‘I was never a new historicist’: Catherine Belsey’s ‘history at the level of the signifier’
Jürgen Pieters
The issue that I want to address in the following pages is that of the vexing relationship
between a reading practice driven by a historicist finality and one driven by a theoretical one.
In principle, the issue shouldn‟t be an issue at all, let alone a vexing one. After all, every form
of historicism (whether of the old variety or the new, or of a different type altogether) is
constructed upon a set of theoretical premises, whereas inversely, every theory is determined
by a set of historical circumstances, specific markers of time and place that inevitably leave
their traces in the „universal‟ concepts that we seem to have come to expect from our theories
of reading. In practice, however, the theory-versus-history-debate proves to be stubbornly
persistent, to the point even where it threatens to stifle discussion and reduce the field into two
opposing camps: one for those who preach theory and one for those who practise history –
and never, ever, the twain shall really meet.1 In what follows I want to make clear, by means
of an example, how this dichotomous logic can easily be overcome. My example is obviously
provided by the work of Catherine Belsey, whose „history at the level of the signifier‟, I hope
to show, offers a way of sidestepping the above binarism.2
As with most debates surrounding the turn to history that we have witnessed in the
fields of literary and cultural studies for the past three decades, the work of Stephen
Greenblatt offers an apt starting-point. From the very start of the critical vogue he helped to
introduce, Greenblatt firmly insisted that he did not want his work to be taken as a further
product of the heydays of theory, or at least not in the same way that the deconstructionist
reading method (to which his own work was obviously indebted) had been. While he readily
admitted to being influenced by some of the high-priests of post-structuralism (Foucault most
notably, but also Derrida and Lacan), he stressed above all that his new historicism differed at
least in one central respect from that of their most devoted American disciples. Never really
having understood the deeper sense of theory-for-theory‟s sake, Greenblatt asserted, his new
approach sought to reintroduce the historical real which the most fervid theory-mongers of the
late seventies and early eighties had bracketed off, in a celebration of pan-textualism that
failed to disclose the diverse institutional and historical determinations of each and every form,
mechanism and process of signification. In this respect, his claim that he was never inclined at
all „to see overtness – an explicit articulation of one‟s values and methods – as inherently
necessary or virtuous‟3 will be as familiar as Jean Howard‟s reminder (in an early critique of
Greenblatt‟s work) that „[t]he new historicism needs at every point to be more overtly selfconscious of its methods and its theoretical assumptions, since what one discovers about the
historical place and function of literary texts is in large measure a function of the angle from
which one looks and the assumptions that enable the investigation.‟4
In the introduction to Practicing New Historicism, Greenblatt, together with co-author
Catherine Gallagher, re-opened the debate by acknowledging that the critique that new
historicism was „insufficiently theorized‟ was by and large a just one. However, Gallagher
and Greenblatt stressed, the reproach „seems curiously out of touch with the simultaneous
fascination with theory and resistance to it that has shaped from the start our whole attempt to
rethink the practice of literary and cultural studies. We speculated about first principles and
respected the firmer theoretical commitments of other members of our discussion group [the
group that eventually led to the foundation of the journal Representations, jp], but both of us
were and remain deeply skeptical of the notion that we should formulate an abstract system
and then apply it to literary works.‟5 Greenblatt and Gallagher‟s point can be taken as an echo
of a programmatic statement Greenblatt had made before: „[I]f theory inevitably involves the
desire to escape from contingency into a higher realm, a realm in which signs are purified of
the slime of history,‟ he wrote in 1985, in an early version of a text that would later be
included in Shakespearean Negotiations, „then this paper is written against theory.‟6
While the above statements obviously contain a somewhat restricted view on the
function of theory and its relationship to critical practice – the application of an abstract
system of thought to the reading of texts –, the logic of the passage is followed by at least one
scholar who is, interestingly enough, overtly critical of new historicism. In Shakespeare after
Theory, David Scott Kastan takes issue with new historicists for just the opposite reason. It is
not, as Jean Howard suggested, the under-theorization of the reading method that is
problematic to him, but rather its „theoretical sophistication‟, which in Scott Kastan‟s view
seems to blind new historicists to a serious extent to the concrete and detailed historical real
which they were intent upon taking as their ultimate goal. „In its often dazzling
demonstrations of the circulation of discourses through culture,‟ he writes in the introduction
to his collection, „New Historicism has rarely paid much attention to the specific material and
institutional conditions of the discursive exchanges it has explored. Its idea of representation
is a dynamic cultural semiosis, but one too often lacking both a convincing account of how a
