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COPYRIGHT 2002 University of Texas at Austin (University of Texas Press)
At the cusp of a new millennium we still entertain and reassure ourselves with the spectacle of princely patrons engaged in mutually rewarding relationships with genius poets. The Academy Award-winning Shakespeare in Love (1998) depicted not only the playwright's romantic escapades but also his successful (if inadvertent) winning of the patronage of an acerbic, penetrating Queen Elizabeth, who quite literally intervenes with--or perhaps supervenes--the authorities on his behalf. The queen is on screen for 8 of the film's 122 minutes, during which time she sees through Shakespeare's disguises ("Next time you come to Greenwich, come as yourself, and we will speak some more"), makes a de facto commission ("And tell Shakespeare something more cheerful next time, for Twelfth Night"), and hints at further patronage ("we will speak some more"). (1) At the same time the queen is obviously moved by the playwright's genius, moved so far as to attend the premiere of Romeo and Juliet at the Curtain Theatre--an unlikely if amusing venture into the playwright's own world--and to acknowledge that the play does capture "the very truth and nature of love." Though Elizabeth never relinquishes her stern regal bearing in the playwright's presence, we are meant to perceive her praise of Romeo as the only possible response to his artistic gifts; likewise we are meant to see in her attentions a necessary and "historical" condition of Shakespeare's own rise to preeminence. At the end of the film, Shakespeare's romance is over--his beloved has been dragged off to Virginia by her new husband--but his literary career, having received a royal boost, is just beginning.
This tendentious summary of Shakespeare in Love occupies the place in
the New Historicist essay traditionally given over to the anecdote,
the narration of some obscure or little-known historical episode
resurrected so as to be read against or alongside a different-but-similar
moment in a canonical text. Considerable criticism has focused on the
place of the anecdote in historicist criticism, and its relationship to
"history" (see, e.g., Joel Fineman, "The History of the Anecdote:
Fiction and Fiction," in The New Historicism, ed. H. Aram Veeser
[London, 1989], 49-76). Most recently Catherine Gallagher and Stephen
Greenblatt (Practicing New Historicism [Chicago, 2000]) have written
of the New Historicist reliance on the anecdote as being
inspired by Geertz's anthropology, where it supplies an anodyne "touch of
the real" to more totalizing, censoring, silencing kinds of historical
practice. This it may do, but it often simultaneously accomplishes
exactly the opposite function rhetorically--that is, anecdotes also
carry with them the whiff of the archive and testify to the critic's
scholarship. Anecdotes serve as credentialling devices even while they
attempt to touch the real, and not just because they do not unearth
themselves, as Gallagher and Greenblatt acknowledge (69-70), but because
they only function as "the badge of the counterhistorian" (58) in the
context of academic history, in the world of journal articles and
monographs. In the public sphere anecdotes are always offered as a
transparent shorthand for lived history, often to great rhetorical
effect: witness the success of Ronald Reagan's anecdotal style in the
1980s, the same decade that saw the establishment of New Historicism
in American universities.
The queen's role alludes to the historical role of aristocratic patronage of literary production in the early-modern era, but what Judi Dench's Oscar-winning performance really captures is the very truth and nature of a nostalgic fantasy about royal patronage, an imaginary ideal that goes hand-in-hand with the film's celebration of romantic love as informing and inspiring dramatic genius. (2) It is a particularly compelling fantasy today, at a time when public and corporate funding for the arts has grown both politically and aesthetically suspect, because it advances a pleasing principle of disinterestedness: Shakespeare is motivated by love rather than the pursuit of patronage, and Elizabeth bestows patronage because she recognizes genius, not in return for praise or flattery or public relations work.
This fiction of disinterestedness, ars gratia artis, owes its longevity in part to the way that poets have traditionally represented scenes of patronage in their work--or rather, to the fact that they have represented such scenes, and have represented them as true, historical accounts of the relations between poet and patron. But the history of patronage is not simply the sum of these individual "histories," and for readers to accept such scenes at face value creates a hermeneutic circle in which literary texts are given full credit for describing the circumstances of their own production. In these circumstances, though, the writer's patron is always a fiction, that is, part of the fiction, and the historicity of such moments is suspect precisely because of their claim transparently to represent what really happened. They are, then, a legitimate subject for more suspicious hermeneutical procedures, which can help reveal where "history" and "interest" intersect.
Moreover, scenes of patronage constitute a compelling focus for historicist analysis (and historcists' self-reflection) in particular, precisely because of the way such scenes address the issue of a literary text's relationship to the circumstances of its production, its moment, its "background." In fact the representation of patronage can be read as a strange cousin to New Historicist criticism; if one familiar trait of New Historicism is its habit of submitting to the techniques of literary analysis the sorts of texts generally regarded as extraliterary, the scene of patronage reveals the poet attempting to conscript an apparently extraliterary event for aesthetic purposes--the very act of textualizing history, as it were. Studying such scenes, then, can help to foreground the formalist procedures and assumptions that typically provide the grist for the historicist mill.
Let me turn for an example to the most famous patronage episode in Middle English writing. It occurs in the Prologue to the first version of Gower's Confessio Amantis, where the poet claims to have received the commission for the work from Richard II himself. As is well known, in the later recensions of the poem the dedication to Richard is replaced by a dedication to Henry of Lancaster, then Earl of Derby, and "A bok for king Richardes sake" becomes "A bok for Engelondes sake." (3) The alteration has been taken as evidence of a change in Gower's political allegiance in the early 1390s, or, alternately, as showing nothing of...
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