How did Stephen Greenblatt revive historical approaches to Shakespeare and Elizabethan literature?

Stephen Greenblatt revived historical approaches to literature by establishing New Historicism, a critical method that challenged the prevailing dominance of New Criticism. While New Criticism encouraged formal analysis that stripped texts of their historical context, Greenblatt argued that literature must be interpreted through the cultural and historical milieu from which it emerged.1

Influenced by the work of Michel Foucault and cultural anthropology—particularly the theories of Clifford Geertz—Greenblatt began analyzing literary production as a form of "cultural exchange." In his seminal work, Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare (1980), he demonstrated how individuals and authors created their identities in relation to the political and social structures of their time.12

Greenblatt, who often referred to his approach as "cultural poetics," famously expressed a desire to "speak with the dead" by examining how social energy circulated through Renaissance texts. By treating literature as an empirical reflection of power, society, and ideology, he successfully reintegrated historical evidence into the study of William Shakespeare and other Elizabethan writers.13