text actually enters and exists in the world and any sustained attention to what Roger Chartier
calls “the effect, in terms of meaning, that its material forms produced.”‟7
Despite its many protestations to the contrary, Scott Kastan believes, new historicism
has never been as historical as it always claimed to be, if only because it thrives on totalized
conceptions of cultural constellations and an insufficiently differentiated view of mechanisms
of power that turns out to sustain a practice as monological as the one Greenblatt and his
followers had always claimed to be adamant to fight. In the volume‟s title-essay, he further
develops this argument, emphasizing that it is about time that we put behind us the theoretical
days of yore and move on to a future that is concerned with the accurate and scrupulous study
of the past in its manifold representations and institutional affiliations. „Theory‟, he concludes,
„has now brought us to the point where we must begin to respond to its significant challenges,
not by producing more theory but more facts, however value-laden they will necessarily be,
that will reveal the specific historical conditions that have determined the reading and writing
of literature. If theory has convincingly demonstrated that meaning is not immanent but rather
situational, or, put differently, that both reading and writing are not unmediated activities but
take place only and always in context and action, the specific situations, contexts and actions
– that is, the actual historical circumstances of literary production and reception – cannot
merely be gestured at but must be recovered and analyzed.‟8
New historicism merely gestures toward history, then; it doesn‟t go all the way – at
least, it doesn‟t go nearly as far as Scott Kastan would want it to go. The method‟s historical
short-sightedness is mainly due, the author of Shakespeare after Theory seems to argue, to the
excesses of the theoretical framework that it uses, and more particularly so to the conceptual
stress that its representatives have generally put on the inherently dual character of the
principle of historicism, which by definition involves enquiries into the historical nature of
both the object and the subject of investigation. This theoretical stance, Scott Kastan
summarizes, „forces [new historicists] to acknowledge the situatedness of the critic as it
determines the questions that are asked of the past‟, but at the same time it thoroughly and
ultimately clouds their historical vision. It is highly ironical, therefore, he concludes, that
precisely those critics who tried to counter the a-historical criticism of previous generations
„have been regularly charged with exactly the narcissism that history should counter. Their
historical readings seem to some too overtly self-interested to be compelling as historical
accounts, significant more as records of our present needs and anxieties than as
reconstructions of those of Shakespeare‟s time.‟9 In New Historicism, theory works against
history, Scott Kastan concludes; in it, theory dominates the historicist impetus to the point
where it threatens to reduce the complexity of the historically actual Shakespeare, the
Shakespeare Scott Kastan is striving for, a Shakespeare „after theory‟.
The theoretical question that Scott Kastan‟s critique brings to the fore is that of the
relationship between the project of new historicism and what in a number of recent
publications by contemporary Shakespeareans has been termed „presentism‟. „Of course we
should read Shakespeare historically,‟ Terence Hawkes and Hugh Grady write in one of their
contributions to the critical debate at hand. „But given that what we term history develops out
of a never-ending dialogue between past and present,‟ they go on to wonder, „how can we
decide whose historical circumstances will have priority in the process, Shakespeare‟s or our
own?‟10 The question, it would seem is not so much one of balance, but of deciding which of
the two „historicities‟ that are always involved in any form of historicism should be allowed to
prevail: the historicity of the object of investigation or that of the subject investigating it, the
historical moment that is being studied or that in which it is being studied. Presentism, as a
project, is not opposed to historicism, it is a form of historicism in its own right, albeit one in
which the present nature of the historical practice is not simply grudgingly allowed, but taken
to be an essential component of the investigation of the past.11
Even though Scott Kastan refrains from using the term that is central to Grady and
Hawkes‟ identification of what they see as another novel historicist paradigm, the problem
that he has with the work of many New Historicists is that they prioritize the present in their
analyses of the past. Interestingly, the most distinct signal of New Historicism‟s „presentism‟,
in Scott Kastan‟s view, is the explicitly contemporaneous nature of their theoretical
framework. Here is how Catherine Belsey sees things in Why Shakespeare – with a difference,
as we‟ve come to expect from her: „While new historicism (…) has been busy pushing
Shakespeare firmly back into his own period,‟ Belsey writes, „cultural materialism (…) has
concentrated on the way the plays have been put to work since then, and enlisted or
appropriated in support of specific causes.‟12 To resume the dichotomy between presentism
and historicism, however problematic it may turn out to be upon closer inspection: to her it is
cultural materialism that is basically „presentist‟ (too presentist, even, „hodiecentrist‟ one
might say), whereas new historicism is not presentist at all, or at least not nearly enough: it is
too historicist, Belsey seems to be tempted into thinking.
