Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare

"That’s a good segue to my second author. Baxandall is writing in the 1970s when Stephen Greenblatt, the author of my second choice, is also starting to develop his work. They take a very similar approach in thinking about culture, society, and the place of the arts within it. But as opposed to the great artwork that we get in the fifteenth century, Greenblatt is interested in the great literature that comes out of the late 16th and early 17th century. Greenblatt wrote a book on Walter Raleigh in the mid-70s but the great book he wrote is Renaissance Self-Fashioning in 1980. Like Baxandall he argues that we need to move between an understanding of the elite and the non-elite, and talk about what we have previously seen as marginal figures. Greenblatt is more obviously interested in the literary tradition but, like Baxandall, he’s fascinated by what’s always been marginalised. For Greenblatt, that’s figures like witches or even women – hugely under-represented in the period. Before the late 1970s, people had not really talked about the presence of women in the Renaissance. The focus was always great white men like Leonardo, Michelangelo, Shakespeare, Montaigne. “The self is always fashioned. We are never born fully-formed as selves” Greenblatt believes that because we’re now learning from other disciplines—drawing on anthropology, archaeology, psychoanalysis, and feminism—we can develop a completely new methodology for understanding the period. What Greenblatt does is follow the way Renaissance people start to fashion their identity. He argues that the self is always fashioned. We are never born fully-formed as selves. Ironically, part of what Greenblatt argues is that that intense sense of selfhood, of individuation, which we’ve always said is key to the Renaissance, doesn’t necessarily come out of progressive ideas. Rather, it’s fashioned in response to absolutist political authority, as well as censorship and sectarian religious conflict. In court life in Elizabethan England there are figures like Shakespeare, Marlowe, and Bacon that are starting to understand themselves and position themselves as ‘selves’ in relation to quite politically prescriptive state systems. What that creates somewhat paradoxically is a flourishing of the self and of great literature."