Greenblatt’s Interpretations of the Relationship Between Prospero and Caliban. An Example of New Historicist Paradigm

Abstract

The paper presents some of the most characteristic features of the literary interpretative practice called new historicism whose main purpose is to point out the mutual agency of history and literature. New historicism renders possible the generation of new perspectives on these two spheres of human activity. The paper also states that the term new historicism denotes a very extensive and heterogeneous practice. This evokes the names of the theorists like Hyden White and Otto Mink on one side, and on the other it includes the literary interpretation that is, besides Greenblatt himself – the founder of this orientation, practiced also by Stephen Orgel, Catharine Gallagher, Louis Montrose and others. The paper limits itself to the work of Greenblatt, precisely to those of his texts that are focused on the phenomenon called linguistic colonialism. Particular interest is paid to the new historicist interpretations of The Tempest and more precisely to interpretations of the relationship between Prospero and Caliban. The segments of European theoretical thought (hermeneutics, Nietzsche, Foucault) on which the new historicism based its interpretative practice are pointed out briefly. In short its essence is in taking arbitrarily chosen nonliterary texts (reports, documents, journals) from their original context and confronting them with canonical literary works on one side and with a wider cultural and political context on the other. Some critical remarks provoked by the characteristic methodological mode of the new historicism are briefly considered. Its principal intention is to illustrate how Greenblatt was, in his later writings from his original postcolonial attitude that expressed itself in the treatise »Learning to Curse«, unknowingly and unintentionally subject to colonial attitude and with it to colonial discourse. This means that he applied the very method of interpretative writing that beforehand he had strongly stated to be inappropriate for interpreting Shakespeare’s dramas.