Belsey‟s assessment of New Historicism is not completely dissimilar to David Scott
Kastan‟s, even though what lies behind their respective analyses differs substantially. For
Scott Kastan, the problem of New Historicism boils down to the fact that it takes a reductive
view – clouded by theoretical concepts – of the complexity of the historical real, whereas for
Belsey, the problem seems be exactly the reverse: a reductive view of certain key-concepts
(Foucault‟s analytics of power, Althusser‟s analysis of the politics of interpellation) clouds the
perception of the historical real whose complexity actually lights up through a more careful
usage of the right concepts. For Scott Kastan, the problem with New Historicism is primarily
a historical one, for Belsey it seems to be a theoretical one.
Belsey first voices her quarrel with Greenblatt‟s New Historicism in her 1989-essay
„Towards cultural history – in theory and practice‟, published in Textual Practice. 13 The
quarrel is primarily a theoretical one, as the following quotation shows: „Too often in the
work of Stephen Greenblatt and Jonathan Goldberg,‟ Belsey writes, „power is represented as
seamless and all-pervasive, while resistance, where it exists at all, is seen as ultimately selfdeceived.‟ Also, new historicists in her experience tend to conceive of texts as „homogeneous,
monologic, in the last instance non-contradictory, because the uncertainties they formulate are
finally contained by the power they might seem to subvert.‟ Belsey‟s own practice, in contrast,
aims for „a story of conflicting interests, of heroic refusals, of textual uncertainties. It tells of
power, but of power which always entails the possibility of resistance, in so far as it inevitably
requires a differentiating other.‟14
Greenblatt is faulted, in other words, not for presenting a historically myopic version
of the early-modern period (Scott Kastan‟s problem) but for the sloppiness of his theoretical
perspective. In the introduction to Shakespeare and the Loss of Eden, published ten years after
the epochal piece on cultural history in Textual Practice, Belsey‟s original critique of New
Historicism is largely rehearsed, even though it is formulated somewhat differently. It now
consists of three interrelated arguments, each of which, again, has a distinct conceptual or
theoretical ground:
First, new historicism seems to me to treat texts as relatively
transparent: not, that is, to look for the inconsistencies and instabilities
of meaning which are my primary concern. In consequence, second,
the cultural moments it depicts are seen as more unified, more
harmonious, more homogeneous than they are in my account. In this,
new historicism borrows, as I see it, from its anthropological model,
though I understand that anthropology too is becoming more
interested in dissent and the struggles that go on within the cultures it
studies. However, in its homogenizing impulse new historicism also
reproduces the values of American functionalism, which implies that
the local features of a society all work, in the last analysis, to maintain
the social order as a whole. In my view, derived from Foucault‟s,
power is always and necessarily coupled with resistance as its defining
difference. Third, and closely linked with my reservations about
functionalism (…) [n]ew historicism takes over from anthropology an
inclination to isolate synchronic moments rather than situate them in a
differential relation to what came before and after. In this respect, too,
new historicist practice differs radically from the work of Foucault, to
whose influence it is so widely attributed. Foucault commonly
contrasts one epoch with another. My own interest, like his, is in the
reasons why certain cultural values – and certain cultures, indeed – do
not survive, or survive only with difficulty by effacing their own
internal differences.15
