In acknowledgement of its scientific and ultimately ahistorical methods, but not before the appellation of New Historicism had already firmly taken root, Greenblatt eventually attempted to give his practice the new name of Cultural Poetics (Wilson 6). It was in opposition to this label that the British Marxist critic Raymond Williams (1921-88) coined the name Cultural Materialism for a strand of criticism that foregrounds the material struggles inscribed in literature.23 Where Marxist criticism insists on seeing modes of production and economic conditions as the centre of power, Cultural Materialism incorporates a range of material conditions that may be seen to shape a literary work and culture. Like New Historicism then, it is appreciably indebted to Foucauldian post- structuralism. Significantly, however, British academics in the 1980s such as Jonathan Dollimore, Alan Sinfield, Catherine Belsey, and Williams himself, saw Renaissance texts as sites of conflict rather than containment. Each of them stressed the potential for political subversion inscribed in Renaissance literature, perhaps most notably Dollimore in his classic book entitled Radical Tragedy, where he saw that “the crisis of confidence in those holding power is addressed in play after play” in Renaissance drama (4). Again, cultural discourses surrounding the movement can be seen to have shaped its theoretical orientation, since Reagan's era of triumphant capitalism before Black Monday24 contrasted with the era of Margaret Thatcher25 in the United Kingdom, which was punctuated by the Falklands conflict of 1982 and is considered “the most confrontational decade in recent British political history” (Wilson 15).
Dollimore's Radical Tragedy is exemplary of how, as Wilson puts it, “Cultural Materialism was above all inflected by Althusser's theory that though ideology is produced 'in words', it has a material existence since it is reproduced in institutions such as the theatre or university” (ibid. 15). Boldly drawing on the work of Renaissance writers such as Michel de Montaigne (1533-92) and Francis Bacon (1561-1626), which was widely circulated in Shakespeare's London, and associating Montaigne's essays with the theories of the Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser (1918-90), Dollimore insists “that the Renaissance possessed a sophisticated concept of ideology if not the
23 Williams, Marxism and Literature (1977).
24 The name given to the world-wide crash in stock markets on Monday 19 October 1987. 25 Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 1979 to 1990.
word,” and also “that Renaissance writers [...] were actively engaged in challenging ideology” (Radical Tragedy 18).26 Such notions allowed practitioners of Cultural Materialism to politicise the study of Renaissance texts, since politics is before all else the study of governance and the distribution of power in society. In an important essay entitled “Literature, History, Politics,” first published in 1983, Belsey draws on the post-structuralist decentralisation of the text in literary criticism to advocate “the production of a political history from the raw material of literary texts” (43). By no longer privileging the text, nor a unified historical account, such a process may reveal the otherwise marginalised or repressed discourses within culture and, more pertinently, may highlight the subversive potential of literary works. Dollimore demonstrates in Radical Tragedy the necessity to look beyond the text as artefact in order to expose political subversion:
[W]hat makes an idea subversive is not so much what is intrinsic to it or the mere thinking of it, but the context of its articulation – to whom, and to how many and in what circumstances it is said or written. That the theatres in early seventeenth- century England were a potentially subversive context is evidenced by the fact of their censorship. (22)
The clear difference, then, between the American New Historicism and its British counterpart, Cultural Materialism, lies in their perceptions of Renaissance drama as a cultural mode of containment, or of subversion respectively. New Historicist studies are principally concerned with the representation of power in Renaissance texts, seeing the playhouse as the prime location for the representation and legitimation of that power. Cultural Materialism follows Williams in refusing to separate literature from other social practices, collapsing traditional distinctions between literature and its contextual background in a process that Dollimore labelled “radical contextualising” (“Shakespeare” 47). Culture cannot be seen as a unity in this process, and accordingly Williams's well-known distinction between residual, dominant, and emergent aspects of culture is taken into account
26 Underlining his proposal that a concept of ideology predated Althusser, Dollimore goes as
far as to suggest that “the originality of Althusser has been overestimated, not least by some Althusserians with an inadequate philosophical and historical perspective” (Radical Tragedy 18).
(Williams, Marxism and Literature 121ff.), while Dollimore instructs that additional levels of subordinate, repressed, and marginal culture must also be considered (“Shakespeare” 49). Ultimately, the aim of these materialist critics, in seeing the theatre as an ideological institution, is to assess the political and social effect of Renaissance texts, that is to say, to what extent they subverted authority and encouraged rebellion, or instead instructed people and maintained order (ibid. 50-51). New Historicism, by contrast, rather takes for granted the answer to this question, assuming the continuous legitimation of those in power, and this in turn may be attributed to its own cultural context in 1980s America.