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Quote :Renaissance Self-Fashioning from More to Shakespeare
Self-fashioning is in effect the Renaissance version of these control mechanisms, the cultural system of meanings that creates specific individuals by governing the passage from abstract potential to concrete historical embodiment. Literature functions within this system in three interlocking ways: as a manifestation of the concrete behavior of its particular author, as itself the expression of the codes by which behavior is shaped, and as a reflection upon those codes.
Most of us believe that we can be who we want to be and do what we want to with our lives. In other words, we think that we are free to self-fashion: to define our own identity, decide what values are important to us, and so on—yes, including “self-fashion” in the sense of wearing whatever clothes we feel like—whether pop diva, puppet diva, or diva who’s seven feet tall.
But, if we think about it, that’s not entirely true. Even when we “self-fashion,” we do that fashioning according to a certain set of rules and regulations. If we’re a literature professor one day, we can’t wake up and be an astronaut the next day. Even if we wear whatever clothes we feel like, the fact of the matter is we’ll never show up naked to work, or wear the sort of things Shakespeare donned in his day (well, unless we work at the local Renaissance Faire, that is). So even our self-fashioning is regulated by social and cultural “control mechanisms.”
Even when it was the Renaissance, “self-fashioning” worked in much the same way. Aristocrats, artists, and others could self-fashion, but they were always doing it according to a set of cultural rules that limited how free they were to create their own identities and personas.
Literature’s relationship to Renaissance self-fashioning has three layers. First, a work of literature reflects the behavior of its author, as well as his (or her) values and point of view. Second, a work of literature also reflects those “control mechanisms” and the codes that shape behavior, and third, a work of literature comments on those control mechanisms and codes.
Stephen Greenblatt’s book Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare, is the book that kicked off the New Historicist craze in the 1980s. Now that we know what he means by “self-fashioning,” we can be more aware next time we wear our flannel shirt and oversized glasses (or corset and monocle, for that matter).
Quote :Renaissance Self-Fashioning from More to Shakespeare
Language, like other sign systems, is a collective construction; our interpretive task must be to grasp more sensitively the consequences of this fact by investigating both the social presence to the world of the literary text and the social presence of the world in the literary text.
When we speak or write, we’re not just speaking or writing our own, unique language. Mommy and daddy taught us to speak when we were tiny, and read all kinds of children’s books to us. And our kindergarten teachers taught us new words. And then, even later in school, we read a whole bunch of books that also influenced the way that we used language. And of course there’s all that slang that we spoke with our friends during recess.
The language that we use, in other words, is made up of all the languages of all these different people that we interact with over the course of our lives. In that sense the language that we use is a “collective construction.”
Our task as clever New Historicist literary critics is to show how the social world influences the language that writers use, and how the language that writers use reflects the social world. Who was Shakespeare speaking to? What was he reading? Who were his theatre buddies and what kind of slang did they joke around with? We need to reconstruct Shakespeare’s social world because only through understanding it can we understand Shakespeare’s language, too.
Here’s another really important New Historicist idea: the language a writer uses isn’t just created in a vacuum. Sure, Shakespeare was a genius, and his way with words is to-die-for and all, but he didn’t just invent it out of nowhere.
That’s right—Shakespeare was out there talking to people, listening to people, reading a lot, and acting in other people’s plays, and his own language is made up of all those little tidbits of language picked up from the social world he was living and moving in. To be or not to be? Shakey just overheard someone trying to figure out which door to go into.