Again, Belsey‟s critique has a primarily theoretical, conceptual basis: the problem of
New Historicism, she argues, is not so much its take on the historical real, but the concepts
that it uses in order to „arrive at‟ that real. Already in her 1989 piece, Belsey argued that New
Historicism was marked (and marred) in this respect by a functionalist perspective, 16 which in
her view inevitably results in a homogenization of cultural moments and the products that
embody them. In Shakespeare and the Loss of Eden, the American genealogy of New
Historicism is highlighted more emphatically: the functionalism is Parsons‟ and it returns in
Clifford Geertz‟s anthropology, both distinct influences on Greenblatt, Belsey feels. 17 She
herself opts for an altogether different perspective, a European, poststructuralist one, derived
from the work of Foucault, Derrida and Lacan. This perspective focuses not on likeness and
sameness, but on difference, not merely as a principle (derived from Saussure, of course18) but
also in the practice of its reading, a practice that Belsey considers to be more attentive, the
product also of „harder‟ work.19
Already in 1989, Belsey labels this approach „cultural history‟, to be distinguished
from both New Historicism and Cultural Materialism. Indeed, it is in the difference from
these two methods (methods with which Belsey‟s own work obviously has a lot in common)
that the specificity of her „cultural history‟ comes to the fore. The label returns in the
introduction to Shakespeare and the Loss of Eden, where it is given a second name: „history at
the level of the signifier‟. It is a form of history, Belsey writes there, that needs to be
distinguished from positivist versions of history that aim for the past wie es gewesen ist and
do so from a seemingly neutral perspective, outside history so to speak. Belsey‟s history at the
level of the signifier is a form of history that self-consciously makes history in the present,
without, however, translating the past into the present. „History at the level of the signifier,‟
Belsey asserts, „interprets the residues of the past explicitly from the present, and emphasizes
the pastness of the past. It takes for granted that we make history, which is to say that we
make a story which differs from the one contemporaries would have made.‟ 20 Belsey‟s
cultural history also needs to be distinguished from the work of social historians who are
primarily interested in the description of given practices. Belsey‟s approach, in contrast, takes
as its prime material signifying practices and the diverse meanings given to historical artefacts,
meanings recorded and contested.21
As we saw from the longer passage that I quoted above, Belsey again opposes her own
practice to that of Stephen Greenblatt in Shakespeare and the Loss of Eden, and she does so,
once more, by stressing the interaction between New Historicism and the cultural
anthropology of Clifford Geertz. Her own practice, subsequently, can also be taken to differ
from that of Geertz: „Unlike synchronic ethnography,‟ she writes, „the distance cultural
history sets out to bridge, is, by definition, chronological,‟ not merely spatial. It is here, I
think, that a further distinction between Belsey‟s cultural history and Greenblatt‟s New
Historicism can be made. Even though Belsey does not put it in these explicit terms, one
could argue that Greenblatt‟s approach is a synchronic one: his analyses of the discursive
conjunction of a series of texts (Shakespeare‟s comedies with early modern medical treatises
and legal writings, say) are aimed at what one could call „une tranche de vie‟ of a given
cultural moment. The analysis is done from a present perspective, no doubt, but it is in the end
fairly synchronic, in the sense that it doesn‟t allow the diachronic distance between the
historian and the object of investigation to become part and parcel of the critical practice itself.
