The New Historicism

In the 1970s and 1980s, the American scholar Stephen Greenblatt and others began focusing greater attention on the historical and cultural context in which literary works—including Shakespeare’s plays—were originally written. Instead of treating the plays as isolated works, this approach takes into account social conflicts as well as aspects of political philosophy, religious beliefs, and other ideas that audiences of Shakespeare’s own day understood without explanation. Stephen Greenblatt explains more about what is sometimes called “the new historicism.”