would like to thank my parents for their continued love and support, and my wife, Ria, for her patience in enduring my endless attempts to explain Marxist theory to her. PPARVINIARVINI PPRINT.inddRINT.indd vvii 117/02/20127/02/2012 112:232:23 A Note on Texts All references to Shakespeare’s plays are to William Shakespeare: The Complete Works, ed. John Jowett, William Montgomery, Gary Taylor and Stanley Wells, 2nd edn (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), with the exception of the quotations from 1, 2 and 3 Henry VI and Richard III, which are taken from the New Cambridge editions: The First Part of King Henry VI, ed. Michael Hattaway (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990); The Second Part of King Henry VI, ed. Michael Hattaway (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991); The Third Part of King Henry VI, ed. Michael Hattaway (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993); and King Richard III, ed. Janis Lull (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). PPARVINIARVINI PPRINT.inddRINT.indd vviiii 117/02/20127/02/2012 112:232:23 PPARVINIARVINI PPRINT.inddRINT.indd vviiiiii 117/02/20127/02/2012 112:232:23 Chapter 1 Introduction Following the publication of Stephen Greenblatt’s Renaissance Self- Fashioning in 1980,1 few observers could have predicted the speed and temerity with which new historicism and cultural materialism came to dominate the study of early modern English literature. New historicism and cultural materialism demystifi ed and repoliticised canonical liter- ary texts by bringing structuralist-Marxist and post-structuralist theory to bear on them. The radical critique of the essentialist humanism to which most previous Shakespeare criticism appeared prone proved irre- sistible. Awakening from years spent in the apolitical slumber of New Criticism and formalism, the academy was plainly ripe for change. As Catherine Belsey recalls: ‘within a very short time [of the publication of Renaissance Self-Fashioning], it seemed that every American English department needed its resident early modern new historicist, and every Renaissance studies doctoral candidate’s research paper began with a historical anecdote’.2 By 1985, Jonathan Dollimore was able to state in his introduction to Political Shakespeare that ‘it would be wrong to represent idealist criticism as still confi dently dominant in Shakespeare studies’;3 in new historicism and cultural materialism, the so-called ‘Crisis in English Studies’4 fi nally seemed to have found its solution. The discipline was reinvigorated by the prospect of dissident politics, ‘reading against the grain’, Althusserian ideology critique, Foucauldian analyses of power, and feminist deconstructions of gender and sexuality; all of which must have felt like a breath of fresh air in 1985. As Peter Erikson notes, by the mid-1980s new historicism and, by implication, cultural materialism had completed their ‘initial phase of development . and . entered a transitional stage marked by uncer- tainty, growing pains, internal disagreement, and reassessment’.5 By the mid-1990s, new historicism and cultural materialism had secured their grip on Shakespeare studies and entered a period of what Hugh Grady calls ‘institutionalization and popularization’.6 Key essays by their PPARVINIARVINI PPRINT.inddRINT.indd 1 117/02/20127/02/2012 112:232:23 2 Shakespeare’s History Plays major practitioners were collected in anthologies, and summarised and critiqued in book-length treatments.7 One seminal volume of criticism, Alternative Shakespeares, which included several key cultural historicist essays, even spawned sequels.8 In 1995, Ivo Kamps declared: ‘material- ist criticism has successfully entered virtually all aspects of Shakespeare studies’.9 In short, new historicism and cultural materialism – or ‘cul- tural historicism’10 for the sake of brevity – became ‘the new orthodoxy in many Literature departments’.11 The bold, pioneering works of the 1980s had become modern classics of twentieth-century Shakespeare criticism;12 what once provided a radical challenge to the status quo had itself become the dominant approach. In 1996, Kiernan Ryan noted that the issues surrounding cultural his- toricism were ‘no longer being debated with the same ferocity and fre- quency’ as they were during the 1980s, and while this might have seemed to be ‘a sign that their charm has already faded and their credibility is in decline’, it was, in fact, a sign of how entrenched and pervasive the cultural historicist view had become.13 Almost fi fteen years later, Ryan’s observation still stands and it needs to be taken seriously. Today, as one group of critics put it, cultural historicism is ‘overwhelmingly the domi- nant conceptual matrix of literary study’.14 Just as the pervasiveness of essentialist humanism before 1980 produced a climate in which critics stopped questioning their own latent assumptions, criticism today faces a similar