At this point, Belsey‟s cultural history couldn‟t be more different: cultural history, she writes
in Shakespeare and the Loss of Eden, is about the „relationship between present and past‟, it
aims for „neither a recovery of the past nor an affirmation of the present, but an
acknowledgment of the gap that divides them from each other.‟22 More is involved than a
mere acknowledgment of this gap, I would add: it is the gap itself that becomes the focal point
of attention, since it is only in this gap (locus of difference, par excellence) that the
relationship between past and present can manifest itself. „Cultural history,‟ Belsey writes in
one of her more recent publications, „historicizes the present as well as the past; and in the
process of developing an awareness of diachronic cultural difference, it also has the capacity
to attune us to the synchronic implications of cultural distinctions in the globalized
contemporary world.‟23
Whether or not Belsey‟s account of New Historicism is correct, is not my main
concern here. I‟m interested, rather, in how this oppositional analysis of what is after all a
neighbouring practice enables her to fashion a distinct critical position that she can rightly call
her own. The distinctness of the position, I believe, lies to a large extent in Belsey‟s
successful attempt to articulate more closely than Greenblatt or others of her generation have
done the theoretical and the historical aspects of her critical practice. „[F]or all of our
passionate interest [in theory, jp]‟, Greenblatt and Gallagher write in Practicing New
Historicism, „terms like „Institutional [sic, jp] State Apparatus‟ or the „objet a‟ have not found
their way comfortably into our own teaching and writing.‟ 24 The key word is indeed
„comfortably‟: Greenblatt‟s work does have a clear theoretical substratum but it has made
more than one critic wonder about the exact function and pertinence of the theory in his
historicist project.25 The theory hovers in the background and it is very rarely integrated in the
actual readings that Greenblatt produces. Again, Belsey‟s work could not be more different,
and the reason why it is different, I would argue, is because in her work theoretical and
historical considerations are fused more organically, to the extent that her work enables us to
consider both the historical grounding of theoretical concepts and the theoretical potential that
inheres in the project of historicism.
In this respect, it is of course hardly coincidental that Belsey keeps returning to
Foucault, one of her great heroes, whom she feels Greenblatt has systematically misread. 26
Foucault‟s „history of the present‟, like Belsey‟s own „history at the level of the signifier‟,
also aims for a harmonious balance of historical and theoretical considerations, where the
critic‟s theoretical perspective is fully integrated in his historical practice and the writing of
history, inversely, becomes part of a larger theoretical project, but one that is grounded in
careful historical considerations and refuses to take both the outcome of its investigations and
the means to arrive at them as universal, timeless and value-free. In order to properly assess
the gap that both divides past and present and on account of that division provokes our need to
relate them to one another, Belsey suggests in Shakespeare and the Loss of Eden, we ought to
read Foucault, and we ought to read him carefully, because in the end Foucault leads they way
to an approach that allows for differentiation and resistance – where difference is not just a
theoretical principle but also a historical given.
The basic fascination of Belsey‟s cultural history to me lies in the way in which she
has tried, from the very beginning, to fuse the theory of post-structuralism with the history of
the early-modern period. As she already made clear in the chapter on the interrogative text in
Critical Practice, there are distinct historical reasons for bringing together this object of study
(early modern culture in its many guises) with the method used (poststructuralism and its
central notion of difference). With specific reference to Brecht‟s Galileo, Belsey points out
that the period in question (a period of transition from the Middle Ages to the fully
„enlightened‟ modernity, „from feudalism to capitalism, where a major change in economic
practice is accompanied by the equally major shift in ideological practice which we call the
Renaissance‟27) is actually all about difference, about the „collision of ideologies‟, „political
contradiction‟, about dialogue, dissonance and conflict. 28 It is hardly coincidental, Belsey
believes, that several of the high-priests of post-structuralism should turn to that transitional
period, in an attempt to interrogate the possible bonds between the early- and the post-modern.
Again, Greenblatt‟s New Historicism starts from a rather similar idea – „we are situated at the
close of the cultural moment initiated in the Renaissance‟, he writes in Renaissance SelfFashioning, „and (…) the places in which our social and psychological world seems to be
cracking apart are those structural joints visible when it was first constructed‟
29
– but in
Greenblatt‟s case this is a mere historical observation that has no further bearing upon the
theoretical framework that he develops in order to analyse this historical conjunction. In
Belsey‟s work, the observation that one can construe a relationship between the early and the
postmodern, leads to a reflection that is as historical as it is theoretical, in the sense that it
historicizes the theoretical framework while simultaneously transforming the historicist
project into a theory. Here is how she puts it in Desire: „And that, perhaps, is the attraction of
poststructuralist theory for this historical moment. It problematizes. Far from providing a
theoretical grid that can be brought to bear mechanically on any text, poststructuralism makes
difficulties, and so calls into question the clichés and complacencies of common sense, the
taxonomies of Enlightenment culture, which neatly polarize love and hate, wanting and
possessing. Derrida‟s account of language, by analogy, does not dismiss metaphysics, still
less reason and truth, but his work makes it impossible to invoke them as guarantees that the
familiar answers to our questions are final.‟30
The taxonomies of Enlightenment culture, the neat polarization of binary oppositions,
the outcome of a Cartesian metaphysics – all of the above are givens of a culture that we tend
to associate with the period that immediately follows the early-modern and indeed is taken to
bring an end to it. One of the more interesting historical correlations between contemporary
theory and the early-modern period, in my view, can be found in the very concept of
historicity that both embrace. The historical experience that underlies the theoretical
framework of post-structuralism – the idea that the past can only be studied from the
perspective of a present and that, hence, historical study is always the study of a relationship
between one and the other, a „history of the present‟, to refer once more to Foucault‟s term –
is structurally speaking very similar to the notion of historicity that develops in the earlymodern age. As Peter Burke and Anthony Grafton, among others, have made clear, earlymodern conceptions of historical enquiry are, almost by definition as it were, premised upon
the investigation of a certain relationship between the culture of the present and that of the
classical past.31 The enquiry into that relationship is what makes the enquiry historical to the
early-modern humanists who stand at the beginning of our modern conception of
historiography – not the attempt to recover history wie es gewesen, but the attempt to set up a
dialogue between the living and the dead, between past and present. Belsey‟s rendering of the
project of historicism became more and more psychoanalytically oriented as her work
developed. While Foucault was the prime mover of the earlier Belsey, it would seem this role
has now been taken over by Lacan. But the point Belsey‟s recourse to psychoanalysis is
meant to make remains the original (Foucauldian) one: to “acknowledge the opacity of
inscription, as well as the pressures exerted by a past that may never be recovered just as it
was”. 32 Bien étonnés de se retrouver ensemble, in Belsey‟s hands, Lacan and Foucault
become masters in the same crime: the foundation of a theoretical project with a distinct
historical finality and vice versa. The fact that Catherine Belsey‟s work, taken as a whole,
consists on the one hand of books on Shakespeare‟s time and on the other hand of books and
texts on different aspects of contemporary culture is quite telling: these are not simply two
different facets of her work, two separate domains of her critical attention. They are tied to
one another, to use yet another Saussurian metaphor, like the two sides of a slip of paper –
like history and theory, for that matter.
Ghent University
In his 1986 address as president of the MLA, J. Hillis Miller famously presented the „turn to history‟ as „an
almost universal turn away from theory‟. J. Hillis Miller, „Presidential Address 1986: The Triumph of Theory,
the Resistance to Reading, and the Question of the Material Base‟, PMLA 102, 3 (1987), p. 283.
2
My analysis in what follows will be theoretical. I will not test the success of Belsey‟s project as a practical
reading method.
3
Stephen Greenblatt, „Resonance and Wonder‟, in: id., Learning to Curse. Essays in Early Modern Culture
(New York and London: Routledge, 1990), p. 167.
4
Jean E. Howard, „The New Historicism in Renaissance Studies‟, quoted by Greenblatt in Learning to Curse, p.
167.
5
Catherine Gallagher and Stephen Greenblatt, Practicing New Historicism (Chicago and London: University of
Chiacgo Press, 2000), p. 2.
1
Stephen Greenblatt, „Shakespeare and the Exorcists‟, in: Patricia Parker and Geoffrey Hartman (eds.),
Shakespeare and the Question of Theory (New York and London: Routledge, 1985), p. 163.
7
David Scott Kastan, Shakespeare after Theory (New York and London: Routledge, 1999), p. 18.
8
Scott Kastan, Shakespeare after Theory, pp. 31-32.
9
Scott Kastan, Shakespeare after Theory, p. 17.
10
Hugh Grady and Terence Hawkes, „Introduction: Presenting Presentism‟, in: id (eds.), Presentist
Shakespeares (New York and London: Routledge, 2007), p. 3.
11
In François Hartog‟s interesting account of the concept, „présentisme‟ becomes an umbrella-term for recent
historical approaches which concern themselves with the survival of the past within the present, not with the past
as it was, but with the past as it remains present. François Hartog, Régimes d’ historicité: présentisme et
expériences du temps (Paris: Seuil, 2003).
12
Catherine Belsey, Why Shakespeare? (Houndmills: Palgrave MacMillan, 2007), p. 5. In what follows I will
concentrate on Belsey‟s analysis of New Historicism and leave Cultural Materialism out of the equation.
13
Since I am tackling Belsey‟s work from the perspective of its explicit relationship with New Historicism, her
work prior to this piece in Textual Practice is absent in my discussion. The contributions by John Drakakis and
Alan Sinfield in the present special issue make clear, however, that both in Critical Practice and in The Subject
of Tragedy the theoretical and historical considerations that will later characterize Belsey‟s quarrel with the New
Historicism are already present.
14
Catherine Belsey, „Towards cultural history: in theory and practice‟, Textual Practice 3. 2 (1989): pp. 159-172,
quotation on p. 164.
15
Catherine Belsey, Shakespeare and the Loss of Eden. The Construction of Family Values in Early Modern
Culture (Houndmills: MacMillan, 1999), pp. 17-18. The same criticism returns in the introduction to Belsey‟s
latest book to date, in the passage from which I took the title of this contribution: „„I was never a new historicist.
In a nutshell, new historicism seemed to me too bland, misled by its anthropological assumptions that cultural
moments were so homogeneous, so monologic, that any one component of the culture would be sure to confirm
another. Stephen Greenblatt‟s work has too much time for the sovereign self, in my view, and, paradoxically, too
little space for resistance.‟ Catherine Belsey, Shakespeare in Theory and Practice (Edinburgh: Edinburgh
University Press, 2008), pp. 8-9.
16
Belsey, „Towards cultural history‟, p. 164.
17
The American theoretical background of New Historicism is the topic of Belsey‟s contribution to Grady and
Hawkes‟ Presentist Shakespeares: „Historicizing New Historicism‟, pp.27-45.
18
Throughout her work, Belsey keeps paying homage to Saussure, whose structuralist insight that meaning
works differentially not referentially is credited as the very foundation of poststructuralism in Critical Practice
(pp. 37 and following), in Culture and the Real (p.4) and in Shakespeare in Theory and Practice (pp. 2-3).
Saussure also gets pride of place in Poststructuralism. A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2002), pp. 8-13.
19
„European poststructuralism, by contrast, generally works harder.‟ Catherine Belsey, Culture and the Real.
Theorizing Cultural Criticism (London and New York: Routledge, 2005), p. 4.
20
Belsey, Shakespeare and the Loss of Eden, p. 9.
21
Belsey, Shakespeare and the Loss of Eden, pp. 5-13.
22
Belsey, Shakespeare and the Loss of Eden, p. 12.
23
Catherine Belsey, „The Poverty of (New) Historicism‟, in Literature as History: Essays in Honour of Peter
Widdowson, ed. by Simon Barker and Jo Gill (London: Continuum, 2010), pp. 7-17, p. 15.
24
Gallagher and Greenblatt, Practicing New Historicism, p. 2. For an apt analysis of the slippage from
„Ideological State Apparatus‟ in Althusser‟s original text to Greenblatt and Gallagher‟s „Institutional State
Apparatus‟ see Scott Wilson, „The Economimesis of New Historicism (or How New Historicism Displaced
Theory in English Literature Departments‟ Journal for Cultural Research 11.2 (2007), pp. 161-74, p. 164.
25
See also Jürgen Pieters, Moments of Negotiation. The New Historicism of Stephen Greenblatt (Amsterdam:
Amsterdam University Press, 2001).
26
See, for instance, „Historicizing new historicism‟, p. 29.
27
Catherine Belsey, Critical Practice (London: Methuen, 1980), p. 86.
28
Catherine Belsey, Critical Practice (London: Methuen, 1980), pp. 95-96.
29
Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning from More to Shakespeare (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1980), pp. 174-175.
30
Catherine Belsey, Desire. Love Stories in Western Culture (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994), p. 16.
31
See, for instance, Peter Burke, The Renaissance Sense of the Past (London: Edward Arnold, 1969), and, more
recently, Antony Grafton, What was History? The art of history in early modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2006).
32
Belsey, Shakespeare in Theory and Practice, p. 9.
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